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

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

#251

Post by bluGill »

dgellow wrote: post #170
CharlieDigital wrote: post #4

$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?

You’re way better to run your own on premise models. Laptops are depreciating assets, do not benefit from economy of scale, have fixed specs, result in a fragmented fleet where you need to keep models up to date. Without talking about power consumption and cooling issues. I really don’t see why companies would go that direction

You don't need to run on laptops, desktops plugged into mains power get more power consumption and better cooling. I want my laptop to work, but I can accept when I'm on an airplane at 32k feet I get less abilities.

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

#252

Post by nomel »

fragmede wrote: post #213
tokioyoyo wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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!

And, you don't have to vibe code. A competent developer can make great use of AI. I think a developer that can develop the system themselves is the most accelerated user.

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

#253

Post by tmp10423288442 »

freediddy wrote: post #149
ValentineC wrote: post #104

> 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.

There are some objections here saying that some US firms are using Chinese AI providers, but I wonder if any of those are subject to compliance. Large firms that are disproportionately responsible for AI spending are all subject to compliance.

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

#254

Post by toasty228 »

tuesdaynight wrote: post #138

Why 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?

There is a whole spectrum between "ai coding is a fad" and "unlimited tokens for every employees we don't even care if it actually ends up being a net positive financially"

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

#255

Post by ftkftk »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #229
ftkftk wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~70 FTE Engineering team. We are shipping more features, especially features that previously would not have survived the cut to make it on the roadmap. Even though we are shipping more, our total amount of escaped bugs has not increased, so our escape rate has actually lowered. On top of that we are able to triage and fix escaped bugs more quickly now. And then of course there has been an uptick in internal tooling t…

> We are shipping more features That's not really the important question; the important question: is it generating revenue . If you increase your spend -> ship more features -> no correlated increase in revenue, that's just burning money. If a team of 10 spends 1 extra headcount ($180k/year) and ships features with no corresponding growth in revenue, what does that mean? There was probably a reason it was on the back…

> is it generating revenue

Yes! :)

> There was probably a reason it was on the backlog (because it didn't really have value).

There are definitely things in the backlog with low value. We don't work those items, even if we could now. The additional bandwidth we have now goes to valuable features that drive revenue and retention metrics. The reason they were on the backlog were because we just didn't have the bandwidth to execute on them well and they were just somewhat less valuable than the critical path items on the roadmap.

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

#256

Post by malfist »

fragmede wrote: post #213
tokioyoyo wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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!

> You don't actually need to know the answer to those questions in order to vibe code

No, but you do need to know the answer to respond to that 3AM page about prod being down.

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

#257

Post by malfist »

john01dav wrote: post #236

Why isn't self hosting (even just renting a GPU server, not necessarily on premise) at large companies or hosting via something like together AI to run the open weight models not more common? I've tried the open weight models and the premium models like Opus and Gemini Pro, and I find that the latter are a little better, but not nearly to the degree to justify the extreme price difference, since the differences large…

Where are you buying the GPUs to have enough compute to run a medium size buisness?

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

#258

Post by tmp10423288442 »

toasty228 wrote: post #254
tuesdaynight wrote: post #138

Why 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?

There is a whole spectrum between "ai coding is a fad" and "unlimited tokens for every employees we don't even care if it actually ends up being a net positive financially"

> "unlimited tokens for every employees we don't even care if it actually ends up being a net positive financially"

That was clearly a short-term trend that would obviously get fixed. Doesn't say much about AI coding as a business model.

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

#259

Post by satvikpendem »

ValentineC wrote: post #104

> 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…

Don't worry, they'll just lobby to ban Chinese models instead to keep their token revenues high.

> Compounding the problem, labs in China often release dual-use capable models as open-weight. Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed, making the model available to any state or non-state actor to use for malicious purposes, including the cyber and CBRN misuse those safeguards were built to prevent.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership

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

#260

Post by tmp10423288442 »

lbrito wrote: post #237
tuesdaynight wrote: post #138

Why 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?

That's just a non sequitur. "companies are already paying thousands per seat" has zero correlation with something being a fad or not. There are much more reasonable rationales explaining why companies are acting the way they are than "because AI coding is not a fad"

Can you name a service that charged companies thousands/seat/month that turned out to be almost or completely useless? There's lots of random services sold to corporates that are not very useful (all the random benefits besides health care, life insurance, and other big-ticket items), but the per-seat charge of those is much smaller.
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