alt Hacker NewsUnironically yes.
I predict that costs will grow to 80% of what it would cost a human, across the board for everything AI can do.
"It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say. Loudly here on HN too.
Of course this will happen slowly, very slowly. Lets meet again in 10-20 years.
Replies
> "It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say.
The question is how much friction there will be for people to switch over to Gemini, GPT or maybe even DeepSeek or Mistral or whatever. Even if price hikes are inevitable across the board, the moat any single org has is somewhat limited, so prices definitely will be a factor they'll compete on with one another at least a bit.
> I predict that costs will grow to 80% of what it would cost a human, across the board for everything AI can do.
80% of a human's price varies greatly by region. 80% of the lowest-priced effort-of- humans in this space right now will probably not be sustainable for the sellers.
This is assuming there will be no competition. But why wouldn't there be? Especially since you can use open source models, which are not too far from frontier models (from now).
I don't think costs will grow on either side in the long term. In the short term, yes, but once they get the infrastructure in place to support AI, costs will go down. Right now, they're on borrowed infra.
Kimi and GLM 5.1 are already capable of handling a good chunk of my tasks. They about to lose the leverage to allow them to drastically increase prices - enough models are 6-12 months away from being good enough large proportions of their customers uses.
Its not20 years. Its now. Nvidia has already said that tokens cost more than humans.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/cost-c...
If openai / anthropic / google were the only game in town then yea, we’d already be paying 5x as much as we do. But local models are so close to sota that it just isn’t going to happen. If I’m a lawyer getting billed $500k/yr on $600k profit I’d rather buy a chonky server and run a model that’s 90% as good and get my money back in 2 years, then pay $5k electricity on $600k profit.
Nobody will successfully lobby for banning local models either, it just isn’t going to happen when the rest of the world will happily avoid paying 80% of their profits to some US bigco for the privilege of existing.