Day 84 of 100 Days of AI

I tested out a few AI agents today with the goal of optimising on cost, but they remain expensive to run if you have tasks that involve multi-step reasoning with chunky bits of content.

One group of tasks that I gave to GPT4o cost $0.15 and took 2 minutes to process. That’s $4.50 per hour. Running this tasks continuously 8 hours per day over 250 working days a year would cost $9,000.

The cost of models is going to come down, but thinking through these numbers made me reconsider how to build agents. They need to be resource-conscious and efficient. On the flip side, startups that are selling agentic services have to find a way to price them for the value they create, not just how much they cost. For example paying $9,000 a year for automation isn’t crazy if it frees up time that is worth 10x or more.