Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025)

Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by colechristensen on Friday April 17, 2026 @09:02PM (#47812284)

Doubtful, local models are the competitive future that will keep prices down.

128GB is all you need.

A few more generations of hardware and open models will find people pretty happy doing whatever they need to on their laptop locally with big SOTA models left for special purposes. There will be a pretty big bubble burst when there aren't enough customers for $1000/month per seat needed to sustain the enormous datacenter models.

Apple will win this battle and nvidia will be second when their goals shift to workstations instead of servers.

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Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by hypercube33 on Friday April 17, 2026 @10:16PM (#47812598)

Weird how you're leaving stuff like Strix Halo out. Also weird you think 128gb is the future with all of the research done to reduce that to something around 12GB being a target with all of these papers out now. I assume we'll end up with less general purpose models and more specific small ones swapped out for whatever work you are asking to do.

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Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by MrBuddyCasino on Saturday April 18, 2026 @12:37AM (#47813169)

Strix Halo hasn‘t got nearly enough bandwidth, its just 256bit.

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Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by Tepix on Saturday April 18, 2026 @01:07AM (#47813291)

It‘s sufficient for some MoE models.

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Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by lookaround on Friday April 17, 2026 @09:42PM (#47812467)

> 128GB is all you need.

My guy, look around.

They are coming for personal compute.

Where are you going to get these 128GBs? Aquaman? [0]

The ones who make RAM are inexplicably attaching their fate to the future being all LLMs only everywhere.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-w-pdqwiBw

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Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by naveen99 on Friday April 17, 2026 @09:49PM (#47812504)

Cloud can’t make money off of you and pay more than you for the hardware at the same time.

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Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by adrianN on Friday April 17, 2026 @11:49PM (#47812983)

Batch inference is much more efficient. Using the hardware round the clock is much more efficient. Cloud can absolutely pay more for hardware and still make money off you.

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Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by bitwize on Friday April 17, 2026 @11:32PM (#47812906)

Cloud can pay more for RAM until all the RAM producers withdraw from the consumer market, then prices will go back down.

End users will still get access to RAM. The cloud terminal they purchase from Apple, Google, Samsung, or HP will have all the RAM it will ever need directly soldered onto it.

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Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by xantronix on Saturday April 18, 2026 @12:14AM (#47813085)

I was really fucking hoping we weren't at the part where "cloud terminals" doesn't seem farfetched and paranoid and yet here we are. Jesus Christ.

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Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by bitwize on Saturday April 18, 2026 @02:05AM (#47813516)

The next step, I think, will be a "cash for clunkers" program to permit people to trade in old computer hardware to the government—especially since operating systems that do not collect KYC data on their users will soon be illegal to operate.

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Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by seanmcdirmid on Friday April 17, 2026 @11:36PM (#47812929)

Doesn’t Apple place RAM directly into the SoC package? We aren’t even talking about soldering it to mother boards anymore, it is coming in with the CPU like it would as a GPU.

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Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by naveen99 on Saturday April 18, 2026 @08:47AM (#47815501)

Ram upgrades are happening because of ddr5. Nvme upgrades are happening because of pcie5. Prices will come down once everyone is done upgrading.

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Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by aisaasbuilder on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @03:59PM (#47939832)

The hourly cost problem is worse for agents than single-model calls because context accumulates across steps. each tool result re-bills everything before it. Rate limits are a ceiling but the quadratic curve hits you before the ceiling does. We built Traeco to surface that curve at config time, not billing time. traeco.dev

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Re:Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially? (2025) by foota on Friday April 17, 2026 @09:51PM (#47812512)

More like RAM producers are providing supplies to the highest bidder, no? If this doesn't peter out supply will normalize at a higher but less insane price eventually.

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