Intelligence density went up a lot this year and my bill didn't move. The $/M number is not where the money goes.

Reddit r/singularity News
ai-costs token-pricing cost-per-step llm-economics sparse-moe

Summary

The author reflects on how AI model pricing per token has dropped dramatically, but real-world costs remain flat because cheaper models get re-run more often. They argue that cost per completed step is the metric that matters, not cost per million tokens.

A year ago a decent executor model cost real money per million tokens. Now there are three or four sitting in the near-free tier. On paper that's a collapse. In practice my spend is flat, and the reason is boring. A cheaper model gets re-run. It stops early, or it silently substitutes a literal path where a glob was supposed to go, or it burns most of its output budget thinking before it says anything, and the orchestrator sends it around again. Three cheap attempts at a step is not cheaper than one expensive attempt, and it's much worse on wall clock. So the number I've started caring about is cost per completed step, not cost per token. Nobody publishes that, because it depends on your harness at least as much as on the model, which is exactly why $/M is the one that gets advertised. The models I've been cycling through are all in the sparse-MoE tier, and one of them is Ling-3.0-flash, which I should say I work on. That's part of why the pricing story bugs me rather than pleases me. Is anyone actually tracking cost per completed step? I'd like to know what the spread looks like across models once you measure it that way, because my guess is the ordering changes.
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