00:00Dr. Conor McKeown is a lecturer in digital media at the University of Stirling.
00:04Great to have you on the program.
00:06So why are Chinese telecoms companies now selling AI the way people buy mobile data?
00:13Well, I think that the cost of tokens and this being sold right now really comes down to three things.
00:20And there are three things that, you know, we kind of could have seen coming in order.
00:27And the first thing is quite simple.
00:28This is the end of freemium model.
00:32You know, this is the point in time where AI companies had given people access to something that was an
00:38experimental technology.
00:39And it's now proven to be obviously extremely highly in demand.
00:43That's proven.
00:44But it's time to start shifting away from the freemium model and start charging somehow.
00:49Now, the second thing was just discussed.
00:52And that is that for a lot of particularly the American models, agentic, open AI, they are still using very
01:01loaded models.
01:02And that captures a lot of news stories over there when they can say our models are so powerful.
01:08They can do so many things.
01:10But that means that even small prompts are really not energy efficient at all.
01:15And the last thing is the most recent switch, which is that people are now starting to use agent-based
01:21workflows where they're essentially creating lots of little digital workers for themselves.
01:27And that eats up tokens because those computers then are able to almost write their own prompts or enact their
01:34own kind of activities.
01:35And that is a much more expensive thing.
01:38So we're getting to the crunch point now where these companies need to start bringing in some revenue or it
01:45could be the beginning of something really risky financially.
01:48Conor, quickly, does this mark the point, you think, where AI stops being a tech product and starts becoming a
01:53utility?
01:55Yeah, I think it could be.
01:57It's interesting.
01:58Actually, in March, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, proposed that workers, especially in tech, should be paid an extra
02:06additional half of their salary on top of their base salary to use tokens.
02:11That this should be so fundamentally a part of our lives that this should be part of our salary.
02:16But at the same time, I'm a little hesitant to say that it's going to be exactly that in the
02:22predictable way, because it's important that we remember it's still possible for everyday people to run these models, open source
02:29versions of these models on their home computers.
02:32So there could be a linear progression to this becoming a household utility or the future could be slightly more
02:39complicated than we think.
02:40We're going to have to talk about that in the future.
02:42We're out of time.
02:43But great talking to you.
02:44Conor McEwen at the University of Stirling.
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