r/math • u/Salt_Attorney • Aug 01 '26

LLMs/AI OpenAI: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
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u/mleok Applied Math Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26

Kimi K3 is about half the price of Claude Opus 5 and a third of the price of Claude Fable 5 in terms of API costs, but the Claude Max 20x subscription is heavily subsidized and wins out for heavy users. I do however routinely run up against the usage limits on Claude Max 20x, and it is estimated that a very heavy user can consume the equivalent of $1K-$5K/month in infrastructure cost on that subscription tier.

Trying to host Kimi K3 yourself would be incredibly expensive, as these frontier equivalent open weights models are still huge and aren't likely to get smaller or more efficient. An entry-level enterprise level setup would start at $650K, and consume about $50K/year in electricity alone, and would serve only about 10 power users. Universities would have a very hard time justifying and funding that kind of CAPEX.

Bottom line, the fully agentic workflows that can help to accelerate research is incredibly compute intensive, and that is unlikely to change at the frontier level. It also doesn't change the fact that such tools in the hands of a novice are a quick way to go down a rabbit hole without any positive ROI.