> Will LLMs be cheaper than humans once the subsidies for tokens go away? At this point we have little visibility to what the true cost of tokens is now, let alone what it will be in a few years time. It could be so cheap that we don’t care how many tokens we send to LLMs, or it could be high enough that we have to be very careful.
We do have some idea. Kimi K2 is a relatively high performing open source model. People have it running at 24 tokens/second on a pair of Mac Studios, which costs 20k. This setup requires less than a KW of power, so the $0.8-0.15 being spent there is negligible compared to a developer. This might be the cheapest setup to run locally, but it's almost certain that the cost per token is far cheaper with specialized hardware at scale.
In other words, a near-frontier model is running at a cost that a (somewhat wealthy) hobbyist can afford. And it's hard to imagine that the hardware costs don't come down quite a bit. I don't doubt that tokens are heavily subsidized but I think this might be overblown [1].
[1] training models is still extraordinarily expensive and that is certainly being subsidized, but you can amortize that cost over a lot of inference, especially once we reach a plateau for ideas and stop running training runs as frequently.
We do have some idea. Kimi K2 is a relatively high performing open source model. People have it running at 24 tokens/second on a pair of Mac Studios, which costs 20k. This setup requires less than a KW of power, so the $0.8-0.15 being spent there is negligible compared to a developer. This might be the cheapest setup to run locally, but it's almost certain that the cost per token is far cheaper with specialized hardware at scale.
In other words, a near-frontier model is running at a cost that a (somewhat wealthy) hobbyist can afford. And it's hard to imagine that the hardware costs don't come down quite a bit. I don't doubt that tokens are heavily subsidized but I think this might be overblown [1].
[1] training models is still extraordinarily expensive and that is certainly being subsidized, but you can amortize that cost over a lot of inference, especially once we reach a plateau for ideas and stop running training runs as frequently.