When "token futures contracts", start selling. Then the bubble is about to burst.
CME is launching GPU compute futures in October: https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/energy/power/compute-future...
The AI Credit Resale Economy
71–80 of 141 posts
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#72Earlier 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.
The one thing I trust is that Chinese prices aren't overinflated. They're almost certainly closer to the actual cost of inference + training amortization than what Western labs are offering.
DeepSeek's price hike is mostly driven by increased demand, for example. It's not about losses so much as they don't have enough infrastructure and need to reduce demand somehow.
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#73Most of these are your standard botnet rings. Either accounts directly are taken over, and the attacker adds 2FA or carding rings take stolen #s and attempt to add credits. It is...incredible how many there are. Stripe does far too little in my opinion to help prevent issues like this, even though they have the business intelligence and enough data to do so.
I think Stripe does enough already. Fraud detection is a crapshoot regardless; I've had legitimate transactions rejected at random without explanation.
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#74> CREDITS FROM YC STARTUP SCHOOL Join YC, get free shit from the network, profit. Nice.
As a bonus, you’ve got a story for the “tell me about a time you hacked a non computer system” question on the YC application
Reselling something one gets for free doesn't sound like a very clever hack.
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#75How can you verify, that the model that you are buying is the one that you are actually getting?
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chinese prices aren't really OOM cheaper. Deepseek recently did a big price hike too.
The one thing I trust is that Chinese prices aren't overinflated. They're almost certainly closer to the actual cost of inference + training amortization than what Western labs are offering. DeepSeek's price hike is mostly driven by increased demand, for example. It's not about losses so much as they don't have enough infrastructure and need to reduce demand somehow.
Why do you have this trust? Are they not profit oriented? Or you suspect that Xi's policy push is to undercut American AI?
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#77Wait 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.
It's not like buying random stuff that you can inspect!
You have no way to verify that your data is not sold to someone else, send to the provider you think, or the response is genuine and not full of prompt injections or other stuff!
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What happens when the VCs decide to stop dumping more money onto the fire?
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What happens when the VCs decide to stop dumping more money onto the fire?
Positive unit economics means that inference as a business continues regardless. The VC's no longer dumping money in means no more training new models.
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#80How can you verify, that the model that you are buying is the one that you are actually getting?
You basically can't. This episode from Syntax[0] shows one provider that he tried to go through to showcase this, and he was fairly certain it wasn't Claude, but of course that was all speculation on his part.