eventually tokens will cost price of energy. and china is miles ahead.
china will be major token exporter soon. mark my words.
Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
191–200 of 819 posts
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#192Why there are so many people that still believe that AI coding is a fad? It's something that started less than two years ago and companies are already paying thousands per seat. I know one that gives you 5k per month. Which other tool went from nothing to this level of acceptance so quickly?
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Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#193I wonder what they are doing with $1500 per month. I'm on Claude Pro $20 plan and I'm doing well. That's 3 days per week. On the other 2 days I'm using a customer's Claude Max, I don't know if it's the $100 or the $200 plan, but I'm sharing it with some of its other developers.
$1500/mth is token pricing. Your other plans are fixed price with rate limits where you get more tokens than the dollar equivalent you pay monthly. These plans are economical only if majority of users spend less tokens in $ than the plan's costs. This subsidizes the gap vs. power users who spend multiple k$ monthly in API tokens.
Next to no one would be using less than the subscription price given how expensive Opus API is.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most sane US companies will disallow use of cloud-based Chinese AI providers, because everything including code, data, PII, etc is being sent to them.
I wonder if I could start a US-based company with good data regulation and just serve open-weight models at a competitive price. I feel like the real barrier is just that most companies willing to adopt AI usage enough to make it worth it at this point don't want to be using inferior models.
Yes, you can. There are multiple inference providers out there. The problem is, it’s hard to beat the Chinese providers in cost. And you also have to compete with frontier model providers’ subsidized offerings.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do we know that AI providers are going to keep these per-token prices, or eventually lower them because of competition from China? I genuinely do not know how prices can get lower from the current major providers in NA without the whole market collapsing. Everyone is spending copious amounts of money to presumably make more money back.
An inference only platform selling good open weight model inference without the research overhead could capture a-lot of market for lower size model uses (haiky, gemeni flash). Diffusion-transformers and clever cashing can drop inference even lower, which is improving at a high rate. The biggest reason large models are un-attainable for local applications is the lack hardware with large amount of unified/graphics mem…
I agree with all of this.
So my question remains the same: How are the players investing 100s of billions in buildout going to hope to make this back? Market capture looks bleak, inference looks like a race to the bottom. End users look like they could be beneficiaries. Where do the big boys go?
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most sane US companies will disallow use of cloud-based Chinese AI providers, because everything including code, data, PII, etc is being sent to them.
I wonder if I could start a US-based company with good data regulation and just serve open-weight models at a competitive price. I feel like the real barrier is just that most companies willing to adopt AI usage enough to make it worth it at this point don't want to be using inferior models.
Here's a free startup idea: operate an open-weight model service, and offer "Verified AI Integrity," which signs the input tokens, the seed for the randomness in selecting outputs, and the model ID, proving that the result of the call to AI was completely "organic" and was not interfered with.
Your main audience would be snake oil salesmen trying to prove their AI products are unbiased and not under the thumb of any outside influence. This doesn't address the biases of the model itself, but that's not your business. Your business is selling tokens and security certificates. If you can get the right angel investor, you could maybe have your new standard required for some government applications.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
One aspect Paul Kedrosky mentioned recently is the concept of „duration mismatch“. The price per token goes down over time (either because the AI vendor reduces due to competition pressure, or because customers are now incentivized to use older cheaper models). But datacenters are financed through debt, with the assumption their revenue increases over time. Quoting him: „[AI vendors are] paying for a fixed cost with…
do GPU chips really depreciate physically? There are no moving parts, I dont think memory chips or GPU chips deteriorate naturally. I think its only accounting depreciation. I have been using my laptop for a decade, what is stopping datacenters from using the purchased GPU chips for a decade?
Today's data center GPUs are essentially overclocked, and so at limit of how much the chip materials can physically handle, and therefore degrade over time. For example, GH200s operate at 1W/superchip but the actual safe power is somewhere around 650W which will allow them to function for a decade or more. But that leads to around 15% slowdown and that is unacceptable in today's competition. So current GPUs are destined to be depreciating assets.
In future, we might have fixed cost GPUs but not today.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#198> I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI - which currently costs me just $100 per provider thanks to their generous subsidized plans for individual subscribers. Do we know that AI providers are going to keep these per-token prices, or eventually lower them because of competition from China? Many lower-budget individuals are now moving to China open weight mode…
id be amazed any american business will aend data to china
Together.ai provide many open weights models and as far as I’m are their servers are US based (the company certainly is)
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#199> I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI - which currently costs me just $100 per provider thanks to their generous subsidized plans for individual subscribers. Do we know that AI providers are going to keep these per-token prices, or eventually lower them because of competition from China? Many lower-budget individuals are now moving to China open weight mode…
Most sane US companies will disallow use of cloud-based Chinese AI providers, because everything including code, data, PII, etc is being sent to them.
Then don't use the cloud-based Chinese providers, use cloud-base US/EU providers using Chinese models. The interesting Chinese models are all open making this issue mostly moot.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is tok/s not a bottleneck I? I assume most people still use ai agents interactively rather than leaving them to do their own thing during the night. I find anything below 50 tps or so entirely unusable... Regardless its Apples to oranges anyway, inference is quite cheap for open weight models its just that Claude and OpenAI can charge very high margins compared to e.g. DeepSeek or various provider on OpenRouter s…
It's not a bottleneck if you care about the actual code.
I would expect the overwhelming majority of output tokens would not be the actual code but used for analysis, reasoning, testing and iteration. If you only use the agent for autocomplete then yes, the calculation is probably different.