alt Hacker News> Brevity means less output tokens, which doesn’t really align with the AI vendors incentives
Actually, I think Jeavon's Paradox [1] means the opposite. If doing X is $100, you may only use it to do X, but not Y, Z, or W. If doing X is $33, maybe you'll use it for X, Y, Z, and W -- spending 1/3 more than you otherwise would.
Or perhaps not you personally, but maybe you'd be willing to spend $100, but three of your friends find it too expensive. If it's only $33 to accomplish some task, then maybe all four are now spending $33.
It’s messier for LLMs because you cannot easily compare the cost between runs, outside of benchmarks. Evaluating the value of the output is already extremely hard. But then you add the fact that you don’t know the cost of the output before it is generated. And Anthropic doesn’t share their tokenizers. It’s not as simple as your examples to get a signal that tells you to spend more or less