If an LLM is too expensive it won't be next year

AI can cost more than human workers now

This is an Axios headline but the tldr is that once an LLM can do your job it will undercut you the next year.

This is the article and it focuses on token and infrastructure costs. Not cleaning up messes or other times a person needs to be in the loop. For example "Uber's chief technology officer already blew through his full 2026 AI budget due to token costs"

Example of someone thinking tokens will stay expensive. 
No shade, it is just my belief they are wrong on this one claim. 

There is a 7 year and a 4 year trend of the price drop to 1/10th a year for a set quality of token. As in $1 million become $1 hundred cost in 4 years. This article looks at gpt 3.5 level tokens from late 2022 to late 2024

https:// and sees over 90% deflation a year

Example price decline in 2 years

But the deflation keeps going Qwen3.5 1.7B–2B is well above gpt 3.5 level in tests and in usage. This you can run really fast locally on any newish laptop or smartphone. Tokens at this quality level are now just electricity costs. That's less than 4 years data but gpt 2 level has followed the same trend for 7 years. 7 more years of the trend turns $10 million cost into $1. Lindy Effect says a reasonable first guess is if a trend has gone on for X length of time assume it will keep going for another X unless theres a good reason for it to stop. Coding and Video Image generation are still improving so fast there is not great reason to assume they will suddenly plateau yet. And the same for efforts to make smaller models smarter using big models. Teacher->pupil, chain of thought, distillation, pruning, low rank factorisation all keep getting better in a way that suggests that smaller models will keep getting better even if big ones plateau.

This is not an argument that LLMs in general will keep getting better though they will and that will help. Or that GPUs will keep improving though they will and that will help. Or that open weight models will stay about 9 months behind state of the art apis though they will and that will help a lot. Or that methods to condense smart models into smaller less demanding machines will improve though they will. It is that all these and a few other trends combined will work together to make a million tokens with a certain score on metrics and in a users opinion an order of magnitude cheaper every year.

Slop Tsunami comes down to the cost of tokens coming down.

The cost of tokens will come down. And at such a rate that it makes Moore's Law look tame. It won't go on forever but it is on a seven year trend with good reason to see it keeping going for at least 3 more years. At which point todays best current token will be 1/1000th the cost.

Irish Electricity Goes Majority Solar

 From Greencollective

I think this 29% figure (1207MW out of ) is actually close to 50% of the electricity in Ireland.

In Ireland small scale solar is shown as a fall in demand. the metrics measure solar farms and small scale production is used on site or locally and not shown in the full supply figures only in demand reductions.

"Of the cumulative solar capacity, 1,322 MW comes from utility-scale solar plants and 727 MW from distributed microgeneration. Total mini-generation and small-scale commercial are also growing, at 74 MW and 53 MW respectively"

Total hidden: ~854 MW or 65% of the solar farms capacity. That means if farms were producing 1207 smaller were probably around 784MW. 

Total imports at the time were 966MW all from the UK. The UK at the time was 43.4% Solar so thats 419.24MW

To add these up
Irish grid-scale solar=1223
Solar-originated imports=419
Hidden Irish embedded solar=784
Total~2,426 MW
Demand at the time was 4101 MW. 
So 4101+784 hidden demand= 4855 MW
2426/4855=50%


Domestic solar is not as well maintained or situated as farms so them being 65% of farms is probably optimistic. But if they are less that also reduces the hidden demand they satisfy so the total % does not drop fast. 

We are not in May yet which means we have a month and a half of natural increases in solar radiation to come. Which will move the calculation to barely getting to 50% with some optimistic figures well past it if the weather is good.

The annual near 30% increase in solar means that the output of a good weekend day in 2026 becomes a weekday in 2027, becomes an ok day in 2028. At which points grid batteries become the most important way to reduce usage of fossil fuels. 

Ireland is the likely the worst country in the world for solar. Which means if we are reaching this point not everyone else is in a potentially better situation. 

2 climate bets: Results are in China and World Coal in 2025

 I made a bet early in 2025 that China would reduce its coal usage for electricity in 2025.

The bet is here and I blogged about it before here

A bet has been accepted between u/TrueCryptographer982 and u/cavedave for $10. That according to Ember Energy statistics China will create less electricity from coal in 2025 than it did in 2024. David taking the prediction that it will be less. And we can settle when the results are in.'

The Ember energy data can back with 

Year Coal_TWh

2024 5851.81

2025 5781.19

Which is a tiny reduction but still meets the bets wording.

The other side of the bet said they would not pay the bet and got abusive.

The other bet made was that Coal usage in the entire world for electricity would drop from the previous year in any year 2025-2026

This happened last year according to ember energy statistics.

They also have refused to pay for the bet so far.

It seems strange to me to me not to pay your bets. 

There are 11064 Cars in Luxembourg

I was in Luxembourg recently and saw 4 cars when I was there. Their registration plates were 1396, 1871, 2383 and 8852

This made me wonder if I could estimate the total number of cars in Luxembourg. 

