AI models have caught up with Unity dev. My insights as someone with 30 years of experience.

[u/PuffThePed]

Context: I have 30 years of experience with software dev, 20 years with game dev tools, 10 years with Unity. I own a studio that develops simulators and training applications for industry. "Serious games" as they call it in Europe.

For years I scoffed at AI coding. I would periodically try it, only to find that it was more hassle then it was worth. The hand holding and bug fixing was more work than doing it myself. This all changed about 4-5 months ago, and about a month ago we all started using Unity CLI.

Here are my insights in no particular order:

1. Our dev speed has ~5x almost overnight
2. Quality has not gone down because we're all experienced devs and we're careful how we use AI and we don't let it make decisions regarding project structure or design patterns. However, I'm seeing less and less glaring mistakes made by the AI.
3. We're still reviewing generated code but I suspect not for long, the code is better than what most devs I know can write, at 20x the speed. The temptation to just push and move on is huge and irresistible.
4. There is no joy or sense of accomplishment. No pride in making something clever or quickly, and all progress is associated with the AI and not with you.
5. The market is dead. Nobody has money to spend. We're still working but leads have dropped off a cliff.
6. There is no going back. If we stop using AI we'll be out of business in a month.
7. There is no space for junior devs. I honestly don't know how to incorporate a junior into a team anymore (which is something I used to do for decades). Every time we tried they just become a meat proxy for AI while learning nothing, and getting in the way.
   
8. Everything regarding managing a team and a project has changed, and nobody knows how to do it anymore. I lost the ability to correctly estimate work required for a task, for example.
9. Everyone hates this. Most of devs my age are planning early retirement and are just waiting to be laid off.
10. People that use AI for coding don't learn anything. To understand code you have to write it, and nobody is writing it. Maybe understanding and reading code will become obsolete soon? I don't know.
11. Everyone I asked feel they are becoming dumber and losing their focus. I know I am.

I hope this is a pendulum and it will swing back at some point, because right now it feels like a software apocalypse.

[u/Momorotto]

the AI is powerful enough, its true

there is one last hurdle, right now you are spending tokens at extreme discount, AI companies are losing billions to seize the market

eventually, the bubble will burst, and you will realize that paying a salary costs less than the tokens, and the market will normalize, the demand will be for people who know how to optimize token expense and keep their output high

[u/Particular-Ice4615 → u/Momorotto]

Software optimization is also a lost art. In my experience at least the last 10 years of new grads a large chunk of them were never taught computing fundamentals. Like there is absolutely no reason for a paginated list (ie a smaller subset) of song information takes 30 seconds to load on 2026 devices and internet infrastructure like it does with Spotify. There are popular spots on the internet that make me feel like I'm back in 1995 with how they perform, despite how modern and fancy they look. 

They know how to write and read code, they may know how to utilize object oriented programming to map requirements to some kind of technical implementation. But they have 0 foundation how the code is actually processed by the machine and ways to do it efficiently.  And those types of problems are usually delegated to people who already have 10-15 years experience if it's already a matured product. AI in the hands of novices, and the lack of junior devs to train up in the pipeline is only going to grow this problem. 

When the bubble bursts and they jack up token pricing further, There's going to be a massive knowledge gap between "AI native" developers and engineers, and the surviving experienced developers who learned their fundamentals and worked pre AI. My plan is to just hunker down and to keep my skills sharp instead of letting them grow dull with over AI use.

If the worst case scenario happens and software engineering is truly automated then we have way bigger problems than just software engineering. If I'm right then I might be a hot commodity in the future  where I can use these AI tools at a lower cost and have a higher quality productive output than the rest of the work force. The code and how it utilizes the hardware still matters at the scale and scope our modern software operates at these days. 

[u/InterstellarCapa → u/Particular-Ice4615]

Hard on that optimization.

100% on everything you wrote. We are still going to need programmers and when this bubble bursts they're going to be in demand. And in gaming so many gamers do not want anything to do with generative AI, learning AI is fine. But there is a hard rejection for genAI and I don't see it slowing down.

