vBrownBag

Yelling at LLM Costs

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AI subscriptions are becoming as essential as internet bills - and just as expensive. The vBrownBag gang takes a hard look at the real cost of LLMs and what happens when the free ride ends.

Chris, Shala, and Damian dig into the Anthropic pricing plot twist, why AI data centers consume 10x the power of traditional racks, the DeepSeek distillation controversy, and what happens when the first hit's free phase ends. You'll learn practical strategies for reducing token burn, why local models are becoming a viable cost escape hatch, how to pick the right model for the right job, and why blindly using Opus for everything is lighting money on fire. This is the unfiltered conversation every AI practitioner needs to have - before the subsidies disappear and the real bills arrive.

Timestamps

0:00 Cold Open: Get These Darn Kids Off My Lawn

1:27 Chris's Big News: Leaving IBM for Six Feet Up

8:09 How Many AI Subscriptions Do You Have?

  • 16:41 Stack Overflow Is Dead, Long Live Claude
  • 17:12 Don't Just Blindly Copy and Paste (AI Edition)
  • 31:00 Anthropic Gross Margin 2025: Negative 53%
  • 35:30 When Token Costs Exceed a Junior Dev's Salary
  • 42:02 Find the Model That Fits the Job
  • 46:11 AI Multitasking Is a Lie (Just Like Humans)
  • 49:05 We Are Uniquely Bad at Making Money Off This Show
  • 53:19 Supply Chain Attacks and GitHub Actions
  • 54:45 Did We Solve Anything? Yes. No. Maybe.
  • 55:58 Grateful for Friends & Wrapping Up

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