alt Hacker NewsYou definitely don't need frontier models for all this work.
And, in fact, I got it from £2500 to £150 by careful model selection (I ran a trial over a small dataset with different models until I found the least expensive/capable model that would reliably do what I needed), using a local model for one step, and paring down the inputs as well so the token count plummeted.
Yeah I see the same thing at work. Most of the people burning crazy numbers of tokens aren't doing any amazing work. They're just using fable to write their emails and do their web searches.
They feel like they're super smart but it's just as smart as hiring a $500k/yr PhD as a PA to schedule your meetings and answer the phone. Sure it does a good job but you're just wasting money and abilities.
They feel super edgy and bleeding edge but all they really do differently is switching the AI chat from auto to the most expensive option all the time. When I see what they're using it for they're only grasping the basics of its abilities.
They're also people sending 2 page AI generated emails that make no sense for literally everything where a "Yeah sure let's do that" would have sufficed.
Unfortunately most of these are business leaders who just want to look edgy and "all in on AI" so we can't really limit their tokens. Yet they're also the ones saying we spend too much and want to limit some of our dev teams actually putting it to good use.