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hariseldomyesterday at 10:19 PM2 repliesview on HN

> I didn’t add any frontier-tier models like Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, or Gemini Ultra. At their prices, 30 games would have cost around $3,000 instead of $482.

I have a lot of thoughts unrelated to the game experiment but more about how these opus/ultra size models can possibly be a financially viable product at scale when it costs $3000 to play 30 simple games. It just seems much much higher than what it would cost to get a human to play 30 rounds


Replies

Eridrusyesterday at 11:22 PM

I think this speaks to the low value being generated by playing games more than anything.

There are plenty of tasks where $100/task is reasonable.

The value of tasks also doesn't correlate to tokens, and as can be seen here you can light a lot of tokens on fire doing nothing useful.

thewebguydyesterday at 11:03 PM

> It just seems much much higher than what it would cost to get a human to play 30 rounds

You mean almost like it was super short sighted to do a ton of layoffs when the AI tech is going to cost almost as much, if not more, than the humans it replaced?

Yeah, you don't need Opus level for everything, and sonnet has gotten fairly decent I'm using it more and more, but still for most tasks I'm working with, Opus is the only one that still regularly succeeds.

So if the tech is only useful on the most expensive tier, that's not going to be sustainable for long unless costs and dramatically come down, and fast.

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