The true cost of saying "Hi" to an AI agent

https://quesma.com/blog/the-true-cost-of-saying-hi-to-an-ai-agent/

by stared • 14 days ago

9 4 14 days ago

netsharc2• 14 days ago

TW: Article written by clanker.

Feels like, just like humans, the response to "Hi" can be hard-coded. The system already knows the user, or if it's anonymous, it can respond the way a hotel concierge responds to a guest she's unfamiliar with, "How can I help?".

Google replaced its Assistant with Gemini on its phones, so instead of simple sentence parsing like "Set alarm at ..." or "Call...", it has to run the text to some freaking LLM..

moritzwarhier• 13 days ago

There was an HN comment pointing out this exact fact in some Anthropic thread recently, that agents are not suitable for indeterminate questions that would better fit a chatbot.

I couldn't bother to find it yesterday, but I think this article was just generated by another user who read that comment and thought it's suitable to bloat into a blogspam submission.

Probably finding suitable comments or other content that can be bloated and used for monetization or engagement farming is already feasible to automate, too.

Disclaimer: didn't click because the headline already tells this and follows an overused generic phrasing.

netsharc2• 13 days ago

but I think this article was just generated by another user who read that comment and thought it's suitable to bloat into a blogspam submission.

I should just tell an AI agent to trawl the Internet for things to expand to blogslop and publish a blog, put some ad on it and profit from the ad-views by the crawling bots! As a bonus maybe it'll increase my "visibility" and the HR bots will think "This person has a popular blog!" and boost my HR score.

Of course because I don't want to lose any self-respect, I'd call it "satirical performance art"...

fouc• 14 days ago

Deepseek v4 flash only costs about $0.13 by the time I hit 200,000 to 250,000 tokens.

The true cost of saying "Hi" to an AI agent

Related Stories