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Comment by istjohn | Hacker News Reader

According to Epoch AI:

> The cost of achieving a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter since 2023, or 13× per year. [0]

0. https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought

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Then why are AI plans still so super expensive, and AI spending going through the roof, while all the subsidies are ending?

Because it's increasingly useful and the thing you are substituting (human time) is much more expensive.

At least for me the Claude plans seem like an incredible deal and I never hit my limit.

The cost per fixed level of intelligence is dropping, but we're also getting dramatically more intelligent models.

MiMo-2.6 RL'd for ~$3.5M (not B), both main and flash combined, that is dramatically less and top 10 on https://artificialanalysis.ai/

https://mimo.xiaomi.com/mimo-v2-6

A frontier Ai is cheaper to make than a single 5/6th gen fighter jet, and maybe every fighter jet at this point.

Especially if you have millions of Opus 5.5 examples to train off of!

so tiring... you don't get to frontier from traces alone...

also, who cares, the world is a better place if there are more awesome models at cheaper prices built with more efficient means

we used to celebrate this kind of advancement, now it seems like astroturfing and belittling are the cool thing de jour

Because models are only getting better at a rate of 10% per year, people always want the best quality possible. You can get SotA performance from a year ago for a fraction of the cost, but why would you use Opus 4.5 when you can use Opus 5.5?

Apart from what others said about using more intelligent models instead of cheaper ones, token usage is also increasing a lot. Classic Jevons paradox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

AI gets cheaper, people use it everywhere. Google searches, for example. Now we want to crack math problems and spend weeks with unreleased models.

If you used GPT-2, it'd be incredibly cheap. You basically can't use it for anything and it's simple to serve.

You mean if you used a modern LLM of GPT-2-level quality. Vanilla transformers like GPT 2 are ridiculously inefficient in comparison.

Reddit is full of people complaining how they burn their 200$ sub in half an hour by starting ten Max sub agents. That’s to say, many people just don’t know what they’re doing.

To pay for the training of the models which are getting bigger and more expensive. So intelligence is getting cheaper overall but the need for ever-increasing intelligence can't be sated.'

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