The chinese AI and greymarket peptides scenes feel so vital, fun and wild-west. Imagine spending your life being beholden to USA corporations and being scolded on HN for violating a trillion dollar company’s ToS.
The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
101–110 of 149 posts
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#102It's the same fundamental problem as "ticket touting" for popular events - if you sell something that's in demand at a price that's far lower than the clearing price of the market, you're creating a juicy arbitrage opportunity that sooner or later somebody is going to try and exploit
Not necessarily. What OpenAI and Anthropic are selling — a flat-rate subscription with both 5-hour and weekly rate limits — is a bit like an all-you-can-eat buffet. They expect some customers to generate more in costs than they bring in revenue, just like some people at the all-you-can-eat buffet eat more than they pay for, but by the law of large numbers, the mean cost per customer comes out to something the labs ar…
fraud that cannot be reliably be prevented, which makes the business model in-question fall into 'questionable' category.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Video influence pipelines from India huh? No wonder social media is so shit nowadays. All that brainwashing and propaganda from third world countries, now at 4% the price!
If we're going to insist on continuing to use the offensive language of "third world country", at least apply it correctly. India is not what even the most casual racist would consider "third world".
> India is not what even the most casual racist would consider "third world".
I don't follow. India was Third World in the original Cold War sense as a founder and leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, and it still fits the term's colloquial sense through low GDP per-capita, poor HDI figures, weak state capacity, corruption and uneven infrastructure.
The label might be offensive, the comment you responded to most certainly is. But excluding India from the Third World is hard to justify.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#104"Token reseller market" is a fancy way of saying credit card fraud. If someone stole xboxs from stores using stolen credit cards and then sold them at 10% of their price, at what point is it a "resller market" and not "criminal enterpirse"?
With theft, somebody ends up without an Xbox. Theft is wrong. This is mere breach of contract, whether it's wrong depends on the contract.
In your world model, hardware and electricity are made out of thin air?
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#105How do the users know they're getting what they're paying for? I disabled automatic downgrading/rerouting because it sometimes takes me a second to tell when the answer came from a different model than I wanted. You could easily sell Opus as Fable for a good while.
i doubt the users really care as long as they get the job done, AI in 90% of use cases is just a race to the bottom, nobody cares as long as it's cheap and gets the job done.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#106It's the same fundamental problem as "ticket touting" for popular events - if you sell something that's in demand at a price that's far lower than the clearing price of the market, you're creating a juicy arbitrage opportunity that sooner or later somebody is going to try and exploit
Not necessarily. What OpenAI and Anthropic are selling — a flat-rate subscription with both 5-hour and weekly rate limits — is a bit like an all-you-can-eat buffet. They expect some customers to generate more in costs than they bring in revenue, just like some people at the all-you-can-eat buffet eat more than they pay for, but by the law of large numbers, the mean cost per customer comes out to something the labs ar…
This is the same terrible analogy used to justify Anthropic shutting off API access for subscribers. It’s nothing like an all-you-can-eat buffer because, as you mention, there are limits!
We are not buying all we can eat. We are buying 3 plates of food every 5 hours (or whatever) and we should be able to do with that food as we please, without anti-consumer tactics to scam us out of not consuming the LIMITS we paid for.
Weirdly, no buffet subscriptions exist that I know of. That should tell you a bit about the viability of this business model.. it will collapse if we had to pay the real cost.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#107One aspect that seems to be missing is the abuse of the free credits provided for new companies by AWS, Azure, and other providers. I know of a friend's company in India who purchased inference, at 4% of the actual price and states that it gave him an unbeatable competitive edge in their large running video influence pipelines. Any new competitors could not offer their pricing at all. Primarily that operated because…
I was going to cover this in a follow-up article, but yeah, there are network of token brokers who buy unused credits from startups and then resell them.
Thanks matt for including the Mandarin terms and the great article!
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#108If we compare OpenAI subscription prices vs. the cheapest inference providers on OpenRouter, than OpenAI must be losing money. Add the fraud to this and the question is what the future will hold. The only salvation is hardware getting 10x cheaper before the labs run out of money. Otherwise, we'll lose affordable access to bulk tokens.
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#109the way i see it there are 3 types of resellers. the ones using fake credit cards to rack up costs and then cancel the card are doing actual fraud. then you got mass free trial abuse which is more of a gray area and i would say its still wrong. but if you sign up for a subscription, pay for it and resell your monthly tokens thats not at all unethical, even if its breaking their terms and costing the provider money. i…
> some small company realizes they dont really use their cars that much so they rent them out again for 3 days a week to get some extra cash. is that fraud? Most likely, yes. There's a common fallacy that once you pay someone for a service, you are free to do whatever you want with that service. In the case of the rental car, the contract the company entered into would prohibit reselling the services and limit who ca…
> There is a vocal online minority who believe user license agreements shouldn't be enforced and individuals should never be considered accountable for following them, but that doesn't even apply to these resellers.
What you're vaguely gesturing at is that "Internet nerd culture" is downstream of both neoliberal politics and vague anti-corporate sentiment in a way that combines to give you a sort of "Fuck You, Got Mine Socialism" - i.e. one where being able to freeload off a corporation is automatically good and anything that stops you from doing so is automatically evil.
If you were terminally online in the 1980s, you likely remember phreaking - i.e. that funny little box you built that let you scam AT&T out of long distance phone calls at local rates. Later on in the 90s was the Telecom Act, which more or less institutionalized freeloading off of AT&T infrastructure in the name of antitrust and competition[0]. A few years later, we'd get MP3 and file-sharing services that would do to music labels what Cap'n Crunch whistles did to the phone company. And then BitTorrent would do the same thing to oversubscribed cable Internet services that were very much not designed to serve as distributed edge CDNs for other people's content.
Just to be clear, both AT&T and the music labels deserved it, and it's Comcast's fault for not building fiber infrastructure that would actually meet demand. We did not fight those battles for nothing. But it also established a pattern: any company that engages in marketing fictions in order to offer a more palatable price is really just lying about the costs, and it is the Internet's solemn duty to invent a scheme to maximally abuse those services. Fuck your business model, and we should get paid for fucking your business model, even if fucking it will collapse the house we live in.
[0] Apple fans: just imagine AT&T is the iOS App Store and Epic Games is MCI, and then make all your annoying comments about how Apple "deserves to be paid" or whatever, and you'll get it. Just try not to think too hard about how many phreaking kits Steve Jobs sold...
Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
#110[flagged]