Top all-time · #8167
Piotr Mazurek
Personal blog · tensoreconomics.comeconomicsai
Piotr Mazurek writes Tensor Economics, a personal blog at tensoreconomics.com about economics and ai. Since 2025, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times, most often “LLM inference economics from first principles”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Piotr Mazurek's posts on LLM inference economics, covering token pricing, batching, and the cost of running models. Commenters cite them for calculations on cost per token and margins.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
We delve into the money behind AI.
Most-linked posts?
- LLM inference economics from first principles8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2025-05-14
- Why are embeddings so cheap?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-09-25
What Hacker News says?
If you self-host, you likely won't have anywhere near enough volume to do efficient batching, and end up bottlenecked on memory rather than compute. E.g. based on the calculations in https://www.tensoreconomics.com/p/llm-inference-economics-fr... , increasing batch size from 1 to 64 cuts the cost per token to 1/16th.
Comment linking /p/llm-inference-economics-from-first
on “LLMs are cheap”Submitted LLM inference economics from first principles as a story · 4 points
HN discussion- nl · 2025-12-24
Lots of sources, and you can do the math yourself. Here's a few good ones: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20... (suggests Deepseek is making 80% raw margin on inference) https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch... https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re... (there's a HN discussion of this where it was pointed out this overestimates the costs) https:…
Comment linking /p/llm-inference-economics-from-first
on “Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades” Submitted Why are embeddings so cheap? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA much better article on token prices: https://www.tensoreconomics.com/p/llm-inference-economics-fr... There's not much incentive to subsidize prices for OpenRouter providers for example, and the prices are much lower than the $6.37/M estimate from the article. https://openrouter.ai/meta-llama/llama-3.3-70b-instruct avg $0.37/M input tokens, $0.73/M output tokens (21 providers) Llama is not even a good example, as t…
Comment linking /p/llm-inference-economics-from-first
on “AI API Prices are 90% Subsidized”Submitted LLM Inference Economics from First Principles as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why are embeddings so cheap? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Moe Inference Economics from First Principles as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What does it cost to run a LLM as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted LLM Inference Economics from First Principles as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted LLM Inference Economics from First Principles as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
