New AI service Praus claims top-tier answers for under a tenth of a cent

A Utah AI lab has launched Praus, a service it says gives answers near the level of the top AI models at a very low cost. Ortelan Labs puts the cost of a typical answer at $0.00069, which is less than a tenth of a cent. The catch is that the company measured this itself, and no outside group has confirmed it.

What Praus does

Praus is what the company calls a harness. That is a layer that sits between you and the AI models and decides how they get used. For each request, it picks the models it thinks suit the task. Then it checks the result before sending it back. It handles research, writing and code.

Because Praus is not tied to one model, Ortelan Labs says newer open-source models can be added or swapped in as they improve. People using it would see no change. Open-source models are ones whose makers share them publicly.

The numbers, and their limits

Ortelan Labs published results on nine public AI tests on Hugging Face, a site where AI projects are shared. In its own testing, Praus ranked first among the listed systems on two tests, GraphWalks and SimpleQA. On the other seven, it ranked between third and sixteenth.

On cost, the company estimates its own on-premises infrastructure cost for a typical answer at $0.00069. It says that is below the list price of all 17 frontier models it compared against. Frontier models are the most advanced AI systems available. The company states plainly that scores and costs are self-reported estimates, not independently verified, and not guarantees.

Agents and access

Praus is available now at praus.ai. An iOS app is planned for later this month, though the company notes plans may change. Agents, which carry out multistep tasks, are in preview for selected accounts only.

The agents work through tools that run in the customer's own application or terminal. So every action happens in the customer's environment and leaves a result that can be checked. Developers can apply for access to the Praus API, which the company opens one account at a time.

Who is behind it

Ortelan Labs calls itself an applied AI lab. Besides Praus, it builds AI systems for companies using their own data, runs a family-history research tool called Lost Tribes, and invests up to $5 million per company in early-stage AI startups. Kyle Nel is chief executive.

What is not known yet

• Whether outside testers get the same benchmark results
• What Praus costs customers, since the release gives no price
• Which models Praus uses behind the scenes
• When agents and API access open to more people

If the claims hold up, cheaper AI could lower costs for small businesses that use it for writing, research or code. Until independent tests appear, the figures are best treated as a company's own estimate.