Item — HN Reader

There is a lot of demand still coming for sure but I think I'm more optimistic. Ready to eat my hat on this but

- higher prices will result in huge demand destruction too. Currently we're burning a lot of tokens just because they're cheap, but a lot of heavy users are going to spend the time moving flows over to Haiku or onprem micro models the moment pricing becomes a topic.

- data centers do not take that long to build, probably there are bottlenecks in weird places like transformers that will cause some hicups, but nvidia's new stuff is waay more efficient and the overall pipeline of stuff coming online is massive.

- probably we will see some more optimization at the harness level still for better caching, better mix of smaller models for some use, etc etc.

These companies have so much money and they at least anthropic and openai are playing winner takes it all stakes, with competition from the smaller players too. I think they're going to be feeding us for free to win favour for quite a while still.

Let's see though.

I agree and I am amazed at how much money some individuals and also a friend's company burn on token costs. I get huge benefits from this tech just using gemini-cli and Antigravity a few times a week, briefly. I also currently invest about $15/month in GLM-5.1 running Hermes Agent on a small dedicated VPS - fantastically good value for getting stuff done and this requires little of my time besides planning what I need done.

I think the token burners are doing it wrong. I think that long term it is better to move a little slower, do most analysis and thinking myself, and just use AI when the benefits are large while taking little of my time and money to use the tools.