Running a vending machine using an LLM is absurd not because we can't run LLMs fast or cheap enough - it's because LLMs are not reliable, and we don't know yet how to make them more reliable. Our best LLM - o3 - doubled the previous model (o1) hallucination rate. OpenAI says it hallucinated a wrong answer 33% of the time in benchmarks. Do you want a vending machine that screws up 33% of the time?

Today, the accuracy of LLMs is by far a bigger concern (and a harder problem to solve) than its speed. If someone releases a model which is 10x slower than o3, but is 20% better in terms of accuracy, reliability, or some other metric of its output quality, I'd switch to it in a heartbeat (and I'd be ready to pay more for it). I can't wait until o3-pro is released.