Imec

When Running Your Own AI Models Beats Paying for APIs - Steven Latré, imec

When Running Your Own AI Models Beats Paying for APIs - Steven Latré, imec

Steven Latré, who leads AI at the semiconductor research center imec, presents a benchmarking study of what it really costs to move long-running coding agents from commercial APIs to self-hosted GPUs. Across thousands of SWE-bench Pro runs, the study finds that hardware costs rise in steps rather than smoothly, that concurrency limits matter more than raw accuracy, that break-even GPU utilization ranges from about 89% on small systems to about 15% on 8x B200 machines, and that harness choice can halve GPU time for the same results.