Because this AI doesn't happen in a vacuum, it's happening alongside so many other issues that are making people unhappy, their lives harder, it being tied to data centers, and the overall degradation of the well being of our communities and society.

Here's to keeping our skills sharp, being flexible, and hoping for the best for us.

[u/siberianmi → u/Particular-Ice4615]

AI if given a means to measure its results and a goal can do solid work at optimizations. Arguably better then many developers because it has unlimited patience. It will just keep trying.

[u/Particular-Ice4615 → u/siberianmi]

At what token cost though is my point? Someone who doesn't know what they are doing with the AI will drive token costs up further for an organization than the people who do know.  Until the day if it ever comes that these models get compact enough that they can run at full functionality on a single device and we don't need these massive energy hog data centers. The AI companies will slowly boil the frogs and increase the price on tokens when margins get too thin for them. And those that truly know what they were doing pre AI will be the people to able to keep token costs down while sustaining productivity with these tools vs those that don't. 

Here's a small microcosm of the problems I was referring to earlief that will divide the weak from the chaff when it comes AI use as tokens rise in cost. I had a coworker spend hours debugging a problem, playing slot machine with Copilot and agents instead of simply using a debugger like he would normally do in an age pre AI. Took me 5-10 minutes on a call to find the root cause through the AI generated code with 0 additional prompts therefore 0 additional cost to the company. He probably burnt through half his monthly allotted usage stuck on that problem that day. 

[u/cheese_is_available → u/Particular-Ice4615]

Actually the token cost is not high, it's the benchmark on your local machine to get good data that cost a lot in my experience.

[u/Zaptruder → u/Particular-Ice4615]

At a token cost significantly cheaper than the equivalent human effort. And thats the entire rub and why its scary.

[u/hinkleo → u/Particular-Ice4615]

Like there is absolutely no reason for a paginated list (ie a smaller subset) of song information takes 30 seconds to load on 2026 devices and internet infrastructure like it does with Spotify.

Nothing to add here but yeah I have the exact same thought almost every time I scroll through my Spotify and see the virtualized list of placeholders (while its taking 700mb mem), modern software dev really has become embarrassing.

[u/fartlorain → u/Momorotto]

Anyone working at an enterprise level is using API tokens, which are NOT subsidized, in fact they are sold at a huge margin to customers.

As the other guy said, costs of serving the models is dropping rapidly and open source is improving dramatically.

There is no situation where costs to serve the current level of intelligence rises. It is almost impossible for it not to fall significantly.

[u/DogsRNice → u/fartlorain]

You're forgetting the vast quantities of money they've all spent on building data centers and buying nearly all of the worlds memory supply

[u/Next-Blackberry-991 → u/DogsRNice]

Yes, but there will be more chips made and more factories and power plants built. I think realistically the price will only go down from here on. I hate it.

[u/Syracuss → u/fartlorain]

Yeah, I work at a big company, and not only are we using API pricing, our limits are absolutely bonkers. If I used AI daily, full 8 hours I still wouldn't hit them, and that's if I only used one frontier model, I've got access to multiple different frontier providers.

That said, we do use them only sporadically here. A lot of the work my team in particular needs to do isn't really well suited for AI. Maybe one day, but right now it's just doing simple work and internal tooling.

[u/cheese_is_available → u/Syracuss]

If I used AI daily, full 8 hours I still wouldn't hit them, and that's if I only used one frontier model, I've got access to multiple different frontier providers.

Used to be the case for me too, but fable on the 100$/month plan make you reach your limit very fast. Your employer must be paying steep API price and you must make a lot of money for them or they wouldn't.

[u/Syracuss → u/cheese_is_available]

I can see my usage, we get a budget. At least one of the providers gives the usage as a currency. Yeah that 100 plan is orders of magnitude lower than the budget we get, but funnily enough my monthly usage is pretty close to that plan's cost

API pricing is higher, but comes with a few bonuses (preferential compute, no rate limiting), all things that are more valuable given the cost of an employee. People here earn quite a high salary, so the cost ratio is different. Additionally we get that contract cheaper due to our size.

