Counting The Cost Of AI Inference – And Projecting It Far Out
March 30, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is probably a good thing that most IBM i shops did not spend a lot of money trying to figure out AI in the past decade. It was enormously expensive to develop first generation machine learning algorithms, and they had limited applicability. With large language models and their generative capabilities, the use cases for AI have skyrocketed, but the costs for training have been crazy expensive since the end of 2022, when the chattybot eureka moment – some might say emergent behavior – happened.
The cost of training what are called foundation models – very large models with hundreds …
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