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Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

simonwillison.net

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Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#151

Post by gedy »

jvanderbot wrote: post #30
CharlieDigital wrote: post #4

$1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum. Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something. 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

Right - the future of LLMs is like ol' windows XP+Dell. Commercialized "things" you run locally offline, co-designed with hardware, with a known productivity suite, and large businesses building the next generation thing and suite with 18mo release cycles (ish).

There's waayyyy too much money betting on that not happening, to the point I feel there'll be regulations popping up for "safety reasons" etc to ensure the big players control this.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#152

Post by anthonypasq »

tuesdaynight wrote: post #138

Why there are so many people that still believe that AI coding is a fad? It's something that started less than two years ago and companies are already paying thousands per seat. I know one that gives you 5k per month. Which other tool went from nothing to this level of acceptance so quickly?

perhaps the personal computer? Companies were spending 3-5k (10-15k inflation adjusted) on every employee for just hardware.

everyone making comparisons to the dotcom bubble seems misguided. this is clearly computing 2.0 imo

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#153

Post by econ »

f311a wrote: post #37

How many more months do we need to wait, until big companies realize that flash models work just fine if you: 1) Don't ask LLMs for big changes 2) Review everything and point them in the right direction Large models still suck at big changes, they produce questionable architecture and you still have to review the code, if your project is serious enough. The codebase quickly become a mess, if you don't pay enough atte…

I wonder to what extent models should figure out which model to forward a query to. Or perhaps the big models could learn the difference between an easy and a hard question and charge accordingly? Perhaps, if it can measure complexity, even generate a quote?

Small models are fine for small coding tasks but I don't see why big ones can't be broken down most of the time.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#154

Post by pm90 »

dangus wrote: post #143
Buttons840 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think companies will eventually just buy a local AI server. Using local hardware is expensive when it's running a complicated software stack that can break in 10,000 different ways. These eventual local AI servers will just talk some protocol for AI and sit in the corner and nobody will think about them. I guess they still might need access to various systems, so idk. Eventually I think someone will offer "AI in a…

I don’t think companies will do that. Why don’t they just buy local on-premise infrastructure even though it’s cheaper than AWS? “AI in a box” sounds a heck of a lot like “the box” from the Silicon Valley TV show. Or the Google search appliance. Or name any other on-premise thing that is equally dinosauric. The real finding of this article is that AI tokens are direct competitors with offshoring. $1,500/month buys yo…

> I don’t think companies will do that. Why don’t they just buy local on-premise infrastructure even though it’s cheaper than AWS?

For customer facing, production software, its worth paying a cloud tax to get the reliability guarantee. For tools that are used by engineers for code development, there is no need for such bulletproof guarantees.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#155

Post by ssivark »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #4

$1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum. Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something. 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

Even if companies decided to move away from expensive models from the major labs, it probably much more economical to pay a cloud provider to host some open weights model which could then be amortized across all (internal) users and do inference at a substantial batch size, rather than giving everyone their own hardware -- which means the company would need to provision for peak usage and inference at batch size of one.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#156

Post by sevenzero »

sfn42 wrote: post #142
sevenzero wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could disable most of these. I already hate all the "oh you're actually right, let me fix that" nonsense. Then it proceeds to burn 50k tokens on the git history instead of copying logic A from a different part of the codebase to logic B, where I want that exact logic without having to write the boilerplate myself...

A lot of the time if you're copying code from one place to another what you actually want to do is abstract it so you can reuse it in both places. The LLM can easily do this type of stuff, just tell it and it'll happily do it. This is exactly what I mean when I tell people they need to work closer with the AI, tell it how to do things. Don't just tell it what to do and get frustrated when it does it differently than…

Nah the codebase is legacy fucked and I cant be bothered to try and optimize business flows without the fear of other stuff breaking.

Claude 100% of the time even thinks we use laravel despite the project being some old lumen codebase, so most of laravels features are not available. It also gets the PHP version we are using wrong 100% of the time.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#157

Post by cheeze »

freediddy wrote: post #149
ValentineC wrote: post #104

> I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI - which currently costs me just $100 per provider thanks to their generous subsidized plans for individual subscribers. Do we know that AI providers are going to keep these per-token prices, or eventually lower them because of competition from China? Many lower-budget individuals are now moving to China open weight mode…

Most sane US companies will disallow use of cloud-based Chinese AI providers, because everything including code, data, PII, etc is being sent to them.

Deepseek has some models in Bedrock. There is definitely a huge market for a "good enough" model running within the country of the company

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#158

Post by swiftcoder »

pqtyw wrote: post #123
LurkandComment wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For claude shops this was a huge hit. But lets back this up. There are some companies that haven't even built a break-even model at this price because they are funded by investment. As soon as those investors lose patience the first dominos will fall. For those who have somewhat of a business model, will it survive a price increase? The bigger question is do the base model providers have enough runway and have a way…

It's mostly R&D though, not inference. If LLM's effectively become a commodity then they are screwed anyway.

Aren’t the Chinese labs quickly turning them into a commodity?

The open-weight models will have a steady race to the bottom on inference costs just by dint of competition between providers. They aren’t at the frontier yet, but they are rapidly eating the flash market.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#159

Post by ceejayoz »

freediddy wrote: post #149
ValentineC wrote: post #104

> I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI - which currently costs me just $100 per provider thanks to their generous subsidized plans for individual subscribers. Do we know that AI providers are going to keep these per-token prices, or eventually lower them because of competition from China? Many lower-budget individuals are now moving to China open weight mode…

Most sane US companies will disallow use of cloud-based Chinese AI providers, because everything including code, data, PII, etc is being sent to them.

Saner companies ask the same question about models from their own country too.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#160

Post by lowbloodsugar »

cyanydeez wrote: post #129
ValentineC wrote: post #104

> I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI - which currently costs me just $100 per provider thanks to their generous subsidized plans for individual subscribers. Do we know that AI providers are going to keep these per-token prices, or eventually lower them because of competition from China? Many lower-budget individuals are now moving to China open weight mode…

id be amazed any american business will aend data to china

Any IT cost center will send to the lowest bidder. This isn’t intellectual property: it’s annoying shit that is an unwelcome cost of doing business. China might copy our tedious scripts? Will they make a product out of it? Can I buy it and fire my IT staff? Great!

Not everyone using AI is using it to code core value IP.

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