Astraas·Section

AI

Models, tools, and the money behind them. What shipped, what it costs, and whether it actually works yet.

• 4 Aug The subscription breakeven is 154 million tokens a monthPricing At published API rates, $100 buys roughly 154 million tokens on a cache-heavy agentic workload. That is the point whe…
• 4 Aug A cache entry pays for itself on the second readPrompt caching Cache writes cost 1.25x and cache reads cost 0.1x, which puts the break-even at 1.39 reads. Measured across 9.75 bill…
• 4 Aug Routing 7% of calls to cheap models saved 0.89%Model routing Routing 6.9% of calls to Haiku and Sonnet cut 0.89% of spend. Measured across 23,157 calls, cheap-model routing is a…
• 4 Aug A backtest said Sharpe 2.74. Real data said 0.35Cost floors Nineteen backtested strategies, and the headline finding is not the fourteen failures. It is that the best proxy resu…
• 4 Aug Inference got 95% cheaper. Your bill went up anywayInference economics Per-token inference prices have collapsed — 95% in two years by some measures — while enterprise LLM spend has double…
• 4 Aug 95% of enterprise AI pilots return nothing. The failure isn't the modelAI ROI MIT found 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots produce no measurable P&L impact against $2.52 trillion of AI spending. The…
• 3 Aug 9.96 billion tokens in 34 days. Output was 8% of the billAgent economics Thirty-four days of real Claude Code usage, costed line by line at published API rates. Cache reads were 98% of token…