1h ago

Compute Shortage Makes Advanced AI Agents Costly While Chatbots Cheapen

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Original post
OPEthan Mollick#175Ethan Mollick@EMOLLICK

We are quite short of compute, and that is going to result in compute becoming very expensive for complex agentic workflows even as single-turn chatbots get cheaper. So the richest companies & most pressing use cases will use AI agents & everyone else will be stuck with chatbots?

1:54 PM · May 21, 2026 View on X
REPLYEthan Mollick#175Ethan Mollick@EMOLLICK

Everyone on earth will get really good chatbots for free, so thats good for democratization of AI, but really good agents that can do complex work burn thousands of times more tokens, and will be reserved for places that can afford to pay, which is bad for democratization.

Ethan MollickEthan Mollick@emollick

We are quite short of compute, and that is going to result in compute becoming very expensive for complex agentic workflows even as single-turn chatbots get cheaper. So the richest companies & most pressing use cases will use AI agents & everyone else will be stuck with chatbots?

8:54 PM · May 21, 2026 · 5.1K Views
8:57 PM · May 21, 2026 · 2.9K Views