We wrote our first book, Building LLMs for Production. It cost us more than $50,000. And money was the smallest part of that cost. Here's the full breakdown of what it took: energy, team, time, and money. There's a little secret on the last slide.
ECONOMY
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Post Questions Big Tech’s Cash Flow Spending on AI
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Google’s Pichai and Ashkenazi provided a great example of how there is no clear articulation by big tech of the whys and wherefores of spending all their cash flow on AI. I think the average investor suspects that it’s an arms race that won’t necessarily end well. But the
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Gary Marcus Questions Whether LLM Developers Can Keep Enduring Advantages
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Warned you all that there was no such thing as an “enduring advantage” in LLMs. Would the world be different if people had listened to the below?
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Gemini Flash Models Trade Off Token Efficiency, Coding Accuracy, and Speed
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Key highlights: Gemini 3.6 Flash: The general workhorse — 17% fewer output tokens, higher coding accuracy, and lower cost per task ($1.50/1M input, $7.50/1M output). Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite: Blazing fast execution at 350 output tokens/sec ($0.30/1M input, $2.50/1M output).
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Agent-to-LLM Traffic Visibility Helps Control Tokens and Execution Costs
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Spot on, Adrian. Without unified visibility into Agent-to-LLM traffic and loop conditions, token burn and unmonitored execution can spike enterprise costs very quickly.
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Post Links Google’s Negative Free Cash Flow to AI Spending
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Wow Google FCF negative due to AI expenditure
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Post Proposes Dedicated AI Inference Budgets for Open Math Problems
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The fact that random people with ChatGPT Pro can solve open maths problems should be embarrassing for Universities. There is a big gap in inference compute that is being spent on solving open problems. Why isn't there a unit that has maybe $10m inference budget and continuously
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Control of AI Production Is Becoming a Geopolitical Battleground
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I find it astonishing that skeptics still refuse to engage with my (and others’) long-argued conviction that controlling Intelligence production is the predominant geopolitical battleground of the 21st century. The evidence shows that this is already causing trade wars, the
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Claude Connector Opens Access to Anthropic Economic Index Usage Data
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Anthropic introduced a new Anthropic Economic Index connector to allow Claude to access a large dataset on how people use Claude around the world. > Explore public data on how the world uses Claude.
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Cursor Early Access Reports Lower Cost per Commit Without Quality Loss
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In early access, customers observed no drop-off in quality with a lower cost per commit vs. routing all requests to Opus 4.8.