If a worker doesn't use their AI/LLM budget, can they get a raise?
no because it does not come from the same budget
Money spent is money spent.
Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
461–470 of 819 posts
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
One aspect Paul Kedrosky mentioned recently is the concept of „duration mismatch“. The price per token goes down over time (either because the AI vendor reduces due to competition pressure, or because customers are now incentivized to use older cheaper models). But datacenters are financed through debt, with the assumption their revenue increases over time. Quoting him: „[AI vendors are] paying for a fixed cost with…
Using a shittier model is just more work for the user, I’m not sure why anyone does it, unless they’re playing with it like a toy.
Local privacy respecting inference can be worth it. I use a local model to log everything I do all week to automate my timesheet. I also have it do a bunch of other data tasks. I won't say that larger SOTA models wouldn't do these tasks better than a local model but PII is a concern and my employer wouldn't approve of me just setting tokens on fire everyday to do what I could do myself.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#463$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?
>WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?
Uber (and quite a few bay area companies and startups) can afford to spend that money. There is no expectation of profit, Uber lost ~62B and growing: https://uberlosses.com/
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#464Why 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.
Token costs do go down over time for sure due to software optimizations (i.e. better attention kernals) but acting like hardware INFLATION isn't happening for at least a few more years is just nonsense. Objectively an A100 is more expensive to rent today than it was in 2024 (a 7 year old GPU - Big short guy is a turbo idiot) and rising. As such, over short time horizons, it's possible to see limited amounts of "price per token goes up" for the same model.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#465Lock-in / switching costs are increasingly concerning me. I am using Claude for a good year now and have been accumulating so much "knowledge" in there by now. If Claude became less favorable in terms of price/performance in the future, that would worry me. I've started to think about a distributed solution, where my storage is detached from the inference, but currently Claude is still the way to go for me. Wondering…
This.^
I realized this first when moving a design spec from Claude chat to Claude Code and panicked. I literally had to build something like Notion but for agents to act as a portable memory between all cloud and local models and agents. But honestly it paid off!
If you are interested you can try it out at markbase.cloud (disclaimer and all that). I am not charging for it.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#466Why 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?
Fear of loss to competitors embracing a technology creates a fear driven adoption. Let me ask you this: is any technology worth so much break-neck adoption without first seeing clear evidence of ROI? No. The adoption is irrational.
What makes you think there is no clear evidence of ROI?
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
oh come on, a paid shill? Simon is very fascinated by AI and at times he can be a little too optimistic but he is generally balanced and his perspective evolves over time which can be seen in his writing. Nerd who loves nerd things a little too much? Sure. Paid shill by Big LLM? Nah.
The issue is he’s not actually balanced at all. I’ve never seen him say anything negative about an AI product.
Here's my AI misuse tag: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-misuse/ - 54 posts
My ongoing coverage of AI ethical issues: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics/ - 308 posts
I've been the loudest voice about the fundamental insecurity of LLMs for several years: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/ - 150 posts
In https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/25/agentic-browser-securi... I said "I strongly expect that the entire concept of an agentic browser extension is fatally flawed and cannot be built safely."
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
oh come on, a paid shill? Simon is very fascinated by AI and at times he can be a little too optimistic but he is generally balanced and his perspective evolves over time which can be seen in his writing. Nerd who loves nerd things a little too much? Sure. Paid shill by Big LLM? Nah.
Yes, a paid shill. You can find a clear point in time where he shifted from sceptic to 1000% fully onboard non-stop praise, with no reason.
I'd love to know when that point was myself!
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#469$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?
> How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?
It probably allowed them to avoid hiring as many people to build a certain amount of software. Even if it didn't increase revenue, it could have lowered human labor costs.
> 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k.
Don't forget the energy costs. Searching around, advanced models use an average of 25 Wh/1000Tok.
$1500/month gets you about 150M tokens.
At the aforementioned energy/token, that's 3750kWh.
What are your local office electricity rates/tariffs? (Hint: they are going up because of AI data centers). Even if my price and energy assumptions are wrong above, you probably aren't going to get the rates that the hyperscalers do.
Even at cheap (i.e Texas) retail electricity rates, that many tokens will probably cost you hundreds per month. In most other electricity markets, probably far more.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#470Just to put this in context. If every company did this, all over the world, with that same limit, we are talking about something around $45B monthly in revenue for all AI companies to share.
There are a lot of places in Europe where 1.5k$ is more than 50% of the total cost of an employee. And the obvious question: what it's the cost of that revenue? Because it looks huge but ...
One could hire a competent developer here in Brazil for that amount. I know because my workplace has hired competent developers for that amount. You can even call them senior developers, but you can't get "non-startup seniors" with actual experience, those expect a bit more.
I just wanted to take their number at face value. It's not like it needs more real information to make AI a bubble.