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> It might become cheaper or it might not If it does not, this is going to be first technology in the history of mankind that has not become cheaper. (But any
by fooker 9mo ago
> It might become cheaper or it might not
If it does not, this is going to be first technology in the history of mankind that has not become cheaper.
(But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year)
- peaseagee 9mo agoThat's not true. Many technologies get more expensive over time, as labor gets more expensive or as certain skills fall by the wayside, not everything is mass market. Have you tried getting a grandfather clock repaired lately?
- simianwords 9mo ago"repairing a unique clock" getting costlier doesn't mean technology hasn't gotten cheaper. check out whether clocks have gotten cheaper in general. the answer is that it has. there is no economy of scale here in repairing a single clock. its not relevant to bring it up here.
- ipaddr 9mo agoClocks prices have gone up since 2020. Unless a cheaper better way to make clocks has emerged inflation causes prices to grow.
- fooker 9mo agoLuxury watches have gone up, 'clocks' as a technology is cheaper than ever. You can buy one for 90 cents on temu.
- ipaddr 9mo agoThe landing cost for that 90 cent watch has gone way up. Shipping and to some degree taxes has pushed the price higher.
- pas 9mo agothat's not the technology of course it's silly to talk about manufacturing methods and yield and cost efficiency without having an economy to embed all of this into, but ... technology got cheaper means that we have practical knowledge of how to make cheap clocks (given certain supply chains, given certain volume, and so and so) we can make very cheap very accurate clocks that can be embedded into whatever devices, but it requires the availability of fabs capable of doing MEMS components, supply materials, etc.
- simianwords 9mo agonot true, clocks have gone down after accounting for inflation. verified using ChatGPT.
- ipaddr 9mo agoYou can't account for inflation because the price increase is inflation.
- simianwords 9mo agothis is not true
- pas 9mo agoyou can look at a basket of goods that doesn't have your specific product and compare directly but inflation is the general price level increase, this can be used as a deflator to get the price of whatever product in past/future money amount to see how the price of the product changed in "real" terms (ie. relative to the general price level change)
- peaseagee 9mo agoYou cannot verify anything using a tool that cannot validate truth.
- esafak 9mo agoInstead of advancing tenuous examples you could suggest a realistic mechanism by which costs could rise, such as a Chinese advance on Taiwan, effecting TSMC, etc.
- groby_b 9mo agoNo. You don't get to make "technology gets more expensive over time" statements for deprecated technologies. Getting a bespoke flintstone axe is also pretty expensive, and has also absolutely no relevance to modern life. These discussions must, if they are to be useful, center in a population experience, not in unique personal moments.
- solomonb 9mo agookay how about the Francis Scott Key Bridge? https://marylandmatters.org/2025/11/17/key-bridge-replacement-costs-soar-as-high-as-5-2-billion-opening-delayed-to-2030/ https://marylandmatters.org/2025/11/17/key-bridge-replacemen...
- groby_b 9mo agoYou will get a different bridge. With very different technology. Same as "I can't repair my grandfather clock cheaply". In general, there are several things that are true for bridges that aren't true for most technology: * Technology has massively improved, but most people are not realizing that. (E.g. the Bay Bridge cost significantly more than the previous version, but that's because we'd like to not fall down again in the next earthquake) * We still have little idea how to reason about the cost of bridges in general. (Seriously. It's an active research topic) * It's a tiny market, with the major vendors forming an oligopoly * It's infrastructure, not a standard good * The buy side is almost exclusively governments. All of these mean expensive goods that are completely non-repeatable. You can't build the same bridge again. And on top of that, in a distorted market. But sure, the cost of "one bridge, please" has gone up over time.
- fooker 9mo ago> But sure, the cost of "one bridge, please" has gone up over time. Even if you adjust for inflation?
- groby_b 9mo agoDepends, do we care about TCO? Also, can I pick the set of bridges I compare? OK, kidding aside: If you deeply care, you can probably mine the Federal Highway Administration's bridge construction database: https://fhwaapps.fhwa.dot.gov/upacsp/tm?transName=MenuSystem&action=buildHTML https://fhwaapps.fhwa.dot.gov/upacsp/tm?transName=MenuSystem... I don't think the question is answerable in a meaningful way. Bridges are one-off projects with long life spans, comparing cost over time requires a lot of squinting just so.
