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The AI Credit Resale Economy

vectoral.com

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Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#111

Post by selcuka »

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.

Define cost: Is it only the inference cost to the provider, or do you also consider training costs as well?

If it's the latter, how would you estimate the number of total tokens that will be sold for the current model (so that we can calculate marginal cost)?

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#112

Post by wodenokoto »

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,…

Some sellers sell the token twice. Once to the buyer and once more as training data to labs building models.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#113

Post by Filligree »

pyvpx wrote: post #89
bonoboTP wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am not, but would be interested to hear. Any articles?

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#114

Post by ElFitz »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #62
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

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

> and providers don't have to cover training capex.

How so?

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#118

Post by freakynit »

zuzululu wrote: post #51

man seems like this entire thread invited a bunch of ads for exactly the thing talked about in the article can't they detect if someone is reselling their tokens like this ? doesn't seem too hard

What if the model providers themselves don't want to? What if this itself is the way to bypass sanctions? What recent open models like deepseek v4 have now shown is that inference is actually much cheaper than what most people think.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#119

Post by smivan »

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).

My pet theory is that the PRC is heavily subsidizing the hosted inferencing costs in order to capture valuable training data, token usage patterns and the occasional leak of valuable data.

Given their past history and current geopolitics, I'd be willing to bet this is more likely than not.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#120

Post by damienmeur »

I also saw some posts on linkedin of people willing to pay to use unused quota resets.

Not sure is this what they meant by the great “ai wealth redistribution”.

With Grok being half-priced for indian residents, I would not be shocked to see a parallel indian account resell economy coming.

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