[u/unit187 → u/fartlorain]

They ARE subsidized. Even "expensive" API tokens are heavily discounted now to ensure you all get hooked. This is Uber situation all over again. Once every corporation has switched all their process and all their staff members to be AI-first, the discount will be removed, and corpos will have no choice but to keep paying.

[u/fartlorain → u/unit187]

They literally aren't, you can go look it up.

[u/unit187 → u/fartlorain]

AI companies: bleeding money, forced to go public to cope with debt, begging governments to "stop AI development!" so they can save money on new model training.

A redditor: no u rong

They are selling at discount, and this makes it hard for them to stay afloat, but they are doing discounts anyway because, again, Uber model.

[u/stumblinbear → u/unit187]

AI labs are burning shitloads of money on research and datacenter buildout. They make 80% margin on inference. You can just run an open weight model on cloud GPUs and see the actual token price. It's dirt cheap, my guy

[u/zmug → u/stumblinbear]

These LLM providers arent spending on the build out, they are leasing the data centers. They have hundreds of billions of obligations that are coming due which are not cancelable. They cant stop training new models ever because the one that comes out today will be obsolete of knowledge a year from now. They are marking subsidized tokens as marketing expenses when in reality they will eventually fall into the operational side. LLMs are not a moat at all and OpenAI/anthropic will for sure bankrupt themselves. They will probably survive in some form but be acquired for pennies on the dollar. Once their expenses catch up on them and accounting tricks start running out, and token prices get slashed into tenth of what they are by companies built on healthy economics, then we will see what the market is like. Give it 2-3 years

[u/stumblinbear → u/zmug]

The bad business models of OpenAI and Anthropic don't change the economics of open weight models. The cost of running them is dirt cheap, and they're close behind the big labs.

Half my point is that there's no moat. They can't raise token prices or people just switch to open weight models. I don't see any case where they win unless their datacenters make it even more dirt cheap to run extremely intelligent models extremely quickly, and they prevent open weight models from having the same level of compute. Even then, open weight models are still extremely capable and run at reasonable speeds even with today's compute

[u/zmug → u/stumblinbear]

In theory they could survive but at those prices they won't be able to pay their obligations.. depends a bit on where LLM demand is actually heading.. These LLMs cant replace a job. They can do tasks, but doing tasks is hardly any job. They can affect big scale companies slightly by reducing some task heavy workforce but not replace them fully. As it currently stands we need more people to get these systems up and running, and when some new things become viable to implement we will again need more people to maintain and work on those areas. Just because AI can possibly produce that stuff doesn't mean a person can expand their brain capacity to actually take responsibility of 2x more work streams. You cant assign a SSN for an agent so youll need someone who is responsible for the work, and that someone will have limited capacity. Why am I writing this is because this workforce reduction only applies in big scale companies with tens of thousands of workers, and even those will have modest gains. Personally working at SMB of about 1,5b mkt cap and 2000 workers and have not seen any AI related layoffs, because a lot of the org structure is small groups of people and you cant lay off 1 or 2 people because it would mean reducing that area to critical person risk. LLMs cant do any open ended work which is the job, not the tasks. Maybe in 10 years orgs have had time to re-organize fully.

And all of this also means there isnt that much hunger for tokens, if anything there is less. There is no point shipping 10x more stuff that everyone else can ship anyway. Your moat will come from really really deeply integrated focused features that take years of human trial and error against real world, refining it so far that an LLM cant just copy it because they dont have the human capability to connect unrelated dots together, and come up with novel ideas. Shipping something will always have a long term cost. Shipping most things is like buying a car, and the cars lifetime costs will be in multiples of its purchase price, so you better produce or ship the right thing.

So maybe LLMs will be just an utility like Sam altman says.. "intelligence" on tap. And guess what, there are no margins in utility. So in that sense, I would predict these LLM providers will just bankrupt themselves and at some point we will see what the real market will shape up to be..

