alt Hacker NewsThe actual cost is going to drop 99% in ~4 years.
How much that makes it into enterprise pricing is TBD, since none of the hyper scalers are making money yet of selling AI inference.
Almost all businesses are ahead of the gun. For most of their use cases, AI is either not yet good enough on its own, or good enough but too expensive.
No one wants to get left behind, so everyone's trying to get onto it now, even though it's not ready for what most enterprises want to do with it.
It's easy for them to look at a small startup without billions of lines of legacy business logic debt and see them having success and wonder why they can't have just as much - or more - why they're bigger so they should have better and more success, right???
Wrong...
But when it gets ~99% cheaper for local inference over the next 4 years, at the same time the price per watt improve 4x -> a lot of those cases will start to pencil out.
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> The actual cost is going to drop 99%
Do you mean the marginal cost by the producer, or the cost on the consumer? I can't see the price of electricity falling much, and the demand curve is apparently exponential if the hype is to be believed.
I don't see how this is even remotely true. Unless there's some super breakthrough into a fundamentally different architecture, there's not really a path to a 50% reduction in price, much less a 99% reduction.
What makes you think prices will drop? Everyone I’ve spoken to believes they will only skyrocket. Genuinely curious
Prices have been very obviously trending up, not down. Even open weights models are becoming more expensive with every release. Computer hardware is ballooning in price.
Going from Opus 4.5 to 4.7 secretly required 6x more compute to run. 4.8 is apparently 30% more on top. I haven't seen any optimizations lately aside from distillation. Nobody's optimizing, they're just scaling up.