Okay, this is fun, but it’s time for an old programmer to yell at the cloud, a little bit:
The cost per AI request is not trending toward zero.
Current ludicrous costs are subsidized by money from gullible investors.
The cost model whole house of cards desperately depends on the poorly supported belief that the costs will rocket downward due to some future incredible discovery very very soon.
We’re watching an edurance test between irrational investors and the stubborn boring nearly completely spent tail end of Moore’s law.
My money is in a mattress waiting to buy a ten pack of discount GPU chips.
Hallucinating a new unpredictable result every time will never make any sense for work that even slightly matters.
But, this test still super fucking cool. I can think of half a dozen novel valuable ways to apply this for real world use. Of course, the reason I can think of those is because I’m an actual expert in computers.
Finally - I keep noticing that the biggest AI apologists I meet tend to be people who aren’t experts in computers, and are tired of their “million dollar” secret idea being ignored by actual computer experts.
I think it is great that the barrier of entry is going down for building each unique million dollar idea.
For the ideas that turn out to actually be market viable, I look forward to collaborating with some folks in exchange for hard cash, after the AI runs out of lucky guesses.
If we can’t make an equitable deal, I look forward to spending a few weeks catching up to their AI start-up proof-of-concept, and then spending 5 years courting their customers to my new solution using hard work and hard earned decades of expert knowledge.
This cool AI stuff does change things, but it changes things far less than the tech bros hope you will believe.
The future is here! And it costs $10-$50 per 1000 HTTP requests.
Yes, sounds ridiculous, but how will this ratio change if we take into account the cost of hiring a programmer and the costs of implementation of a niche feature that this experiment provides at a cost of LLM inference?
Also: we can cache and reuse enpoint implementation.
Play tic tac toe a few times against Chat-GPT. Wouldn’t trust an LLM that can’t win tic tac toe against four year olds with production code 🤣
Considering that most techbro startups are going to be dead within a year, I’d say AI wins.
Plus most of the competent programmers already have high resistance for technobabble bullshit, and will simply refuse to work on something like an online contacts app (are you copying a Facebook or what?)
Kinda reminds me of this: I built the most expensive CPU ever! (Every instruction is a prompt)
