“If it costs me $10 to summarize my emails, I can live without, right? But if it costs me 0.0001, then that can become a big pipeline of 10 things that in the end can make my life 10 times faster or better. So then you need to bring the unit economics in place.”
MLOps.community · AI Builders · November 2026
Context
He argues that many AI applications only become viable once per-use cost falls. This follows his point that current AI usage is still highly subsidized by providers and that the subsidies will not last.
Transcript
…the agent as less instruction as it requires because then you are not overcrowded with lots of context and it works better even. So we went into that path and we went into that path first with cloud and open AI and then we find out very quickly that the costs are growing exponential day every day.
And this is according to you with the subsidies. So you're expecting that eventually the subsidies will run out and it's going to get even more expensive. Exactly. You recognize that's not feasible.
Yes, that is not feasible because lots of applications during this transformation are actually becoming viable. In the end it's a unit economy, right? So if it costs me $10 to summarize my emails, I can live without, right? But if it costs me 0.0001, then that can become a big pipeline of 10 things that in the end it can make my life 10 times faster or better. So then you need to bring the unit economics in place. How are
you deciding what use cases are worth doing and which ones aren't? Is that where the hard work comes in? Is that why it's so hard?
Yes, it's very hard.
Because at the end of the day, you can't have a judge looking at every use case and saying this one is worthy, this one is not.
More from MLOps.community
