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Izmaki | on: GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
Seconded on the "not cheap" argument here. I've spent $25 worth of tokens completing a one-week task in an afternoon, or rather my company spent the money. I would never have personally felt OK with throwing this much money after some prompting back and forth for a few hours, one lazy Saturday afternoon. I ran the risk of not finding the solution before the token usage would be too high for me to want to carry on, if I was my own credit card linked to the account.

Of course money in this situation is a bit of a funny measurement, right, because if I was able to take the rest of the week off as soon as I had solved the one-week problem, then I would have no problem at all throwing even $100 worth of tokens at it, so I could enjoy a nice 4-day "mini-vacation".

How cheap "cheap" is, is indeed "in the eye of the beholder".

throw310822 | parent
Is is sarcasm? $25 to perform in half a day a week of work, that is not cheap, it's a massive saving of money- probably in the thousands.
Izmaki | root | parent | next
It's not sarcasm. If I had to pay $25 to perform my work from an ever-growing pile of projects, I would be losing money. That's not "cheap intelligence" for me. It certainly is for my employer, though, because for the mere price of $25 extra per day they can get 4*X the product per period of time.

In Scrum terms my personal velocity grows by a factor of four or more with access to agentic AI workload, but if it means that I will just be asked to "consume" 4*X more Story Points per sprint, I'm not the winner in the end, my employer is. If they asked me to complete X Story Points per sprint regardless of my velocity, and they let me take the days off when I was done, I would be the winner. But that's not how it works.

AI is "Cheap" for the person/organization that gets more product for less money, not for the individual person building the product faster.

throw310822 | root | parent
I'll simplify it for you: AI is cheap for those who pay for it.
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shinryuu | root | parent | next
For whom is the question you should ask.