
Episode #3
Mainly AI Episode 3: Models Are Just Math - The Economics of AI at Scale
<p>MIT’s Manya Ghobadi on AI Economics: Why Token Pricing Misses the Point</p><p>Host Dan Mitchell interviews Manya Ghobadi, MIT CSAIL associate professor and founder/CEO of Systalyze, about making AI practical, efficient, and economically viable at scale. Ghobadi explains that AI “models are just math,” with prompt cost driven by model architecture and matrix multiplications, and offers a simple view of LLMs as next-token probability predictors. She argues efficiency should be a first-principles focus, critiques token-based pricing as a flawed proxy for value, and advocates resource-based thinking centered on GPU requirements, deterministic performance, and self-hosted open-source models...


