Without Caching Your AI Agent Costs 10x More: Artificial Analysis Breaks It Down
AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-11-04
George Cameron, co-founder of Artificial Analysis, breaks down what actually drives agent costs in 2026: input tokens, cache hit rate, and number of steps. One agent task costs $21 with caching vs over $200 without. Other points:
- Intelligence gets roughly 10x cheaper per year, making cost as important as capability
- Open-weights models stay close behind frontier closed models
- Reasoning effort directly affects cost; trade-offs matter per task
- Distinguish "limited" vs "unlimited" intelligence tasks to decide model choice
- Ends with how to shortlist and benchmark models
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