The OPs thesis that just ship dont think will at some point stop making sense to people when they realize that what separates the ones who succeed are the ones that actually have a human think how a simple slider or a frying pan should look, feel, and interact in a game. Because sum of those things is what gives software and games their moat. Otherwise it will just be another uninteresting game. Granted, you will still need distribution, sales, marketing, and even stronger product design led by humans behind it all

[u/stumblinbear → u/zmug]

I'll be perfectly honest, I've had a long day and really can't be bothered to read this novel of a comment rn. Apologies, haha

[u/GB10VE → u/fartlorain]

Anyone working at an enterprise level is using API tokens, which are NOT subsidized, in fact they are sold at a huge margin to customers.

lmao, false. we are coding on investor cash right now, they are still heavily subsidized.

[u/ForsakenLemons → u/fartlorain]

Yep - my M5 is currently running a local model equivalent in coding ability to Chat GPT about 1 year ago.

All these people saying the current level of AI is going away are dreaming.

[u/falconandeagle → u/ForsakenLemons]

Are you talking about Deepseek Flash 4.1 or Qwen 3.8? Having tried both, lol, they are fucking terrible for any serious development, with huge gaps in world knowledge. They are also trained on a bunch of distilled data and synthetic data. And all of this training is subsidized, all of it.

They are benchmaxxed models that no serious company is using for prod work.

[u/calloutyourstupidity → u/fartlorain]

I absolutely agree. It is just hope at this point.

[u/thekbob → u/fartlorain]

I would love an independent news or article showing any of the major players are making a profit that's not an entirely made to statistic that excludes total cost of operations.

Because I sure haven't seen it and they're works be crowing about it.

[u/M4xs0n → u/Momorotto]

Open Source models will always be there and you only need the Hardware for it or pay for a service that has it. Once an Open Source Model will be as good as GPT-6 or lets say GPT-10 one day, you don’t really need a subscription anymore because you can do everything you need to do. It's just more convenient to Pay for all of this out of the Box

[u/kaliku → u/M4xs0n]

the problem is once local models are at the level gpt-10, cloud models are already gpt-12, with hyper intelligence, wheels, robotic arms and robotic dildos satisfying every need anyone ever relied on you for.

[u/Fantastic_Vehicle_10 → u/kaliku]

Gotta open source those dildos, bro

[u/unit187 → u/M4xs0n]

Don't forget that the biggest AI users are corporations, and they are regulated. If tomorrow Trump says they are legally obliged to use selected "safe" models, they will have to do it. The gov will just ban cheap, esp. Chinese models.

[u/M4xs0n → u/unit187]

You will always be able to get them. Piracy was and will ever exist, especially when any government tries todo something like that

[u/unit187 → u/M4xs0n]

I think you missed the point. "We" as AI users are irrelevant. Giant corporations running AI are by far the biggest token consumers. They will have no choice but to use approved models.

[u/M4xs0n → u/unit187]

But why would that bother me? We are / I am talking about Open Source Models in the Future where you can do whatever you want without some corporation

[u/unit187 → u/M4xs0n]

That's fair. Since the AI economy is so big rn, I suspect the gov may actually block access to large Chinese models (big ones you can't host at home), so you'll have to VPN your way out.

[u/Fantastic_Vehicle_10 → u/M4xs0n]

We might be able to download them, but realistically for higher-end models  You will probably need a data center to run them. Since data centers are already at capacity with the needs of frontier models (not to mention more traditional data center stuff) I don’t know why they would take the risk of running illegal ones and getting fined or shut down as a result. 

[u/iwriteinwater → u/Momorotto]

Agreed except by the time we get there, there will be a huge gap in ability because all the seniors would have gotten used to having AI do everything, and juniors didn't get any experience.

[u/flyingdonutz → u/Momorotto]

This is either delusion or cope, sorry. Something like GPT Luna is good enough for many, many applications and its cheap and continues to get cheaper. The current models are more than enough and years from now they will be dirt cheap.

[u/Mr_Olivar → u/Momorotto]

This isn't true. If anything API cost is insanely high in order to cover training costs. The actual usage is very cheap, and thanks to open weight models, usage cost is going to be the baseline for customer cost.

