It's low entropy. The amount of entropy is prompt + model but now that you have seen the model various times, the entropy comes down back to the prompt only.
You'd not be amazed by seeing a 2 sentences prompt and thus you are not amazed by this work either.
Wallet/Qrcode payments in many countries are roughly free. Visa/MC/Banks charge roughly 3-5% when you account for all fees (ie: Stripe). The security angle is also BS because these costs are hidden from consumers as they are thrown on merchants who will average them out again on consumers.
They are draining/milking the cow. At some point, they had significant value in quick information transmission when the internet and smart phones weren't really a thing. But now the only advantage is chargebacks/refunds which coincidentally, the experience there is being made shittier.
Still, not worth the 3-5% premium. Glad many merchants are starting to charge for credit card use and push back.
Most people in gov./bureaucratic functions do little or nothing (though depending on country, they could be doing negative work or harming the process itself). Developers are not the worse out they represent a very small percentage of the human capital.
We have no idea how much compute or man hours Open AI is burning at this. It could be thousands/millions per problem. They are doing this specifically for PR and are ready to pay billions.
OP here: for clarification I have "email addresses" which are <whatever>@fastmail.com (or whatever other domains fastmail offers). I then use the word "alias" for the on-the-fly alias such as [email protected] where the real email address is [email protected]. To be clear, the email I received in German was sent to the [email protected] (an actual email address, not an on the fly alias). The connection to Germany is that the email seems legitimate to some degree (it was to verify the email address) but it was in German and received within a week after visiting Germany. The email address was not used while in Germany and has never been put into a web form.
There are no combinations. The aliases are make-do in fastmail backend. If you have a domain, you theoretically receive all emails sent to that domain (*@domain.com)
I opened my Google account to check the model and honestly have no idea how to access it, whether it exists or not, what is Google AI, what is Gemini, what models are available, where the chatbot is, where the API is, etc..
Honestly, who is in charge of this? How do people even subscribe and make sense of any of this?
Yeah, the naming and proliferation of different tools and sites is confusing. Quickest way I know to get on any plan is via Google One at: https://one.google.com/.
I think it's sinister, but not for the reasons you're thinking. I think they're just wildly unprofitable on subscriptions. The idea that most customers won't use their full quota is plain wrong: most people are maxing out their subs, or even reselling whatever quota they have left.
When you're running something at a loss, you can mistreat your customers and they'll still stick around (I'm an example). OpenAI and Anthropic are now cheaper than Chinese models on subscriptions, while being 6-10x more expensive on the API.
My guess is they need the user numbers for the IPO and are willing to take a temporary loss in the meantime. By the time they go public, they'll either drop the subscription model or it'll turn into what the Chinese providers already offer: basically just a cap on how much API you can consume. Same same.
It's not clear what API tokens actually cost them, but I looked into running a local model, and it's way outside the budget of an individual or even a small or medium business (hundreds of thousands of dollars). So my guess is that running these models economically isn't possible, even if they're delivering real business value (coding, research, etc.). In other words, at API prices I'd just stop using AI, and I suspect most other developers would too.
> It's not clear what API tokens actually cost them, but I looked into running a local model, and it's way outside the budget of an individual or even a small or medium business (hundreds of thousands of dollars). So my guess is that running these models economically isn't possible
Datacenters have massive economies of scale. Everything from cheaper electricity to having specialized, more efficient hardware to simply being able to run it continuously at near-100% utilization, all adds up.
Many things in the economy - most notably, manufacturing of most consumer goods - only makes economic sense once you're producing for/serving millions of people. This is not unusual.
> In other words, at API prices I'd just stop using AI, and I suspect most other developers would too.
Many say that, but I sincerely doubt they'd actually follow through. People might get more conservative about how they spend their tokens, but AI today is just too good at eliminating drudgery and boring / bullshit parts of daily work to give up on merely 3-5x price increase.
Sure. Issue is, no one is providing on how much it actually costs to burn these tokens. And as we don't know, we can only speculate.
> Many say that, but I sincerely doubt they'd actually follow through.
I have a $100 open ai sub and I track my token usage. Last month I spent roughly $2.600 in equivalent API usage. There is no way am paying that. I let my $100 sub lapse if next month I'll be using it less.
Look, I am not saying that there isn't a potential value out there. But the cost has to be bounded. If your opportunity is $1.000 and AI costs $2.000 to execute it, then you don't have a business model here.
> Sure. Issue is, no one is providing on how much it actually costs to burn these tokens.
You can assume Openrouter open-model providers serve at or above margin, because there's no branding so there's no reason to do it unless you can be profitable. If the Anthropic models are anywhere in that ballpark, they're very comfortably profitable on API.
> I looked into running a local model, and it's way outside the budget of an individual or even a small or medium business (hundreds of thousands of dollars).
That is a big exaggeration. You can have a perfectly usable local LLM setup that will power your agent for single digit thousands of dollars. Can even power multiple agents simultaneously, depending on the hardware and setup. Won't be fast and won't be frontier intelligence, but definitely useful.
Any model running on "single digit thousands of dollars" hardware will either be below SOTA (even for local models) or not even close to fast enough for real-time agentic work. Even the latest so-called "flash" models are large enough that doing real work usably with those on a lower-cost platform is at least dicey. You can fire off non-interactive work and do especially simple Q&A/chat (which is vastly more token-efficient than anything agentic - though even then latency will be high for anything genuinely SOTA) but that's about it.
You'd not be amazed by seeing a 2 sentences prompt and thus you are not amazed by this work either.
reply