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The AI Credit Resale Economy

vectoral.com

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Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#81

Post by dragonwriter »

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

“It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API.”

There is no “real cost” other than the cost actually charged.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#82

Post by dataflow »

mlenhard wrote: post #44
tantalor wrote: post #24

There's a lot of assertion here and the other article that this fraud and abuse but is there any evidence of that? A simpler explanation is that that this is just a resale market.

From talking with some of the companies experiencing this, I can confirm that a portion of it is actual credit card fraud. Tokens have become a pseudo-currency, making them a prime target for abuse. Some of the abuse is more benign, but there is also real fraud through chargebacks, account takeovers, and stolen credit cards.

When you say a portion is that more like 1%, 5%, 20%, 50%, or 90%?

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#83

Post by dataflow »

namelosw wrote: post #37
andy99 wrote: post #27

What does the demand side look like? I understand why people have these tokens they want to sell, who wants to buy them?

Chinese. There are large number of Chinese people who are dependent on the Western model because they're still ahead of the game. But they're continuously getting banned and getting super frustrated. Especially for Claude because Anthropic is very good at identifying mainland Chinese and getting them banned in hours. There are many of them who are willing to pay more than the original rate for a stable experience. It…

What does it mean for a phone number, bank card, and IP to "match together to make sense"?

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#84

Post by mlenhard »

dataflow wrote: post #82
mlenhard wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From talking with some of the companies experiencing this, I can confirm that a portion of it is actual credit card fraud. Tokens have become a pseudo-currency, making them a prime target for abuse. Some of the abuse is more benign, but there is also real fraud through chargebacks, account takeovers, and stolen credit cards.

When you say a portion is that more like 1%, 5%, 20%, 50%, or 90%?

I don't have exact numbers here, and it varies by company, but a rough guess is around 10-20%. This might be a bit biased because the companies willing to talk to me are probably seeing the worst of it.

Also, outside the labs, most of the companies I've talked with have shut off free tiers and free credits entirely because the abuse is so bad.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#86

Post by voidmain0001 »

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.

The article indicates that the provided API key is probably a proxy to the actual so the third party is also recording all prompts made using the proxy key.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#88

Post by bonoboTP »

HWR_14 wrote: post #79
Geezus_42 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not if there is competition who does train newer and better models.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#89

Post by pyvpx »

bonoboTP wrote: post #76
ronsor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Are you familiar with Chinas version of capitalism? It is markedly different than “the” western model

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#90

Post by diego_sandoval »

Aurornis wrote: post #12

The original article linked in the opening has more context https://vectoral.com/blog/token-relay-market People trading their unused credits feels more genuine, although still in violation of the agreements. The person who got into YC Startup School who was trying to resell the $2500 of credits was interesting. It wouldn’t be that hard for OpenAI to identify the IP addresses of the relays and start flagging accounts,…

Except for the cases of credit card fraud, I don't see what's morally wrong with it, for it to be called "fraud".

It's just reselling.

Maybe people are starting to copy Anthropic's rhetoric of "everything that inconveniences me is fraud (e.g. distillation). Everything that benefits me is legit."

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