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Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

simonwillison.net

21–30 of 819 posts

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#21
post #13

Seems odd limit, especially since it highly dependant on Token provider used, with Opus this is not much and could easily be burnt in a week or less, but with something like deepseek the 1500 can literarily be an annual budget. That being said, I do have to wonder why someone as bug as say Uber, simply not rollout OSS model in the cloud for their team, I'd imagine that would be cheapest & most flexible option, while…

[deleted]

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#22
post #16

$1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum. Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something. 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

at their scale they could also just run a large on-premise or rented (basically still cloud, but cheaper) GPU cluster and run through that. fixed costs, even license a SOTA model’s weights if you’d like

> even license a SOTA model’s weights if you’d like

Yeah, I bet all labs releasing SOTA models are more than happy to remove the main way they make money and let you run it locally, especially if you're a big spender like Uber who seems very willing to throw money into the sea as an experiment.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no evidence that per-token inference prices (which is what Uber is setting a cap on) is subsidized.

Is there any evidence that it's not?

Yes; they ban various uses of their subscriptions but say you can do whatever if you’re paying for the API without limits

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#24

$1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum. Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something. 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

> it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend?

You can ask the same for the median 330k salary in the US for Uber Engineering... and being a bit snarky, attending Uber engineers talks here and there at a few conferences, looks like. they love to (re)invent internal tooling/platforms. That's pretty expensive on its own.

EDIT: I'm not saying that Uber's engineers didn't add value to the company, they absolutely did and handling the scale up they had to handle is not an easy feat. But I do challenge the notion of "what features did they create with that (LLM) spending?" of GP.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#25

$1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum. Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something. 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

$1.5kpm for SOTA. 128gb you run DSV4 Flash.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#26

$1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum. Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something. 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

[deleted]

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#27

$1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum. Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something. 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

> WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? WTF did anyone build with all that spend? Despite all the feel-good anecdotes about how productive folks feel using ai coding tools there's a deafening silence when it comes to actual, demonstrated efficacy. How can we be this far entrenched in these workflows and still not know whether they actually do anything useful?

I can say at least for me at a small-ish company (~40 FTE) there has been a surge in internal productivity tools. Nothing to improve the end user product directly but a lot of tools to make processes easier and less error prone.

What would previously be janky internal dashboards or excel sheets are now actually nice to use tools. That said of course the maintenance cost of all that has yet to be discovered, and the ROI is questionable.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is market introductory pricing that hasn't factored in cost recovery. Most of it has been run on early investment with the assumption they will recover costs in the long run. The prices are subsidized across the board and they will need to go up signficantly to recover them.

None of what you said is true

And you know this how?

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#30

$1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum. Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something. 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

Right - the future of LLMs is like ol' windows XP+Dell. Commercialized "things" you run locally offline, co-designed with hardware, with a known productivity suite, and large businesses building the next generation thing and suite with 18mo release cycles (ish).
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