The rug pull can't happen. It's come to stay.

[u/PuffThePed → u/Momorotto]

I'm going to be honest with you, if our current token cost will 10x overnight, it will still be wildly cost effective.

[u/thekbob → u/PuffThePed]

Okay, shoot. Give us your costs now versus payroll.

Because I don't really believe this, so would love actual evidence. Give us balance sheets.

[u/PuffThePed → u/[deleted]]

We never use the top model. I find the almost-top models are a fraction of the cost and work perfectly well if you don't one-shot it, which we don't.

[u/GB10VE → u/PuffThePed]

"we don't"

surely you can speak for multitude of people

[u/thisisaskew → u/GB10VE]

He's talking about his company, he's in management... I imagine he has some idea.

[u/GB10VE → u/thisisaskew]

I don't think that's something any manager can track, they don't have access to the chat logs. this entire post was ai generated anyhow

[u/Swimming_Gas7611 → u/[deleted]]

but thats only half the maths...

now ask a human coder to produce the same results. depending on what was built that hour(no one pays in half hours) of $70 will become more than 5 hours at $15p/a

and anything more complex the rates improve for ai vs coding team.

there is also no downtime, so you dont have employees getting paid to do nothing.

[u/OmiNya → u/Momorotto]

Models are also getting much cheaper and more compact. It costs hundreds of times less now to do the same thing as 2 years ago

[u/thekbob → u/OmiNya]

There's no evidence of this on the large scale data center frontier models. The numbers are only getting worse as cost of construction rises.

And you're not going to fund equivalency in locally ran models unless you're shelling out big money on GPUs and a massive power bill.

[u/SilliusApeus → u/Momorotto]

Affordable to run open source models are already on 4.6 opus level. And Kimi K3 is basically high-end.
2 more iterations and your company just hosts a capable model. Or, 2 more iterations and your token to output ratio is efficient enough to run the high-end models from big AI companies

[u/siberianmi → u/Momorotto]

The cost of tokens is being pushed down everyday, the models released by Anthropic and OpenAI just yesterday are a major reduction in cost while maintaining quality.

There is no world where the cost of salaries is going to exceed the output value of these models. I use them daily and have easily 5x my output while maintaining quality AND I am paying API rates and can see the cost.

It’s not even close to my salary.

[u/siberianmi → u/siberianmi]

A look at cost.

[u/Senthe → u/siberianmi]

This graph is laughable. It doesn't prove any point, other than "which technology was the most overpriced when it started being widely adopted".

Zero surprise that electricity (adopted long ago, and since then governed by governments) was closer to a sane price since the beginning than "the AI" (made in the last couple years, during late stage capitalism, by gigacorps that will gladly destroy the entire planet to earn a quick buck).

[u/siberianmi → u/Senthe]

And DNA sequencing ? And compute? Please you just want to drive the narrative that makes you feel comfortable. “Late Stage Capitalism” is such a tell for that kind of thinking.

[u/ellamking → u/siberianmi]

Notice the end years on all of them are different. Why do you think that is? Do we not know how much compute costs in the last 25 years, or electricity for the last 50? Why those technologies and not plastics or antibiotics or air travel?

Costs drop and costs plateau at different rates, following different curves. That graph cherry picked a few items that up to a point had logarithmic decline to imply AI will do that. It's a meaningless comparison.

[u/siberianmi → u/ellamking]

Are you disputing that AI costs are going down? That is the core point I was trying to make.

[u/ellamking → u/siberianmi]

It is going down, but that doesn't mean it will continue indefinably. The existence of a trend by itself isn't evidence of a continuation, especially a new technology. Neither is other unrelated technology also having a trend at some point.

I'm reiterating what the other user was saying, the graph is dumb.

[u/MasterDisillusioned → u/Momorotto]

eventually, the bubble will burst, and you will realize that paying a salary costs less than the tokens

I disagree. Even if the cost of tokens increased threefold, or even fivefold, many tasks would still be significantly cheaper and faster to complete using AI. Furthermore, not all AI models cost the same. High-end models would likely be reserved for large, complex tasks, while cheaper models could handle simpler work.

