The true cost of saying "Hi" to an AI agent

TW: Article written by clanker.

Feels like, just like humans, the response to "Hi" can be hard-coded. The system already knows the user, or if it's anonymous, it can respond the way a hotel concierge responds to a guest she's unfamiliar with, "How can I help?".

Google replaced its Assistant with Gemini on its phones, so instead of simple sentence parsing like "Set alarm at ..." or "Call...", it has to run the text to some freaking LLM..

Deepseek v4 flash only costs about $0.13 by the time I hit 200,000 to 250,000 tokens.