ai and ml

It’s not just gas prices skyrocketing. Frontier-model pricing keeps climbing too

It’s getting more expensive to use the latest models. OpenAI last month bumped the version number of its GPT model family to 5.5, and per-token prices rose too, in some cases doubling compared to its predecessor.

For 1 million tokens, GPT-5.5 is priced at $5 (input), $0.50 (cached input), and $30 (output). Its predecessor GPT-5.4 charges $2.50 (input), $0.25 (cached input), and $15 (output) per 1 million tokens.

The AI biz claims that the cost increase is offset to some extent by token processing efficiency – delivering better results using fewer tokens.

“While GPT‑5.5 is priced higher than GPT‑5.4, it is both more intelligent and much more token efficient,” the company said during the rollout.

But the cost is still going up, more than efficiency improvements are reducing costs. According to an analysis conducted by OpenRouter, GPT-5.5 is anywhere from 50 percent more expensive to nearly twice as expensive, depending on prompt length.

“Our analysis shows that GPT-5.5 actual costs increased 49 percent to 92 percent,” OpenRouter said. “Longer prompts, over 10k tokens, saw costs offset by shorter completions. Shorter prompts, under 10k, experience a higher cost increase where completions did not get shorter.”

That range – 49 percent to 92 percent – factors in the model’s token efficiency improvements, which are more relevant for longer prompts. According to OpenRouter’s measurements, GPT-5.5 generates between 19 percent and 34 percent fewer completion tokens for longer prompts (10,000 tokens and up).

If reports of OpenAI’s projected $14 billion loss in 2026 prove accurate, costs will have to rise much more to balance its insistent spending. But this is a problem also faced by rival Anthropic, set to lose a reported $11 billion in 2026.

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 arrived without a visible list price change amid claims about an improved tokenizer. The result, according to OpenRouter, is potential savings for shorter prompts but larger bills for longer ones.

“Our study of real Opus 4.7 usage shows that actual costs increased 12–27 percent for prompts above 2K tokens when cache absorption is taken into account,” the biz said. “Short prompts under 2K were the exception, where significantly shorter completions offset the tokenizer overhead entirely.”

Expect further price increases for premium models. ®

Cloudflare previously announced plans to hire more than 1,000 interns to ‘ramp up’ AI use.

Cloudflare is cutting 20pc of its workforce after AI usage at the company grew 600pc in the last three months. The company said that it is cutting more than 1,100 employees, and expects restructuring costs to range up to $150m.

Shares at Cloudflare fell by more than 16pc in after-hours trading despite the company announcing a stronger than expected quarter, with first-quarter revenue growing 34pc year-on-year to nearly $640m. It expects second-quarter revenue to hit between $664m and $665m.

“We have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era”, an email sent to employees read.

“Today’s actions are not a cost-cutting exercise or an assessment of individuals’ performance – they are about Cloudflare defining how a world-class, high-growth company operates and creates value in the agentic AI era.”

In its earnings release yesterday (7 May), Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said: “AI is driving a fundamental re-platforming of the internet and a paradigm shift in how software is created and consumed – it’s shaping up to be the biggest tailwind we’ve ever seen in Cloudflare’s history.”

Cloudflare has offices in a number of European countries, including the UK. When queried on country-specific layoffs, the company redirected SiliconRepublic.com to the official announcement on its website.

The IT service provider is the latest to join a growing list of well-performing tech companies laying off human workers in preference for AI. In recent times, Coinbase has cut 14pc of its workforce; Meta, about 8,000 jobs; Block, 4,000 jobs; Oracle, about 10,000; Amazon, 30,000; Atlassian, 10pc of its workforce; and Snap, about 16pc – with the trend largely attributed to changing technology at the workplace.

Company leaders, who were previously apprehensive of linking layoffs to AI, have recently begun embracing the shift in work culture, with Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong noting AI is “changing how we work” and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg commenting that projects that previously required larger teams now only need “a single, very talented person”.

Block’s co-founder, head and chair Jack Dorsey, meanwhile, said earlier this year that a “majority of companies” will reach similar conclusions around smaller teams and make similar structural changes “within the next year”.

