Most of Your AI Bill Is Context, Not Answers: Memory, Re-sent
schwentker · x · 2026-08-27
The author observes that at scale, much of AI's metered cost is context: prompts, history, retrieval, and prior attempts — effectively memory, re-sent with every call.
The implication: if answers are the smallest part of the bill, what exactly are we paying for?
More from AGI Musings
- US models + China's robot manufacturing base: the next decade's race — VraserX · 2026-08-27
- Chinese model progress driven by pretraining, not distillation, podcaster consensus argues — vista8 · 2026-08-27
- AI scientist puzzled: Why no explosion in AI-discovered materials? — francoisfleuret · 2026-08-27
- François Fleuret: Inability to identify constraints in AI reward optimization — francoisfleuret · 2026-08-27
- AI concentrates military power, potentially enabling single-person absolute control over nations — Darpinian · 2026-08-27
- Full access to network internals isn't enough: interp could still take 100+ years — ericjmichaud_ · 2026-08-27