Intelligence is Free, Now What? Data Systems for, of, and by Agents

BAIR · 1 week ago

The cost of AI inference has dropped 50x to 900x per year, with GPT-4-class capabilities now under $1 per million tokens compared to $30 in early 2023, making sufficient intelligence for knowledge work effectively free. This shift requires rethinking data systems in three ways: designing systems that handle agents issuing thousands of speculative queries per request, building infrastructure to manage agent swarms with shared memory and coordination across thousands of concurrent agents, and enabling agents to synthesize and verify custom data systems. The changes enable new possibilities like multi-query optimization to reduce duplicate work, structured memory systems for agents to retrieve task-relevant information across multiple dimensions, and systems that proactively guide agents rather than passively execute queries.