Costs & the Economics of Inference
Cost per token, GPU cloud pricing, H100/H200/B200 rental, the cloud / local / edge trade-off: the real economics of AI inference, with the numbers.
4 articles
Costs
MLPerf Endpoints measures an inference service through its API at several load levels. Version 0.7 finally traces the curve between throughput, TTFT, TPOT and quality, but it does not normalize cost yet.
Costs
A driving model is a function of its data distribution. But the cost of moving it is not where intuition puts it: perception recalibrates for almost nothing, behaviour does not, and validation dominates everything. The entry price for a market is a simulation bill.
Costs
10 gigawatts 'secured years ahead of schedule', 0.3 gigawatt plugged in at Abilene. Behind OpenAI's comeback in AI coding, a compute bet that must be read in three states: the secured, the built, the plugged-in. And a subscription economics that agents cracked open.
Costs
On July 8, 2026, OpenAI disavowed the reference benchmark for agentic coding. On the 9th, it merged Codex into the ChatGPT app and launched GPT-5.6. Behind the sequence, a comeback that turns less on intelligence than on prices, subscriptions and the harness.
