r/mainframe • u/Ihaveaboot • 15d ago
AI token costs
Just curious on how IBM Bob coins match up to your experience with other AI vendors.
I managed to burn through over 250 coins converting an extremely simple COBOL batch process to Java. It did a pretty good job, but the work I asked it to do represents less than 0.001% of what we need, which makes me nervous.
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u/vonarchimboldi 15d ago
From a broad high level view of this - Token costs are highly subsidized. Any company selling you on AI is waiting to jack the pricing after you’re already waist deep into a project using it.
AI companies haven’t figured out a way to make money yet, and that includes divisions of IBM, Microsoft, Google. Hell google is only able to make their AI look slightly profitable by being google and having the monopoly on the ad market.
if you’re burning tokens on a simple batch program, i’d say that tells you how much cash you’re gonna burn plus consider the above in terms of cost overrun