- willio58 9mo agoRepairing grandfather clocks isn't more expensive now because it's gotten any harder; it's because the popularity of grandfather clocks is basically nonexistent compared to anything else to tell time.
- direwolf20 9mo agoDoesn't need to be any particular reason to disprove the notion that technology only gets cheaper.
- emtel 9mo agoTime-keeping is vastly cheaper. People don't want grandfather clocks. They want to tell time. And they can, more accurately, more easily, and much cheaper than their ancestors.
- epidemiology 9mo agoOr riding in an uber?
- InsideOutSanta 9mo agoSure, running an LLM is cheaper, but the way we use LLMs now requires way more tokens than last year.
- simianwords 9mo agook but the capabilities are also rising. what point are you trying to make?
- oytis 9mo agoThat it's not getting cheaper?
- jstummbillig 9mo agoBut it is, capability adjusted, which is the only way it makes sense. You can definitely produce last years capability at a huge discount.
- simianwords 9mo agoyou are wrong. https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends this is accounting for the fact that more tokens are used.
- techpression 9mo agoThe chart shows that they’re right though. Newer models cost more than older models. Sure they’re better but that’s moot if older models are not available or can’t solve the problem they’re tasked with.
- simianwords 9mo agothis is incorrect. the cost to achieve the same task by old models is way higher than by new models. > Newer models cost more than older models where did you see this?
- ctoth 9mo ago> But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year You could not have bought Claude Opus 4.5 at any price one year ago I'm quite certain. The things that were available cost half of what they did then, and there are new things available. These are both true. I'm agreeing with you, to be clear. There are two pieces I expect to continue: inference for existing models will continue to get cheaper. Models will continue to get better. Three things, actually. The "hitting a wall" / "plateau" people will continue to be loud and wrong. Just as they have been since 2018[0]. [0]: https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2018/09/a-critical-appraisal-of-deep-learning.html https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2018/09/a-critical-appraisal-...
- simianwords 9mo agointeresting post. i wonder if these people go back and introspect on how incorrect they have been? do they feel the need to address it?
- maest 9mo agoDo _you_ do that?
- simianwords 9mo agoi try to yes
- fooker 9mo agoNo, people do not do that. This is harmless when it comes to tech opinions but causes real damage in politics and activism. People get really attached to ideals and ideas, and keep sticking to those after they fail to work again and again.
- simianwords 9mo agoi don't think it is harmless or we are incentivising people to just say whatever they want without any care for truth. people's reputations should be attached to their predictions.
- ak_111 9mo agoConcorde?
- asadotzler 9mo agocheaper doesnt mean cheap enough to be viable after the bills come due
- krupan 9mo agoThere are plenty of technologies that have not become cheaper, or at least not cheap enough, to go big and change the world. You probably haven't heard of them because obviously they didn't succeed.
- root_axis 9mo agoNot true. Bitcoin has continued to rise in cost since its introduction (as in the aggregate cost incurred to run the network). LLMs will face their own challenges with respect to reducing costs, since self-attention grows quadratically. These are still early days, so there remains a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of optimizations, but all of that becomes negligible in the face of quadratic attention.
- twoodfin 9mo agoFor Bitcoin that’s by design!
- namcheapisdumb 9mo ago> bitcoin so close! that is a commodity
- fulafel 9mo agoI don't think computation is going to become more expensive, but there are techs that have become so: Nuclear power plants. Mobile phones. Oil extraction. (Oil rampdown is a survival imperative due to the climate catastrophe so there it's a very positive thing of course, though not sufficient...)
- runarberg 9mo agoSupersonic jet engines, rockets to the moon, nuclear power plants, etc. etc. all have become more expensive. Superconductors were discovered in 1911, and we have been making them for as long as we have been making transistors in the 1950s, yet superconductors show no sign of becoming cheaper any time soon. There have been plenty of technologies in history which do not in fact become cheaper. LLMs are very likely to become such, as I suspect their usefulness will be superseded by cheaper (much cheaper in fact) specialized models.