Agents cost a lot, and the limits are showing
Agents are expensive to run, and companies now say it out loud. Users of Grok Bot ran out of a week's usage overnight, and Elon Musk said the agent was costing too much. OpenAI is now capping how many paid ChatGPT accounts you can have per device and per payment card.
Sam Altman also said it is 'quite terrible' for people to keep the world's limited DRAM (computer memory) in their own machines, used maybe 5% of the time. One r/LocalLLaMA user answered by running DeepSeek V4.1 Flash with a 1-million-token context on a gaming GPU, after a patch that makes agent sessions start 20 times faster. And TechCrunch says OpenAI might rebrand its unpopular data centers as 'AI compute campuses'.
One positive headline: US federal data finds that small businesses using AI are more likely to hire. We only have the headline, not the numbers.
Caps, rationing and new names for data centers tell one story: AI power is costly and concentrated. If the big labs ration access, running models at home becomes a question of independence, not only a hobby.