Cloudflare, however, is also tapping a younger, more AI-literate workforce, with plans to take on 1,111 interns by the end of 2026. The interns are expected to “ramp up the creative and widespread application of AI with a fresh approach”, the company wrote in a blog last September.

The company – which claims to interface with around 20pc of the web – had a turbulent final quarter last year with two major outages affecting websites across the globe. Sites and platforms such as Zoom, LinkedIn, Shopify, Canva, Substack and Coinbase, as well as X and OpenAI, were reportedly affected in the disruptions.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Updated, 8 May, 10.41am: The article has been updated with a response from Cloudflare.

Barespace Capital’s new system gives salon owners direct access to growth funding through the platform they already use.

Start-up Barespace, an Irish AI-powered OS provider for the hair and beauty sector, has launched Barespace Capital, an embedded finance platform enabling salons to access funding within already utilised platforms.  

Barespace and Barespace Capital aim to follow a shift towards embedded finance across vertical SaaS platforms. According to Barespace, the hair and beauty sectors often deal with traditional lenders who struggle with risk assessment and variable cash flow, as standard finance systems often rely on documentation and processes designed for other types of business. 

Established in Dublin in 2022 by co-founders Conor Moules and Glenn McGoldrick, Barespace works with more than 300 salons across Ireland, the UK, France and Spain, and recently secured significant seed funding of €2.9m to support further expansion.

The platform stated that Barespace Capital “represents the latest step in the company’s evolution from a booking platform into an AI-powered operating system for the beauty industry”. So far, the company has raised €4.68m in funding. 

Commenting on the announcement, CEO Moules said: “Salons run on tight margins and unpredictable cash flow. Traditional banks don’t understand the business and most salon owners either go without or jump through hoops for a loan that can take months to approve. 

“Barespace Capital changes that. Because we already live inside the salon, managing bookings, product inventory, staff and payments, we have a real-time picture of the business that no bank ever sees. When you can see the talent and the traction in real time, backing them is not a risk. It’s obvious.”

In March of this year, Sifted released its annual list of the 100 fastest-growing Irish and UK start-ups; Barespace made an appearance, coming in at 56th position as the highest ranking seed start-up on the list. Other high-profile Irish entries included Dublin’s Kota, which placed in the top 10, and Protex AI, which ranked 21st. 

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

This week was the best of times for Akamai and the worst of times for Cloudflare. 

On the same evening, content delivery network mainstay Cloudflare announced it was cutting about a fifth of its staff in a realignment around AI, its competitor Akamai announced a seven-year, $1.8 billion deal with a leading LLM provider that Bloomberg identified as Anthropic. 

Akamai CEO Tom Leighton said this was the largest deal in the company’s history and that it came after another large, unidentified frontier-model developer signed a $200 million deal last quarter.

“These leaders in AI have chosen Akamai because their AI workloads need the scale, performance and reliability that our cloud platform provides,” he said during the company’s first quarter earnings call on Thursday. 

Akamai, which has 4,300 locations in 700 cities across 130 countries, won the deal against stiff competition from hyperscalers and neoclouds. He said Akamai’s ability to manage and scale complex distributed systems, as well as its low latency, tipped the scales in its favor. 

Given the supply chain constraints in datacenter space, especially as it relates to memory costs and the infrastructure needed inside of large datacenter buildouts, one analyst asked if Akamai planned any increase to its capital expenditures this year to pay for it. Akamai executive vice president and CFO Ed McGowan said that was not likely. 

“We’ve been able to get the supply chain ready. We anticipate receiving all the goods that we need to deliver this services over the next seven years within the next 12 months,” he said. “Now there’s always potential for slippage and delays, but we have mechanisms in our contracts to deal with, if, in say six months from now, prices were to go up. So we’ve taken that into consideration.” 

McGowan said it is a consumption-based contract over seven years, so as soon as Akamai ramps the necessary capacity, it will start taking revenue, which he expects to begin happening later this year. 

Winning this deal and ones like it has been Akamai’s goal in the AI era, Leighton said. 

“This has been the strategy all along. So we’re very pleased to be executing against it,” he said. “The goal has been to be deploying a distributed inference platform, distributed compute platform that would be desired by enterprises across the spectrum … The platform is to a point where we can do that, and I think you’ll see more of this going forward.” 

