alt Hacker NewsAI services are only minorly incentivized to reduce token usage. They want high token usage, it makes you pay more. They are going to continually test where the limit is, what is the max token usage before you get angry. All AI companies will continue to trade places for token use and cost as cost increases. We are in tepid water pretending it is a bath pretending we aren’t about to be boiled frogs.
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To an extent. That economic incentive stops making sense when a) capacity is an actual constraint and b) Anthropic is not a monopoly and is subject to pressure from competitors who are more user-friendly.
I am betting on the fact that people will get increasingly frustrated at closed agent lock-ins. I built (cline fork) and open-sourced https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac with the sole focus on token efficiency expecting that the closed-lock-in vendors will do enough to frustrate their users over time. Looking for contributors
That's what I am thinking, too. It sound's like a conspiracy theory, but at the end Anthropic et al benefits from models that don't finish their jobs. I recently read about this "over editing phenomenon". The machine is never done. It doesn't want to.
It's like dating apps. They don't want you to find a good match, because then you cancel the subscription.
Up to a point. There is incentive when they get to the point where they literally can't serve their userbase and customers start leaving.
I severely doubt it. Token spend translates to real cost for the provider. Each token involves real and expensive compute. They aren't free monopoly money you get billed arbitrarily for. You're paying for electricity and infrastructure involved in generating each token.
Less spend means less real cost to the provider while your flat monthly subscription stays the same price. As well, reducing token use per customer means you can over-subscribe even harder, allowing for more flat monthly subscriptions.
Less tokens = more free capacity = more subscription income.
Well that's why threads like this are important to upvote. On hacker news , they're angry !
People said this about AWS too. "Why would they save you money??". It turns out that every time they reduce prices, they make more money, because more people use their services.
AI companies have the same incentive. Make it cheaper and people will use it more, making you more money (assuming your price is still above cost). And of course they have every reason to reduce their on costs.