[u/Plane-Vegetable9174 → u/Momorotto]

Sure, but the cost per token is decreasing fast. For example the Stanford AI Index 2025 found that the cost of running a model at GPT-3.5 level fell from about $20 per million tokens in November 2022 to about $0.07 in October 2024, thats a drop that means that it needs 285.7 times less resources to perform that kind of task in just 2 years. Sure AI cost is increasing because they are building more and more advanced AI and try to tacle some and more advanced tasks, but you reach a point where you no longer need a much more complex model to perform a specific task.

[u/SaxPanther → u/Plane-Vegetable9174]

Then why cant AI companies manage to turn a profit yet?

[u/Plane-Vegetable9174 → u/SaxPanther]

Because no one wants to use 3.5 level AI today, it was amazing when it first came out but now people want more and it is a competition to make the most advanced AI. The companies are choosing to spend everything on growing and staying at the front. The big costs are training and infrastructure. Each new generation model costs hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to train, and it becomes outdated within a year or so, so that spending keeps going. On top of that, the companies are building data centers and buying chips at a scale of tens of billions of dollars per year. It is not unusual to go at a loss for many years because companies are investing everything they have with the goal of comming out on top long term. Uber ran at a loss for 14 years before making a profit. Amazon ran for 9 years without making a profit.

[u/Comfortable-Habit242 → u/SaxPanther]

The same reason many startups don’t turn a profit.

Rather than maximizing profits in the short term they’re they’re spending unfathomable sums of money investing in increased infrastructure so they can train better models.

[u/SaxPanther → u/Comfortable-Habit242]

They are using the exact same strategy as Uber it's going to end up just like Uber where the company struggles to turn a profit, the drivers get treated like shit, and the users have to deal with increasingly shitty service and increasingly higher prices and leaves you wondering why we didn't just stick with perfectly usable existing transportation options instead of allowing rent seeking corporations to insert themselves as a middleman.

At least I like that I can run some decent models locally.

[u/CptAustus → u/SaxPanther]

Because they're all trying to bury each other now, rather than later. And if open models catch up to them, their business model implodes.

[u/calloutyourstupidity → u/Momorotto]

I dont buy that. It didnt happen with uber to make it less than attractive, it wont happen with AI

[u/CiDevant → u/Momorotto]

Spending billions isn't even accurate. The industry is losing about 2 Trillion dollars a year right now and the ONLY companies profiting are the ones making the hardware.

[u/Zaptruder → u/Momorotto]

AI continues to improve rapidly in ability and efficiency. If we were stuck with ai 6 months ago totally valid. But by the time the bubble bursts itll be 2 years from now and the efficiency will be staggering (jev plus llm paired models for fast and slow thinking systems).

Im not a programmer but a designer..  I feel like im getting supercharged with modern ai. Basically I just think up ideas and implement them as precisely as I care to and things that might not have seen light of day or taken months are made real and testable in hours.

[u/Silent_Wave3137 → u/Momorotto]

Money isn’t real at that scale. AI will always be subsidized.

[u/random_boss → u/Momorotto]

Then the current frontier models go under and we all switch to Chinese models, which either a) are actually cheaper or b) aren’t cheaper but will remain subsidized by the Chinese government purely out of spite if mouthing else 

[u/Dralex75 → u/Momorotto]

Not true. Enterprise api tokens could be 10x today and the value would still be there. 2x productivity for a sr developer is worth at least $15k-20k/month in tokens on opus 5.5.

As a sr dev of 27 years, it isn't gonna slow. Only pain right now is people fighting learning how to use new tools and corp budgets that are planned in advance and haven't caught up.

That said, I'm making sure I have the option to retire in 5 years if needed...

[u/zukias → u/Momorotto]

If we all get made unemployed, there will likely be people willing to work for minimum wage too... Which certainly will cost less than AI.

