> I hope you don't think that what you're paying for an LLM today is what it actually costs to run the LLM. You're paying a small fraction.

Depends, right? Claude Code on a Max plan is obviously unsustainable if the API costs are any indication; people can burn through the subscription price in API credits in a day or less.

But otherwise? I don't feel like API pricing is that unrealistic. Compute is cheap, and LLMs aren't as energy-intensive in inference as some would have you believe (especially when they conveniently mix up training and inference). And LLMs beat juniors at API prices already.

E.g. a month ago, a few hours of playing with Gemini or Claude 3.5 / 3.7 Sonnet had me at maybe $5 for a completed little MVP of an embedded side project; it would've taken me days to do it myself, even more if I hired some random fresh grad as a junior, and $5 wouldn't fund even an hour of their work. API costs would had to be underpriced by at least two orders of magnitude for juniors to compete.