this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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“But the cost per token keeps going down!” The AI proponents scream.
Why are they wrong?
The cost per token goes up with every new generation of models. It goes down over time as the model undergoes optimizations such as distillation. Unfortunately, those optimizations make the model perform worse and more likely to hallucinate. Then they come out with a new generation which obviously outperforms the heavily watered down, distilled model, and the cycle repeats again.
Think of a trend like this:
The costs keep going down but the long term trend is going up.
The cost is not actually going down. The price is going down, because these companies are need new revenue and new customers and new waves of hype to prop up their failing business model. The cost is at best staying level if you want to be very selective and generous, and is inevitably going up. And it's going to go up much, much faster in the near future.
Sure, Nvidia may put out some newer chips that are technically somewhat more efficient from time to time, but the old cards are still running, they've already been purchased and they still have to pay for themselves, and there is no evidence they have (or ever will) and the new ones are even more expensive than that, and they'll have to pay for themselves too. And at the same time energy is getting more expensive, training costs are getting more expensive, and demand on both sides is increasing which is only going to push those costs even higher.
There is zero possibility any of this makes economic sense. The entire economic output of the world decided to jump on the FOMO bandwagon, that doesn't mean the wagon is actually going anywhere.
I'm not certain, but it could be that as the cost goes down, they keep bringing out more powerful models, so the cost per query stays constant.
If this is accurate, their need to compete with each other to have "the best" AI is creating a prisoner's dilemma where everyone loses because the individually-optimal choice is worse than if they all agreed that today's AI is good enough and concentrated on affordability and minimising energy/water usage instead.