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The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

vectoral.com

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Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#3
post #2

> For example, one operator’s price-comparison site listed a package that bought the equivalent of $3,333 worth of official Anthropic credit for 425 RMB — roughly $0.13 of usage per $1 spent. Do these numbers make sense? $0.13 usage per $1 spent?

If you are using a stolen credit card to buy tokens and resell them, then the cost per token is the amount the credit card cost you (and building/running the proxy service), not the value of the tokens themselves.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#4
post #2

> For example, one operator’s price-comparison site listed a package that bought the equivalent of $3,333 worth of official Anthropic credit for 425 RMB — roughly $0.13 of usage per $1 spent. Do these numbers make sense? $0.13 usage per $1 spent?

Yeah, I should probably clean this up. The sentence is a bit hard to understand. What I was trying to show was the steep discounts offered by resellers.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#5
post #4
post #2

> For example, one operator’s price-comparison site listed a package that bought the equivalent of $3,333 worth of official Anthropic credit for 425 RMB — roughly $0.13 of usage per $1 spent. Do these numbers make sense? $0.13 usage per $1 spent?

Yeah, I should probably clean this up. The sentence is a bit hard to understand. What I was trying to show was the steep discounts offered by resellers.

So $1 of usage for $0.13?

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#6
post #2

> For example, one operator’s price-comparison site listed a package that bought the equivalent of $3,333 worth of official Anthropic credit for 425 RMB — roughly $0.13 of usage per $1 spent. Do these numbers make sense? $0.13 usage per $1 spent?

I think this was very poorly worded. I believe they’re trying to say you pay the reseller $0.13 to get what costs $1 at the upstream provider.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#7
I don't know anything about tokens. Does the following argument make sense?

1. Tokens are model-specific: e.g. tokens used by Anthropic cannot be used in models of other companies.

2. Tokens are generated by GPU cards. They measure the power of GPU cards.

3. Tokens cannot be separated from the models. You sort of "connect" the software part (models) into the hardware part (GPU cards) to use the tokens generated from the hardware.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#9

I don't know anything about tokens. Does the following argument make sense? 1. Tokens are model-specific: e.g. tokens used by Anthropic cannot be used in models of other companies. 2. Tokens are generated by GPU cards. They measure the power of GPU cards. 3. Tokens cannot be separated from the models. You sort of "connect" the software part (models) into the hardware part (GPU cards) to use the tokens generated from…

No, all 3 points are incorrect. I’m not even pro-LLM and I’ll tell you this.

You should do a bit of reading on what a token is. The short answer is that it’s a series of 2-4 bytes of information turned into an integer.

Your comparisons are akin to asking “are amazon gift cards the same as a bunch of pesos?”

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#10

I don't know anything about tokens. Does the following argument make sense? 1. Tokens are model-specific: e.g. tokens used by Anthropic cannot be used in models of other companies. 2. Tokens are generated by GPU cards. They measure the power of GPU cards. 3. Tokens cannot be separated from the models. You sort of "connect" the software part (models) into the hardware part (GPU cards) to use the tokens generated from…

Tokens measure "how much work the model did" in the same way that step counts measure "how far the person went"

GPUs "generate tokens" in the same sense that human feet "generate steps"

You can't compare token counts across different providers to get an absolute measure of "total work done" for the same reason that you can't compare step counts across different people to get an absolute measure of "total distance traveled"

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