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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

#281

Post by iLoveOncall »

geodel wrote: post #247

> A $1,500 monthly limit per tool strikes me as a rational policy response to over-spending,... > 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. This whole article seems to me like Multi level marketing "businesses" where 'Diamonds' have made their m…

That's just Simon Willison since LLMs came out. It's glaringly obvious that he's a paid shill.

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

#282

Post by saulpw »

chmod775 wrote: post #269
saulpw wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you can't talk to them about the flow of the code. You can't ask them for their thinking as to why certain things are. You can absolutely do this. It's even right most of the time.

Let's be real. Most of the time you ask an LLM "Why did you do it like this?", it responds with something along the lines of "Oops. My bad. You're right to point this out." You even have a fair chance of getting a response like that when there isn't anything wrong and the question wasn't rhetorical - which perfectly illustrates the level of the genuine understanding LLMs operate at.

This has happened to me, so I put this in my global CLAUDE.md, and it seems to help (I don't remember getting the response you mentioned for awhile now):

    **Lead with the answer when asked how/which/whether.** Name the command/mechanism first; a question seeking understanding isn't a go-ahead to execute. Answer, then offer to act.

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

#283

Post by consp »

bgnn wrote: post #262
bijowo1676 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do GPU chips really depreciate physically? There are no moving parts, I dont think memory chips or GPU chips deteriorate naturally. I think its only accounting depreciation. I have been using my laptop for a decade, what is stopping datacenters from using the purchased GPU chips for a decade?

Chips age and fail with age. You can check hot-carrier injection, bias-temperature instability and electromigration as they are the main aging mechanisms. All if these are a linear function of time but exponentieal of temperature. 90-100C these chips are running at are really tough, so they are likely to fail at couple of percent to 10% range in 2-3 years depending on the margins they have in the design. The solder j…

If those don't go the caps and coils will eventually.

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

#284

Post by Daishiman »

analognoise wrote: post #215
Daishiman wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$18K a year is a fraction of the salary of a junior engineer. Claude has allowed me to do refactors that would have taken weeks to instead take a couple of days. It has, objectively, increased the velocity of the engineering component of greenfield features by 40% in my org. You can put a number value on that and decide if it gives you favorable ROI.

The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever). You’ve gotten a result, but without the work that made you valuable, while deskilling yourself. It’s a lose/lose situation for…I would say anyone employed as an engineer or programmer. I’m not taking responsible for AI output, the same way I won’t t…

> The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever).

Absolutely false. Refactors (in my case) can be as simple as dropping old packages for newer packages with slightly different semantics. It can be moving legacy pages from jQuery to Vue.

> You’ve gotten a result, but without the work that made you valuable, while deskilling yourself.

I've 25 years coding, trust me, I don't lose anything by not finding out on my own that the semantics of a jQuery promise changed between major versions.

> The only person that wins here is the person who can pay you less because they don’t need you, they just need another “types computer guy”.

You have no idea of what you're talking about. There are entire classes of K8s networking issues that would have taken me a day to debug which Claude solved in minutes just because it can run 20 diagnostics commands in two minutes and deal with technical minutae that is time-consuming but ultimately irrelevant to my business goals.

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

#285

Post by gedy »

thewebguyd wrote: post #232
gedy wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

3/4 of Microsoft's BUILD conference the past two days were about local AI, foundry local and Windows ML along with a big section in the keynote about running local workloads on their new hardware with Nvidia. Say what you want about Microsoft's reputation, but they are a "big player" and seem to be moving in the direction of local AI first.

I would love this to happen of course, just paranoid it won't.

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

#286

Post by sajithdilshan »

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?

I don't think it's necessarily what Uber build, but the gained productivity. If the engineers use the AI tools the correct way, it can drastically increase the productivity and that means they can actually use the LLM as a junior or an associate engineer. $1500/mo is way cheaper for that level of productivity where as they would have had to pay far more for a human engineer.

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

#287

Post by insane_dreamer »

I still have never hit a ceiling with my Claude Max $100 account, much less the Max $200 account. I'm not burning tokens needlessly, nor running it all day, but I do use CC almost daily. What are these devs doing that they are burning more than $1500 in tokens a month?

Maybe it's just me, but I still find that I really have to "shepherd" the AI and work with it to get the results I want. And I read every line of code added and challenge the model's logic. So that limits my token burning. Maybe these people are just "vibe-coding" without really checking the results?

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

#288

Post by CuriouslyC »

satvikpendem wrote: post #259
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…

Don't worry, they'll just lobby to ban Chinese models instead to keep their token revenues high. > Compounding the problem, labs in China often release dual-use capable models as open-weight. Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed, making the model available to any state or non-state actor to use for malicious purposes, including the cyber and CBRN misuse those safeguards were built to p…

If you do the math, they don't have a choice. If China captures America's AI market it'll cause a major depression. They'll give it the BYD treatment, though it'll be a lot less effective.

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

#289

Post by Marsymars »

analognoise wrote: post #215
Daishiman wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$18K a year is a fraction of the salary of a junior engineer. Claude has allowed me to do refactors that would have taken weeks to instead take a couple of days. It has, objectively, increased the velocity of the engineering component of greenfield features by 40% in my org. You can put a number value on that and decide if it gives you favorable ROI.

The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever). You’ve gotten a result, but without the work that made you valuable, while deskilling yourself. It’s a lose/lose situation for…I would say anyone employed as an engineer or programmer. I’m not taking responsible for AI output, the same way I won’t t…

> The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever).

I'm pretty pessimistic on AI and don't have access to good agentic workflows, but refactors are exactly the thing where it seems to me like agents could be really strong - once I've refactored something architecturally, I might have hundreds of instances of a thing that needs to be updated in a predictable way, but is complicated enough that it's going to be faster for me to manually update hundreds of instances rather than writing a generalizable find/replace tool.

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

#290

Post by jujube3 »

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?

It's cope. People desperately want to believe that AI coding is going away so that they can go back to partying like it's 2020.

So there's a huge number of HN posters claiming that the price of tokens will go UP over time rather than down (that's how Moore's Law works, right???) or that code bases that AI contributes to will spontaneously combust, or something.

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