Re the API costs — this is a great property of the "explore an LLM's latent space" game. Once a character has proposed a trade for a given (player item x hidden motivation) pair, I cache it for use again in future plays. This means the inference cost per player trade round will drop over time. Costs are also offset by ads on the mobile versions (I plan to add them to the web version eventually).
Also, GPT-4.1-mini is surprisingly cheap for this operation as well - since posting here a few hours ago total inference spend has been in the low single digit dollars - so not really a concern at this scale.
Is LLM generated every time? If so, I'm worried that the API usage fees must be quite high.
Re the API costs — this is a great property of the "explore an LLM's latent space" game. Once a character has proposed a trade for a given (player item x hidden motivation) pair, I cache it for use again in future plays. This means the inference cost per player trade round will drop over time. Costs are also offset by ads on the mobile versions (I plan to add them to the web version eventually).
Also, GPT-4.1-mini is surprisingly cheap for this operation as well - since posting here a few hours ago total inference spend has been in the low single digit dollars - so not really a concern at this scale.