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

simonwillison.net

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

#341

Post by djeastm »

chmod775 wrote: post #269
saulpw wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you can't talk to them about the flow of the code. You can't ask them for their thinking as to why certain things are. You can absolutely do this. It's even right most of the time.

Let's be real. Most of the time you ask an LLM "Why did you do it like this?", it responds with something along the lines of "Oops. My bad. You're right to point this out." You even have a fair chance of getting a response like that when there isn't anything wrong and the question wasn't rhetorical - which perfectly illustrates the level of the genuine understanding LLMs operate at.

I remember hearing (perhaps last year?) that the model companies have specifically tried to obfuscate the "thinking/reasoning" behind the decisions the models make so as to prevent cheaper models from training on the reasoning logs. So asking one "why did you do it like this" might be not fruitful.

Not sure if that's true or if it might be influencing what you're seeing, but it's a thought.

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

#342

Post by themafia »

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?

Why are there so many people who mistake simple anecdotes for actionable data? Why do the majority of businesses fail rather than succeed?

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

#343

Post by sparrc »

suncemoje wrote: post #328

Lock-in / switching costs are increasingly concerning me. I am using Claude for a good year now and have been accumulating so much "knowledge" in there by now. If Claude became less favorable in terms of price/performance in the future, that would worry me. I've started to think about a distributed solution, where my storage is detached from the inference, but currently Claude is still the way to go for me. Wondering…

My favorite solution to this is to use the Cline coding agent, which is open and allows you to easily switch between different providers and models.

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

#344

Post by themafia »

newobj wrote: post #80

It's also a useful signal for AI value. Looks like it's a max value add of $18,000 per engineer per year.

It means Uber thinks they can sustain that level of expense. Whether engineers at Uber are representative of the rest of the work force is an easily debatable question.

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

#345

Post by geysersam »

dgellow wrote: post #164
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…

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…

Current AI datacenter/model development investment rate is roughly 1T/year. That's a lot. But the US economy is 33T/year. So the investment pays back (roughly) over ten years if, each year, the AI investments increase overall productivity by 0.6%, assuming the AI companies can capture half of the value of that productivity gain.

> „[AI vendors are] paying for a fixed cost with a depreciating commodity“

That's just a confusing way to say you don't think future models will be worth the development costs. Because if future models are significantly better, why would the price of tokens to access those models deprecate?

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

#346

Post by dadoomer »

suncemoje wrote: post #328

Lock-in / switching costs are increasingly concerning me. I am using Claude for a good year now and have been accumulating so much "knowledge" in there by now. If Claude became less favorable in terms of price/performance in the future, that would worry me. I've started to think about a distributed solution, where my storage is detached from the inference, but currently Claude is still the way to go for me. Wondering…

Isn't all the "knowledge" just text files? I've transitioned between services easily by simply copying the text files.

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

#348

Post by GrinningFool »

thewebguyd wrote: post #166
anthonypasq wrote: post #152

Earlier 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…

Any kind of rug-pull is a serious concern. Companies are re-orienting their entire development processes around these tools. Sure they can go back, but it will require a much larger and more expensive effort than to transition in the first place.

All companies who make this transition will be more or less at the mercy of model providers.

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

#349

Post by WarmWash »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #288
satvikpendem wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

If you do the math, they don't have a choice. If China captures America's AI market it'll cause a major depression. They'll give it the BYD treatment, though it'll be a lot less effective.

They'll ban them because (unless run locally or self-hosted) they are just data capture tools for the China.
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