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The AI Credit Resale Economy

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Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#61

Post by andai »

raincole wrote: post #58
vb-8448 wrote: post #31

Wait a sec, I have to trust a third party with basically no reputation, did I get it right? It's basically asking for being hacked and/or sending you private data to random email addresses! Neither at a 99% discount I'd do it. I understand if someone, for any reason, cannot access a specific model ... But nowadays, there are so many alternatives that even this doesn't make sense any more.

It's really common in China where OpenAI and Anthropic models are firewalled. There was a joke that Chinese people didn't realize how cheap DeepSeek was, because they already were using resold ChatGPT/Opus tokens at that price. Here is a more detailed article about how it works: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

Oh that's interesting, looks like those proxies are probably also selling the data to Chinese AI companies for training.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#62

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

ffsm8 wrote: post #47
judge2020 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another part of the discount is that Claude Max 20x is $200 but gives usage equivalent to thousands of dollars worth of API-based token spend. But also, resellers only need to make an overall profit including kickbacks from the companies purchasing token history for distillation.

It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API. I suspect it's closer to the sub price and anthropic is just milking their API users, but that's something you'd only know from the inside

Open weight SOTA models are not greatly cheaper than Anthropic and providers don't have to cover training capex.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#63

Post by segmondy »

vb-8448 wrote: post #31

Wait a sec, I have to trust a third party with basically no reputation, did I get it right? It's basically asking for being hacked and/or sending you private data to random email addresses! Neither at a 99% discount I'd do it. I understand if someone, for any reason, cannot access a specific model ... But nowadays, there are so many alternatives that even this doesn't make sense any more.

So what? The world is more trustworthy than you can imagine. I have bought over 30 GPUs over the internet, sight unseen. From around the world and every single one has arrived good. I have also gotten over 20 from marketplace and the same. Use your common sense, from conversation and everything else, you can often separate the scammers from real folks.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#64

Post by bonoboTP »

ffsm8 wrote: post #47
judge2020 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another part of the discount is that Claude Max 20x is $200 but gives usage equivalent to thousands of dollars worth of API-based token spend. But also, resellers only need to make an overall profit including kickbacks from the companies purchasing token history for distillation.

It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API. I suspect it's closer to the sub price and anthropic is just milking their API users, but that's something you'd only know from the inside

Costs also have to include the amortized training costs.

But the API price is likely simply regular supply and demand, charging as much as the market will pay. Corporations are dropping insane amounts because it's still peanuts for many industries. Software has just been ridiculously cheap before AI. So high prices are still low for companies if it eases some bottlenecks.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#65

Post by drawnwren »

ffsm8 wrote: post #47
judge2020 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another part of the discount is that Claude Max 20x is $200 but gives usage equivalent to thousands of dollars worth of API-based token spend. But also, resellers only need to make an overall profit including kickbacks from the companies purchasing token history for distillation.

It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API. I suspect it's closer to the sub price and anthropic is just milking their API users, but that's something you'd only know from the inside

Generally speaking, B2B prices are rarely supply-and-demand priced in the usual sense.

YC has advised startups in the past that it's easier to sell a single $100k customer than 100 $1k customers.

It would also be relatively surprising to learn that i.e. the Chinese providers are OOMs better at inference than OAI/Anthropic (like their prices would imply if they were in a perfectly competitive market).

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#66

Post by bonoboTP »

drawnwren wrote: post #65
ffsm8 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API. I suspect it's closer to the sub price and anthropic is just milking their API users, but that's something you'd only know from the inside

Generally speaking, B2B prices are rarely supply-and-demand priced in the usual sense. YC has advised startups in the past that it's easier to sell a single $100k customer than 100 $1k customers. It would also be relatively surprising to learn that i.e. the Chinese providers are OOMs better at inference than OAI/Anthropic (like their prices would imply if they were in a perfectly competitive market).

Chinese prices aren't really OOM cheaper. Deepseek recently did a big price hike too.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#67

Post by drawnwren »

bonoboTP wrote: post #66
drawnwren wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, B2B prices are rarely supply-and-demand priced in the usual sense. YC has advised startups in the past that it's easier to sell a single $100k customer than 100 $1k customers. It would also be relatively surprising to learn that i.e. the Chinese providers are OOMs better at inference than OAI/Anthropic (like their prices would imply if they were in a perfectly competitive market).

Chinese prices aren't really OOM cheaper. Deepseek recently did a big price hike too.

Fair, I hadn't looked recently. It looks like currently kimi is either 1/2 or 1/4 Ant pricing depending on whether you think Opus 5 is usable or not. (Deepseek is still an OOM though)

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#69

Post by jeffnash »

rdbell wrote: post #32
veganmosfet wrote: post #22

The reseller could use an intermediate proxy and modify the traffic like in [1], to get control of the client machine - depending on the harness permissions. TLS terminates at the proxy (say, https://reselltokens.ai ), end to end integrity is not enforced. LLM traffic contains tool calls like "bash ...", which are executed on the client machine, they can be manipulated. Secret exfil is also possible. [1] https://arxi…

You can place your own CLIProxyAPI instance in front of the reseller proxy and block prompts/responses that look harmful. There are community plugins like this: https://github.com/rheodev/cpa-plugin-privacyfilter I haven't tried the plugin system myself yet.

I swear every time I think I have a unique tweak for an OSS tool, it turns out someone else did it. I forked CLIProxyAPI myself to add something similar, though my implementation is closer to a provider-egress DLP layer and it's intended for API keys and the like, not PII. It uses gitleaks but also supports reversible redaction so a secret that's flagged can be replaced with a placeholder before CLIProxyAPI sends the request to the provider and then any instances of that placeholder can be rehydrated in the response to the caller.

Since it modifies logic across the full request/response lifecycle, I unfortunately couldn't implement it cleanly with the existing plugin API.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#70

Post by HWR_14 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #64
ffsm8 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API. I suspect it's closer to the sub price and anthropic is just milking their API users, but that's something you'd only know from the inside

Costs also have to include the amortized training costs. But the API price is likely simply regular supply and demand, charging as much as the market will pay. Corporations are dropping insane amounts because it's still peanuts for many industries. Software has just been ridiculously cheap before AI. So high prices are still low for companies if it eases some bottlenecks.

The costs only have to include amortized training costs if you are trying to be profitable overall. Having positive unit economics and VC subsidized fixed costs is pretty standard.
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