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Launch HN: Maitai (YC S24) – Self-Optimizing LLM Platform

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11–20 of 84 posts

Re: Launch HN: Maitai (YC S24) – Self-Optimizing LLM Platform

#11
The pricing is ... steep?

You are charging per request ($0.05) what amounts to about 1M tokens on GPT4-mini ($0.075); i.e. this is 10-100x more expensive than the cost of running the LLM. I don't think it's worth it at that price point.

Edit (just found out this):

"The $0.05 per request fee covers requests up to 30,000 tokens.

For requests exceeding this limit, additional nominal charges may apply."

Hmm ... it's just too much.

Re: Launch HN: Maitai (YC S24) – Self-Optimizing LLM Platform

#13

This is actually really cool. I could see this being very useful. I can see big companies with a budget paying for this rather than rolling their own, but I would assume the biggest struggle you'll have with the long tail of users is pricing, since they may make their own reliability solutions that are "good enough." What's your take on that?

Yeah pricing for smaller shops and independent devs is something we're still working on. We'd ideally like for everyone to be able to use Maitai though, so we'll probably release some features on a free plan soon.

Re: Launch HN: Maitai (YC S24) – Self-Optimizing LLM Platform

#14

The pricing is ... steep? You are charging per request ($0.05) what amounts to about 1M tokens on GPT4-mini ($0.075); i.e. this is 10-100x more expensive than the cost of running the LLM. I don't think it's worth it at that price point. Edit (just found out this): "The $0.05 per request fee covers requests up to 30,000 tokens. For requests exceeding this limit, additional nominal charges may apply." Hmm ... it's just…

Good feedback, I agree that our pay-as-you-go pricing may not fit everyone's budget. We're working on reducing our costs and simplifying our pricing. Goal is to get this much, much lower in the coming months. There's some complexity to how we handle pricing, since the core of what we do is based off of ingesting the requests and responses, and performing some processes on top of that info. Some people have small prompts (<1000 tokens), others have massive prompts (80k+). We found that the vast majority are well under 30k, though.

Re: Launch HN: Maitai (YC S24) – Self-Optimizing LLM Platform

#15

How are expectations specified?

We derive them from your requests as they come in. What we've heard is that most of the time, devs just want the model to do what they told it to do, consistently. That's all in the prompts, we just do a lot of work to parse them, structure them, and maintain them.

Re: Launch HN: Maitai (YC S24) – Self-Optimizing LLM Platform

#17

The pricing is ... steep? You are charging per request ($0.05) what amounts to about 1M tokens on GPT4-mini ($0.075); i.e. this is 10-100x more expensive than the cost of running the LLM. I don't think it's worth it at that price point. Edit (just found out this): "The $0.05 per request fee covers requests up to 30,000 tokens. For requests exceeding this limit, additional nominal charges may apply." Hmm ... it's just…

$0.05/request is a staggering amount. Their demo to order a burger is funny considering that a long chat session could easily end up costing more than a burger.

Re: Launch HN: Maitai (YC S24) – Self-Optimizing LLM Platform

#18

The pricing is ... steep? You are charging per request ($0.05) what amounts to about 1M tokens on GPT4-mini ($0.075); i.e. this is 10-100x more expensive than the cost of running the LLM. I don't think it's worth it at that price point. Edit (just found out this): "The $0.05 per request fee covers requests up to 30,000 tokens. For requests exceeding this limit, additional nominal charges may apply." Hmm ... it's just…

Good feedback, I agree that our pay-as-you-go pricing may not fit everyone's budget. We're working on reducing our costs and simplifying our pricing. Goal is to get this much, much lower in the coming months. There's some complexity to how we handle pricing, since the core of what we do is based off of ingesting the requests and responses, and performing some processes on top of that info. Some people have small prom…

I wish you the best, nonetheless.

And the quality of your product is really good, so congrats on shipping, as usual!

Re: Launch HN: Maitai (YC S24) – Self-Optimizing LLM Platform

#19
Good problem to take on, you're absolutely right that there is a lot of demand for reliability. Curious how effective the learning + tuning really is.

I presume that's the reason for the limited selection of models - i.e. only some are tunable? I think that's my biggest issue with this solution, if I'm going to be dropping this into my LLM pipeline I need to have more control over how the model is used.

Re: Launch HN: Maitai (YC S24) – Self-Optimizing LLM Platform

#20
post #19

Good problem to take on, you're absolutely right that there is a lot of demand for reliability. Curious how effective the learning + tuning really is. I presume that's the reason for the limited selection of models - i.e. only some are tunable? I think that's my biggest issue with this solution, if I'm going to be dropping this into my LLM pipeline I need to have more control over how the model is used.

It's pretty easy for us to add support for additional models right now, we just see that the vast majority of people are using just a few models: gpt-4o/4o-mini, claude-sonnet-3.5, llama3/3.1, or fine-tunes on top of llama3/3.1. We'll be publishing some reports on incremental improvement from passive fine-tuning pretty soon!
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