The biggest AI cost reduction measure today is a cloud provider discount, lol

AI spend has moved from experiment to budget line in about two years, with 98% of FinOps teams now managing some of it, and the article argues that committed-spend discounts are today's biggest cut because they lower token price without reducing token volume. It details three engineering levers that do reduce volume: prompt caching (cutting the input side of the bill by about 85%), batch APIs at half price on Anthropic, Bedrock and OpenAI, and smaller models for routine work, noting Claude Haiku costs about a fortieth of Opus per token. It then frames self-hosted LLM versus API as a per-workload choice among rent, route or own, with self-hosting paying off only at high, steady GPU utilization.