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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

It also needs to be said: The amount of compute that went into this is something. From some estimates I've seen, the compute cost alone would be around $10m, +/-

As a reference, for that kind of money one could put together a research group of 20-25 researchers, and keep them salaried for 5 years.

So while it is impressive, absolutely no doubt there, the SOTA access is so expensive that it is sort of unobtanium.

Luckily, the prices have historically reduced by a factor of 5-10 every year...but still, only those that swim in cash can afford this.

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> From some estimates I've seen, the compute cost alone would be around $10m, +/-

At market prices. All the estimates I've seen are based on OpenAI API costs. It doesn't mean that's what they paid, or how they paid for it.

But yes, the surprising willingness of humans to solve hard problems in exchange for food and board is underrated.

Given that they all the bit AI players are still loosing money, it follows that their total costs are _higher_ that their API pricing would imply.

You may not like the truth, but it's still the truth.

https://marketwise.com/investing/openai-losses-surge-to-21-b...

Anthropic is "profitable"... if you exclude compensation and compute cost commitments:

https://aitoolsrecap.com/Blog/anthropic-first-profit-2026-re...

Once we have an existence proof of a particular technology, it doesn't take long for it to become economically viable and proliferate. And for something as useful as this, theres a strong economic incentive to get it to be as cheap and accessible as possible. Maybe not today, but certainly in a couple years I can imagine this level of intelligence being accessible to someone with a $20/mo plan, or even a free plan.

I remember being blown away when a then-unreleased version of GPT 5 took gold at the International Math Olympiad. Now I can run a model at home that can do that. We are more fortunate to have these tools than almost anyone is willing to acknowledge.

Interestingly it's this promise of the costs being able to be reduced what incentivizes the actual research.

If you tried to raise 25M to have 20 researchers on a salary for 5 years solving a specific math problem only academics care about, you probably wouldn't get much interest, or you would be able to solve 1 or 2 problems.

If however you promise that the money will go towards a technique that would allow to solve 10 thousand different math problems, and that costs will go down in the future, then you can raise much more than 25M.

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