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Humans are not cheaper than AI models. Let's go with $35 an hour. 24365 = 8760 8760$35 = $306,600 Yeah, a human working non stop will run $300k. Now you sa

Humans are not cheaper than AI models. Let's go with $35 an hour. 24365 = 8760 8760$35 = $306,600 Yeah, a human working non stop will run $300k. Now you said, the "best" models. I personally reckon that 80-90% of most work don't need the best models. They need a good model, and good models are super cheap. i.e, the tiny gemma4 or qwen3.6 models will be sufficient for most of those work. AI cloud usage cost goes up near linearly, but local cost doesn't. So say someone built an under $10k system, with perhaps dual RTX 5090. That same system will be able to easily run 20 parallel requests. The only cost is electricity. You can run it 24/7. For 1 year, that's ~$6million. 20 humans will also have overhead of electricity, real estate and other things which far exceed the cost of electricity for just AI. The thing AI agents are lacking is agency and autonomy. As they get closer and closer, the majority of humans competing in the same sort of tasks will have no chance.

zipy124 6mo ago
I'm going by the graph in the original artical, not stating a point. I mean if their cost lines on the graph are to be believed, then the number I quoted is cheaper.
ac29 6mo ago
> So say someone built an under $10k system, with perhaps dual RTX 5090. That same system will be able to easily run 20 parallel requests. The only cost is electricity. You can run it 24/7. For 1 year, that's ~$6million I dont see how you get anywhere close to $6M of tokens out of a pair of 5090s. The class of model they could run is fairly small and extremely cheap to run via API (my math says running Gemma4-31B for 24 hours costs less than $1 on OpenRouter). Even with 20x concurrent requests you are orders of magnitude away from $6M/yr.
- segmondy 6mo ago
  I never said that, my point is that paying 20 people at $35 for 24/7 is about $6 million. You can replace that with a $10k system running 20 parallel requests for a year and save lots of money.

zipy124 6mo ago

I'm going by the graph in the original artical, not stating a point. I mean if their cost lines on the graph are to be believed, then the number I quoted is cheaper.

ac29 6mo ago

> So say someone built an under $10k system, with perhaps dual RTX 5090. That same system will be able to easily run 20 parallel requests. The only cost is electricity. You can run it 24/7. For 1 year, that's ~$6million I dont see how you get anywhere close to $6M of tokens out of a pair of 5090s. The class of model they could run is fairly small and extremely cheap to run via API (my math says running Gemma4-31B for 24 hours costs less than $1 on OpenRouter). Even with 20x concurrent requests you are orders of magnitude away from $6M/yr.

segmondy 6mo ago
I never said that, my point is that paying 20 people at $35 for 24/7 is about $6 million. You can replace that with a $10k system running 20 parallel requests for a year and save lots of money.