On the same day, across the country, Cloudflare was spelling out the bad news to its employees that it planned to cut the workforce by 1,100, roughly 20 percent. Cloudflare co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn said it was not about cutting costs, but about building a company that meets the AI moment. 

“We have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere,” they wrote in a blog post. 

Cloudflare’s revenues grew 34 percent year over year to reach $639.8 million in the first quarter. It posted a net loss of $22.9 million. It expects to pay up to $150 million in severance and benefit payments related to the layoffs. 

While Akamai’s stock price surged 26 percent on Friday, Cloudflare dropped 23 percent. With a market cap of over $69 billion, Cloudflare still has more than three times Akamai’s market cap. ®

The TCL QM8L SQD-Mini LED TV may be technically the company’s third-tier TV this year, but it’s good enough to give you a flagship-type experience for a very reasonable price.

In my time with the TCL QM8L, I was very impressed across the board — almost as much as my dad, who’s probably stole even more time using it than me during testing. Its bright screen makes daytime watching easy even in bright rooms, and TCL’s backlight tech does a great job of offering a clean image with no blooming, highlighting detail no matter how bright or dark the picture is.

Some Netflix subscribers are encountering a server error that prevents them from cancelling their memberships, at a time when the streaming platform has just raised prices across all of its US plans.

The error, identified by the code NSES-500, appears on Netflix’s standard “Something went wrong” page and has persisted for affected users across multiple devices and browser changes over at least a week, suggesting the problem lies within Netflix’s backend infrastructure rather than individual account settings.

One suggested workaround circulating in the same threads involves switching the account’s payment method to an expired card before attempting to cancel, a step that some users report bypasses the error screen where the conventional cancellation route continues to fail.

Reports of the issue have gathered significant traction on Reddit, where a thread on r/Anticonsumption documenting the cancellation block has drawn over 1,500 upvotes, with further threads on r/netflix showing a consistent pattern of subscribers hitting the same wall regardless of the workarounds attempted.

The price rise that preceded this error affected every tier of Netflix’s US subscription offering, a broad adjustment that pushed the Premium plan to $26.99 per month for 4K streaming and represented one of the more aggressive rounds of pricing changes the platform had pushed through in a relatively short window, giving subscribers fresh motivation to assess whether to stay.

That context makes the cancellation fault considerably more aggravating for those it affects, since any subscriber unable to complete the process before their billing date rolls over faces the prospect of being charged for another full cycle before they can exit the service.

Some users in the Reddit threads have reported that calling Netflix’s customer service line directly produced a successful cancellation where the online process had failed entirely, though this route requires navigating a support queue rather than using the standard account management tools.

Netflix has not acknowledged the error publicly, and no timeline has emerged for when the self-service cancellation flow is expected to return to normal working order.

When to watch Man City vs. Brentford

• Saturday, May 9, at 12:30 p.m. ET (9:30 a.m. PT).

Where to watch

• Man City vs. Brentford will air in the US on NBC Sports Network and Peacock Premium.

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Nothing less than a win looks likely to do for title-chasing Man City on Saturday as it hosts a Brentford side looking to build on its London derby win last weekend. 

Second-placed City has a game in hand over title rival Arsenal. However, the team comes into this weekend’s action five points behind the Gunners, having played out a tremendously entertaining 3-3 draw at Everton on Monday.  

Brentford enters this game in seventh place and with renewed hope of qualifying for Europe for the first time in its history following last weekend’s 3-0 win over London rival West Ham. 

Manchester City takes on Brentford on Saturday, May 9, at the Etihad Stadium, with kickoff set for 5:30 p.m. BST. That makes it a 12:30 p.m. ET or 9:30 a.m. PT start in the US and Canada, and a 2:30 a.m. AEST kickoff in Australia in the early hours of Sunday morning. 

How to watch Man City vs. Brentford in the US without cable

Saturday’s clash at the Etihad Stadium will be broadcast on NBC and streaming service Peacock. To catch the game live on Peacock, you’ll need a Peacock Premium or Premium Plus subscription. NBC Sports Network is available on platforms like YouTube TV.