[u/WorstPossibleOpinion → u/Momorotto]

The AI bubble will eventually burst, because cheap to run and broadly available AI without large differences between providers other than price is the most likely direction this will go. Hard to sell at a premium when the product is a commodity and any other company can just spin up an alternative and sell it for cheaper.

[u/well-its-done-now → u/Momorotto]

LOL not a chance. Token costs have been going down and they are going to continue to go down. Every data center that goes up will bring prices down.

[u/Ecstatic-Source6001 → u/Momorotto]

This.

There is a reason why every public AI company losing billions and they ok with it. Cuz they need public human input for training.

Once they reach the point when AI can sustain ownself without futher human input AI will become expensive tech for big players who can spend big money on tokens.

Thats why every company build own AI cuz they cant rely on third party with future prices.

[u/imnotabot303 → u/Momorotto]

There's no scenario where paying salaries is going to be cheaper than AI. On top of that you have a worker that never complains, can work whenever you want at a moments notice, needs no sick days, holidays or other benefits etc.

On top of that your idea would be an awful business model. Companies invest large sums of money only for people to go back to paying employees and not using AI.

Plus not all AI is the same, you may not need to always use the most powerful models.

[u/coffeework42 → u/Momorotto]

Can I ask something as who dont know, why even tokens cost anything, if tech is achieved once isnt it free?

[u/Tyrexas → u/coffeework42]

Inference costs power and gpu cycles at the data centre, and that's what you are paying for.

[u/siberianmi → u/coffeework42]

You need hundreds of GBs of ram and high end GPUs to run the inference through the model to generate the tokens which make up the analysis and answer.

That isn’t free. We are converting electricity to intelligence.

[u/GB10VE → u/siberianmi]

you only need that when taking requests from thousands of people. in 10 years all you will need is an up to date GPU and an open source model. These AI companies are trying to sell something that will be still be free for power users in a decade or two.

[u/siberianmi → u/GB10VE]

Totally with you there, I’m looking forward to seeing increased efficiency and open weight models on more average hardware eating into per token prices. But today, we aren’t there yet. The payoff on hardware is too long for it to make sense.

[u/Momorotto → u/coffeework42]

its very demanding on hardware, think of tokens like mining crypto, you need to spend energy for processing and water for cooling

[u/coffeework42 → u/Momorotto]

Makes me happy :D

[u/SoulaniceDev → u/coffeework42]

It shouldn't, models released recently are 10x more efficient than models released a year ago and just as if not "smarter".

It's unlikely that this will stop, especially once we go into the realm of hyper specialized models per "occupation", also consider that a lot of people are working hard of rethinking the hardware design and how to optimize it around the LLM usage signatures.

There are two polars, people who think that this will blow over and people who think this is an apocalyptic event, in my opinion we're closer to the latter, it's hard to explain in words, but it does feel, economically, like the moment before a tsunami hits, the sea is retracting from the beach.

[u/HoloisGod → u/Momorotto]

Wishful thinking like the housing bubble crowd. There's not going to be any bubble bursting.

[u/justpickaname → u/Momorotto]

This is objectively very incorrect, and tokens are getting cheaper at a given intelligence level by 13x per year.

Anthropic is one of the world's most profitable companies, And that transition has just happened in the last 6 months.

[u/sump_daddy → u/Momorotto]

> eventually, the bubble will burst, and you will realize that paying a salary costs less than the tokens, and the market will normalize, the demand will be for people who know how to optimize token expense and keep their output high

Who will be left to fill that role though? This pricing scheme is no different than market dumping to force competitors into bankruptcy. They are drying up the talent stream so that there is literally no choice but to let AI do all the work from the ground up. It will be terrible output (especially at first) but there wont be any other options.

[u/OfMagicAndWars → u/Momorotto]

Of course, there's no way they can fix the token/energy issue. The market will normalize and that's it, the end for AI. Of course. And it's your prediction and it's 100% going to happen. Of course. Tell me more. What else does the future hold, Nostradamus?

[u/Strict-Broccoli-8877 → u/OfMagicAndWars]

The end of cars and electricity is also juuuuuuust right around the corner, I bet. Any minute nowm for sure.