What it cost to have an assistant with you like in the movie Her?

The cost of using AI has dropped precipitously, an order of magnitude every year.

If the average American picks up their phone 144 times per day & engages with an assistant, each time for four interactions every day of a month, an assistant like Her would cost about 78 cents in inference cost.¹

I’m not taking into account any of the additional costs associated with delivering such a product. Assuming a commercial vendor would 10x the price, it’s still $7 per month, less than half of a Netflix subscription.

The point being it’s already incredibly inexpensive to deliver a very sophisticated product especially with the smaller models.

At these costs, we should expect AI to be ubiquitous as the cost/benefit to user experience is worth much more than this either to hardware vendors who are looking to differentiate their devices or software companies who are competing for subscription or advertising dollars.

¹ 144 sessions per day with an average of four back and forths or 300 tokens across 30 days is approximately 0.5m tokens per month. At 15 cents per million tokens, about $0.78.