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For the last 2 years, startup wisdom has been that models will continue to get cheaper and better. Claude first, and now Gemini has shown that it's not the case
by rohansood15 8mo ago
For the last 2 years, startup wisdom has been that models will continue to get cheaper and better. Claude first, and now Gemini has shown that it's not the case.
We priced an enterprise contract using Flash 1.5 pricing last summer, and today that contract would be unit economic negative if we used Flash 3. Flash 2.5 and now Flash 3.1 Lite barely breaks even.
I predict open-source models and fine-tuning are going to make a real comeback this year for economic reasons.
- typs 8mo agoI mean the same level of intelligence does get cheaper. People just care about being on the frontier. But if you track a single level of intelligence the price just drops and drops.
- rohansood15 8mo agoWhat's the cheaper alternative from Gemini for Flash-2.5-lite level intelligence when it gets deprecated on 22nd July 2026?
- simianwords 8mo agoNot true. You just measure cost by amount of money spent per task. I would argue that this lite version is equivalent to older flash.
- rohansood15 8mo agoYea but there is a whole world of tasks for which Flash 2.5-lite was sufficiently intelligent. Given Google's depreciation policy, there will soon be no way to get that intelligence at that price.
- simianwords 8mo agoI hope they release models at every intelligence resolution although the thinking effort can be a good alternative
- dktp 8mo agoOpus 4.5 became significantly cheaper than Opus 4.1
- xnx 8mo ago> We priced an enterprise contract using Flash 1.5 pricing last summer, Interesting. Flash 1.5 was already a year old at that point.