AI agent costs crash from $500/day to $6: price war and optimization pay off
Exponential View (Azeem Azhar) · rss · 2026-08-16
Azeem Azhar details how his AI agent R Mini Arnold's daily cost dropped from $500 to $6 after switching to cheaper models like OpenAI Codex subscription and DeepSeek v4 Flash, while becoming more capable. The piece also covers US enterprise AI spending (top 1% spend $7,400/employee), data centers raising neighboring towns' bond spreads by 10 bps, and Anthropic hiring a chip design team.
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