alt Hacker News> The LLM's are clearly useful for many things
I don't think that's of any doubt. Even beyond programming, imo especially beyond programming, there are a great many things they're useful for. The question is; is that worth the enormous cost of running them?
NFT's were cheap enough to produce and that didn't really scale depending on the "quality" of the NFT. With an LLM, if you want to produce something at the same scale as OpenAI or Anthropic the amount of money you need just to run it is staggering.
This has always been the problem, LLMs (as we currently know them) they being a "pretty useful tool" is frankly not good enough for the investment put into them
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Yeah. Obviously. Duh. That's why we keep doing it.
Opus 4.5 saved me about 10 hours of debugging stupid issues in an old build system recently - by slicing through the files like a grep ninja and eventually narrowing down onto a thing I surely would have missed myself.
If I were to pay for the tokens I used at API pricing, I'd pay about $3 for that feat. Now, come up with your best estimate: what's the hourly wage of a developer capable of debugging an old build system?
For the reference: by now, the lifetime compute use of frontier models is inference-dominated, at a rate of 1:10 or more. And API costs at all major providers represent selling the model with a good profit margin.
All of the professions its trying to replace are very much bottom end of the tree, like programmers, designers, artists, support, lawyers etc. While you can easily already replace management and execs with it already and save 50% of the costs, but no one is talking about that.
At this point the "trick" is to scare white collar knowledge workers into submission with low pay and high workload with the assumption that AI can do some of the work.
And do you know a better way to increase your output without giving OpenAI/Claude thousands of dollars? Its morale, improving morale would increase the output in a much more holistic way. Scare the workers and you end up with spaghetti of everyone merging their crappy LLM enhanced code.