Peacock offers two Premium plans, and after recent price increases, the ad-supported Premium plan costs $11 a month and the ad-free Premium Plus plan costs $17 a month.

How to watch the Premier League 2025-26 with a VPN

If you’re traveling abroad and want to keep up with Premier League action while away from home, a VPN can help enhance your privacy and security when streaming.

It encrypts your traffic and prevents your internet service provider from throttling your speeds, and can also be helpful when connecting to public Wi-Fi networks while traveling, adding an extra layer of protection for your devices and logins. VPNs are legal in many countries, including the US and Canada, and can be used for legitimate purposes such as improving online privacy and security. 

However, some streaming services may have policies that restrict VPN use to access region-specific content. If you’re considering a VPN for streaming, check the platform’s terms of service to ensure compliance.

If you choose to use a VPN, follow the provider’s installation instructions to ensure you’re connected securely and in compliance with applicable laws and service agreements. Some streaming platforms may block access when a VPN is detected, so verify whether your streaming subscription allows VPN use.

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Livestream Man City vs. Brentford in the UK 

This Saturday afternoon clash is exclusive to Sky Sports and will be shown on its Sky Sports Main Event channel. If you already have Sky Sports as part of your TV package, you can stream the game via its Sky Go app. Cord-cutters will want to set up a Now account and a Now Sports membership to stream the game. 

Sky’s standalone streaming service Now offers access to Sky Sports channels with a Now Sports membership. You can get a day of access for £15 or sign up to a monthly plan from £35 a month right now.

Livestream Man City vs. Brentford in Canada 

If you want to livestream EPL games in Canada this season, you’ll need to subscribe to Fubo. The service has secured exclusive rights to the Premier League and is broadcasting all 380 matches live. 

Fubo is the go-to destination for Canadians looking to watch the EPL, with exclusive streaming rights to every match. It currently costs CA$27 for the first month, then CA$31.50 per month thereafter.

Livestream Man City vs. Brentford in Australia 

Livestreaming rights for the EPL are now with Stan Sport, which is showing all 380 matches live, including this game.

Stan Sport will set you back AU$20 a month (on top of a Stan subscription, which starts at AU$12). It’s also worth noting that the streaming service is currently offering a seven-day free trial.

A subscription will also give you access to Premier League, Champions League and Europa League action, as well as international rugby and Formula E.

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As the Nintendo Switch 2 still doesn’t have access to the YouTube app, owners have managed to find a workaround on the console.

This workaround is via the free-to-play title Super Animal Royale and takes advantage of the news section embedded within the app. As shared by Reddit user JampyL, the news section surfaces YouTube videos that open inside the console’s browser and enables gamers to search for and watch any YouTube content freely.

Nintendo Switch 2 owners have found a workaround to access YouTube on the console through the free-to-play title Super Animal Royale, filling a gap that Google has yet to address with an official application.

Undoubtedly it’s a clever workaround, however it’s not without its compromises. Firstly, the browser-based playback caps resolution at just 360p which makes longer or detail-heavy content much harder to watch on a TV. In addition, users won’t be able to sign into their YouTube accounts which means there’s no access to personal playlists or recommendations.

The absence of a native YouTube application on the Switch 2 is a notable gap given that the original Nintendo Switch shipped with a dedicated YouTube app that remained available to users throughout the console’s life cycle, with that same legacy app remaining downloadable on Switch 2 hardware for owners who want a stopgap while waiting for a purpose-built successor.

Google confirmed during an earlier period that a YouTube application for the Switch 2 is in active development, though more than a year has passed since that acknowledgement without any further update on timing or availability, leaving the console without streaming video support that competing platforms have offered as standard for well over a decade.

The Switch 2 launched earlier this year to strong demand, with Nintendo reporting significant early sales figures, making the continued absence of a fully functional YouTube experience on the platform increasingly conspicuous among the broader library of missing media applications at this stage of the hardware cycle.

Google has not confirmed when a dedicated YouTube application will arrive on the Nintendo eShop, leaving Switch 2 owners reliant on workarounds for a feature the platform’s predecessor supported from relatively early in its own life cycle.