Intelligence is Free, Now What? <br> Data Systems for, of, and by Agents
| Source: BAIR Blog (Berkeley AI Research)
Tags: BAIR, Berkeley, data systems, AI agents, inference costs, agentic AI, database
A Berkeley AI Research perspective argues AI inference costs have fallen 50x per year (median) — from $30/M tokens in early 2023 to under $1 today — and calls for rebuilding data systems around three new realities: agents as the dominant workload, coordinating agent swarms, and agents synthesizing entire data systems themselves.
Details
Aditya G. Parameswaran, EECS Associate Professor and EPIC Data Lab co-director at UC Berkeley, argues that knowledge-work-grade AI intelligence is effectively free and accelerating. GPT-4-class capabilities cost $30 per million tokens in early 2023; today the same runs under $1, with some providers below $0.10. Inference prices have fallen between 9x and 900x per year, with a median near 50x. This isn't just a cost trend — it reshapes the fundamental economics of software. The perspective introduces three categories of challenge. "Data Systems For Agents" addresses how databases must change when agents — not humans or BI tools — become the primary query workload. Agents perform what the authors call "agentic speculation": high-volume, heterogeneous streams of schema introspection, partial queries, and hypothesis exploration. "Data Systems Of Agents" concerns the infrastructure needed to coordinate thousands of agents over long-running tasks with shared state, consensus, and failure recovery. "Data Systems By Agents" addresses verification: as agents become capable of synthesizing entire custom data systems, how do you confirm the synthesized system actually does what you intended? The piece is part landscape survey, part original research agenda — several described directions (agentic speculation, structured memory, custom data system synthesis) are the authors' own ongoing work. The authors note intersections between the three challenges: an agent synthesizing a data system for other agents collapses all three categories at once.