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Every now and then I throw some rocks at the latest AI shit just to know my enemy. This "agentic" shit is wild. Less than useless with open weight models. Barely cobbled together harnesses. The amount of tokens, hardware, and energy it takes to puke out useless slop is astounding.

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Yeah, I really don't know. It's really unclear to me that any benefit is coming from the agents speaking gobbledygook to each other 24/7.

Unless we just see entirely new hardware approaches with orders of magnitude levels of improvement, there's no way in hell the unsubsidized cost of this isn't fucking ridiculous.

The margins on frontier model inference actually do seem to be positive, from what I've read. I imagine they benefit massively from economies of scale, specialized models, aggressive shared KV caches, and the like.

IDK if that number is correct, or if it accounts for things other than inference, but there's a nice discussion here bsky.app/profile/simo...

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net

They're rumored to make a healthy margin on inference - so the more tokens they can sell the better Especially since corporate clients can't sign up for the $100 or $200/month subscription plans - companies have to pay the full API prices

This is also maybe the first time where I thought I might be holding it wrong, especially for the local LLM use case. Qwen3.8 + pi/omp was just... shit. I asked it to *plan* a simple refactor and it churned and churned and eventually got stuck in a loop where it didn't realize it finished lmao.

nevermind the fact that the result was ass. I'd have gotten more utility out of running a GPU benchmark and letting my cat sit on my computer for the warmth.

it's all hideously unstable, too. remember steve yegee's gasdown that everyone was jerking themselves off over? well. it's gone. model changes mean it doesn't work anymore. all the while he's pulling six figure consulting fees?