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Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
211–220 of 819 posts
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
HuggingFace offers DeepSeek as one of its models— it's pretty simple to spin up instances under your control. I'm not sure about OpenRouter but I wouldn't be surprised if they offer a US-based provider of DeepSeek. For reference, Cursor has their first own light fork of Kimi that they use as their baseline coding and review model.
The majority of Deepseek providers on OpenRouter for v4 pro are in the US. Especially interesting is that they are in the same ballpark for pricing.
They are in the same ballpark for deepseek-v4-flash, but deepseek-v4-pro from deepseek is still around 1/2 of the alternatives.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#213Why 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?
“AI coding is a fad” is not just one big camp of similar-minded people. Different groups have to give up on their pre-existing beliefs in order to be ok with AI coding. Think of people who were very strict with variable names. People who pushed for multiple-levels deep of abstractions for a single API logic that’s not going to be reused. People who believed that coding is craft, rather than just a process to get to t…
What's an int vs a float vs a boolean? What's a function? What's a class? What's a variable? You don't actually need to know the answer to those questions in order to vibe code. That's a lot of priors to update!
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
yea, and understanding that too is important. the idea you dont need to read code or analysis seems to align with the depwndcy addiction being shoved in thw pipe.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're a content creator; you define your revenue stream. Uber engineers do not define their revenue stream; the product leadership team does. $1500/mo of AI spend by engineers does not equate to revenue. They need to figure out revenue first before zeroing in on AI spend.
$18K a year is a fraction of the salary of a junior engineer. Claude has allowed me to do refactors that would have taken weeks to instead take a couple of days. It has, objectively, increased the velocity of the engineering component of greenfield features by 40% in my org. You can put a number value on that and decide if it gives you favorable ROI.
The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever).
You’ve gotten a result, but without the work that made you valuable, while deskilling yourself.
It’s a lose/lose situation for…I would say anyone employed as an engineer or programmer. I’m not taking responsible for AI output, the same way I won’t try to fix auto-generated code: because you just regenerate it.
The only person that wins here is the person who can pay you less because they don’t need you, they just need another “types computer guy”.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
perhaps the personal computer? Companies were spending 3-5k (10-15k inflation adjusted) on every employee for just hardware. everyone making comparisons to the dotcom bubble seems misguided. this is clearly computing 2.0 imo
No disagreement on computing 2.0, but companies spending 3-5k per employee for hardware isn't generally a monthly cost. It's a at the time of hire, and then once every 3 to 5 years after that, for a monthly amortized cost of about $50/employee. I have my concerns with current inference pricing in that there's a non-zero possibility for a rug pull in the future for the subscription plans for organizations and individu…
Every employee doesn't need $1k in token spend per month, either. That kind of spend makes sense for technical workers in r+d.
Most other workers are served fine by $20-30 worth of tokens on a budget model. You don't need Opus to help support write emails.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#217Earlier 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?
In addition to the physical depreciations other comments mentioned I'd also mention that old chips will settle into a low price and then actually go up on a per unit basis if you're trying to buy a significant amount of them. With a limitation on fabrication facilities continuing to pump out older cards is an opportunity cost to the manufacturers that would prefer to be producing newer cards. If you were in a place where you suddenly wanted to buy 10,000 3080s, as an example, I'm not certain if the market could actually fulfill that demand and no one with the ability to increase the available supply to meet that demand actually wants to do so.
Chips do wear out and need to be replaced (entropy do be like that and durability is not a primary concern for chip design) so you'll need to refresh your stock and, even if you don't need cutting edge models, the price of all chips at scale will go up over time. It may feel unintuitive since, when the PS3 was released PS1s were extremely cheap - but if you're struggling to understand this effect from your experiences in the consumer market you're actually looking at the price factor that starts making antiques increase in value since at a certain point they become scarce goods. The market price for an NES is higher today than it was in 2003 because the price had already bottomed out from demand from the general consumer market but the demand remaining (speedrunners and the like) is now fixed or growing while the supply is inevitably shrinking.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#218Why 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?
I would use these exact facts as a sign that it's maybe not what it seems. It's much too big and too fast to feel stable. It might keep at that level, increase even more, or drop down to a saner level of use / allocation.
> It might keep at that level, increase even more, or drop down
Bold prediction. :)
I think anyone predicting a drop or near-term flattening is not thinking beyond the online bubbles where these tools are discussed. In a local tech meetup a lot of the normal companies are barely coming online with AI tools at their company, and even then with very low limits.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#219Why 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?
>Why there are so many people that still believe that AI coding is a fad?
Because there's not a single piece of evidence that this has improved the quality of the delivered software, or for that matter even the speed of features any of these companies produce, in fact if anything the opposite.
The point of software development, the hint is in the name, is to develop software, not consume tokens. If Uber was now full of 10x engineers the stock price of Uber would be up, not down on a yearly basis. Hilariously enough the only company whose stock price is up appears to be Antrophic
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't ask LLMs for big changes > Review everything and point them in the right direction Sorry upper management doesn't care. That's an engineering problem that you need to solve.
They were proposing a solution.. To use flash models and use them in a way that best amplifies your work.
He was making a joke.