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I would guess the cost to do this with humans would be _at least_ $1.5M in compensation alone (I'm thinking three 500k/year Bay Area engineers) so this is already an order of magnitude cheaper.

Is it worth $165K? I'm less sure of that but it's honestly a moot point - this will get to 5 then 4 digits of cost pretty fast.

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Bay Area salaries are well-known to be extremely inflated.

Have European engineers do it for $100k or Asian engineers do it for $50k and the math is already looking a lot sketchier.

More gets done in the Bay Area than those places.

I think putting it in terms of API pricing is oversimplifying disingenuously. Anthropic still hasn't pulled the rug out from under us, so I'm sure it cost a great deal of money once everything comes together, likely surpassing 1.5M. Summarily, they got the result faster, which a group of engineers couldn't do, but at a greater expense.

GLM 5.2 (open-weights) is at or near Opus 4.7 level performance already. I think it's unlikely Anthropic will be able to durably charge us much more than the CapEx depreciation cost of GPUs + the OpEx of running them for non-frontier models (which Fable will be in 6 months to a year).

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