This is the German Tank problem where the British in WW2 found some serial numbers on German tanks in north Africa and wanted to use those to guess how many tanks had been produced. If you are sure the serial number on tanks goes up by one each time and they started with number 1. Then if you have seen the highest number 100 in looking at 3 tanks of after looking at 50 you can have a better estimate to the highest number of tank made.  Also if you see a tank with number 1000 you know at least 1000 have been made. 

A formula to estimate the total number based on seeing k serial (registration) numbers where m is the highest number seen is the MVUE (Minimum Variance Unbiased Estimator) N ≈ m + (m/k − 1)

Which gives an estimate of 11064 total cars in Luxembourg.

Ireland's response to the Strait of Hormuz being closed

What do we do about a huge amount of energy no longer flowing out of the Strait of Hormuz?

"Households urged to cut fuel use as Ireland braces for oil crisis"

Walking, cycling, putting on a jumper and keeping the heat lower are good ideas but on a global scale they won't effect the price of energy. And even on the Irish scale won't delay problems by a lot.

We can conserve joules and we can produce more joules on the island. 

But can we expand our energy supply quickly? China added 93gw of solar in May last year. 2 days of that would mean whenever it was sunny Ireland would have a huge excess of power.

This week we had 1.5 gw of solar at some points. And with that's 6gw addition it would have been over all our electricity. They added a GW of wind a day that month so 2 days of those additions would also help a lot here.

Adding solar is not a simple as buying some panels and waiting for them to arrive. Solar farms are easier to add GW to the grid fast. Industialised solar farm rollout happens now. Sending people up on roofs is less watts per worker per day then large numbers of panels being put onto a field. 

For it to be useful in this crises I think the government could allow

All wind farms to have permission to add solar to them. Wind is strongest on winter nights and solar on summer days. Having both in one place using a wire that's already there doesn't lose you that much power. Solar and Wind combined has planning issues in Ireland, but thats one thing the government do control.

The government could also give solar planning permission to fields within  a few km of a substation. If that rule is too free focus on those near cities. Already sometimes we cannot move electricity from the west to Dublin often 

This crisis could end tomorrow and what I will suggest take some time to work. Also it could go on years and it will not help in a dark windless fortnight in January 2027. But having a few extra GWh put into the Irish grid regularly is no small improvement. I think we do that with some small changes to our planning rules. 

6 months ago would have been a better time to install shed loads of more solar and wind here. But the second best time is today.

Ireland's Second City

Cities around the world follow Zipf's law. The second city is a certain percentage smaller, third smaller again etc.

With Dublin at 592,713, Zipf (α=1) predicts the second city should be around 296,000. Belfast is actually 348,005 — about 17% larger than the law would predict

Cork at 222,333 (rank 3) fits pretty well — Zipf predicts ~197k.

Fake People Everywhere

Soon you will only trust people you know.  

I have been learning a fun programming language called Gleam. And I wanted to read a book on it. 
The one book on it I could find was by someone called Julian Lornfield. Who has written over a dozen books in 2025 each on a different topic in computers. Theres no photo of them on the internet other then this amazon author photo. No linkedin. No youtube talks at conferences etc.

So baring some major mistake by me this is a bot churning out AI written books. It could be a real person but one without the usual trail we leave. A fake author would be odd but not something that unusual in 2025.

But to take a step up from these checks. What happens when fake reviews, linkedin accounts and these things I checked are much easier? If there was a linkedin, lots of reviews, better spacing of the release dates and even videos of talks would I have been fooled? Probably.

Making a fake account involves making photos, passing captchas, sending text back and forth between some other bots and some real people. All this is easily doable now. 

AI LLM arguments focus on the abilities at the extreme. Writing a new math proof or acing some test. But what happens when they get really good at stuff designed for normal people to easily do. Gmail wants you to get an email account. Amazon wants you to leave reviews. Emergency services want you to ring when your house is on fire. 

When LLMs get good enough at these tasks that Social media, reviews, email inboxes get flooded you will not trust anyone in the digital space you do not personally know. They pretty much are already on Twitter and facebook but other digital locations are next. The cost of an llm for the same level of intelligence decreases 10 fold per year. So if it is too expensive to build up 100 bot reviewers today it will be 1/1000th the cost in 3 years. 

For online review sites this is probably fairly obvious. But I do not think the effects on offline services are considered yet. 
999 services or dentists are not designed for 100 bots that sound like people ringing them.
Politicians and newspapers are not expecting 100 physical letters what have all been written by different bots.

If we get 100 fake ads from what looks like our bank we are likely to get one just when we are having a problem and at our most confused moment believe them.

LLMs are smart enough now to create and operate online accounts including making phone calls. The price of this will drop orders of magnitudes in a few years. The online and especially the offline world is not set up for when this happens.