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Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs

claudecodecamp.com

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Re: Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs

#351

Post by aenis »

tabbott wrote: post #268

I find it interesting that folks are so focused on cost for AI models. Human time spent redirecting AI coding agents towards better strategies and reviewing work, remains dramatically more expensive than the token cost for AI coding, for anything other than hobby work (where you're not paying for the human labor). $200/month is an expensive hobby, but it's negligible as a business expense; SalesForce licenses cost fa…

That.

We already shipped 3 things this year built using Claude. The biggest one was porting two native apps into one react native app - which was originally estimated to be a 6-7 month project for a 9 FTE team, and ended up being a 2 months project with 2 people. To me, the economic value of a claude subscription used right is in the range of 10-40k eur, depending on the type of work and the developer driving it. If Anthropic jacked the prices 100x today, I'd still buy the licenses for my guys.

Edit: ok, if they charged 20k per month per seat I'd also start benchmarking the alternatives and local models, but for my business case, running a 700M budget, Claude brings disproportionate benefis, not just in time saved in developer costs, but also faster shipping times, reduced friction between various product and business teams, and so on. For the first time we generally say 'yes' to whichever frivolities our product teams come up with, and thats a nice feeling.

Re: Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs

#352

Post by scuff3d »

hyraki wrote: post #315
tabbott wrote: post #268

I find it interesting that folks are so focused on cost for AI models. Human time spent redirecting AI coding agents towards better strategies and reviewing work, remains dramatically more expensive than the token cost for AI coding, for anything other than hobby work (where you're not paying for the human labor). $200/month is an expensive hobby, but it's negligible as a business expense; SalesForce licenses cost fa…

Yes 200 as a business expense is really not that bad. But a hobby is hard to justify.

It's not gonna stay that way. Token cost is being massively subsidized right now. Prices will have to start increasing at some point.

Re: Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs

#353

Post by jasonjmcghee »

_pdp_ wrote: post #29

IMHO there is a point where incremental model quality will hit diminishing returns. It is like comparing an 8K display to a 16K display because at normal viewing distance, the difference is imperceptible, but 16K comes at significant premium. The same applies to intelligence. Sure, some users might register a meaningful bump, but if 99% can't tell the difference in their day-to-day work, does it matter? A 20-30% cost…

It's more like, if it gets it right 99% of the time, that sounds incredible.

Until it's making 100k decisions a day and many are dependent on previous results.

Re: Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs

#354

Post by what »

dustingetz wrote: post #219
Aurornis wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not really clear whether Opus 4.5+ represent a level shift on this frontier or just inhabits place on that curve which delivers higher performance, but at rapidly diminishing returns to inference cost. I think we're reaching the point where more developers need to start right-sizing the model and effort level to the task. It was easy to get comfortable with using the best model at the highest setting for every…

Human dev labor cost is still the high pole in the tent, even multiplying today's subsidized subscription cost by 10x. If the capability improvement trajectory continues, developers should prepare for a new economy where more productivity is achieved by fewer devs by shifting substantial labor budget to AI.

Your employer doesn’t pay the subscription cost, they pay per token. So it’s already way more than 10x the cost.

Re: Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs

#355

Post by devmor »

dboreham wrote: post #106
mattkevan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not really, companies like GM used to boast about how well they treated their employees and communities. It was Jack Welch and a legion of like-minded arseholes who decided they should be increasingly richer no matter who or what paid for it.

See also HP. Pretty much only Costco left.

Costco is such a strange and stark case standing in opposition to this general rule. From everything I hear, I can only gather that the reason is because of extremely experienced and level-headed executive staff.

Re: Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs

#356

Post by Gigachad »

scuff3d wrote: post #352
hyraki wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes 200 as a business expense is really not that bad. But a hobby is hard to justify.

It's not gonna stay that way. Token cost is being massively subsidized right now. Prices will have to start increasing at some point.

Seems like the real costs and numbers are very hidden right now. It’s all private companies and secret info how much anything costs and if anything is profitable.

Re: Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs

#357

Post by jpalawaga »

justapassenger wrote: post #220
jpalawaga wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except developers can’t even do that. Estimation of any not-small task that hasn’t been done before is essentially a random guess.

That's why you split tasks and do project management 101. That's how things worked pre-AI, and old problems are new problems again. When you run any bigger project, you have senior folks who tackle hardest parts of it, experienced folks who can churn out massive amounts of code, junior folks who target smaller/simpler/better scoped problems, etc. We don't default to tell the most senior engineer "you solve all of tho…

Yeah... you split tasks into consecutively smaller tasks until it's estimateable.

I'm not saying that can't be done, but taking a large task that hasn't been broken down needs, you guessed it, a powerful agent. that's your senior engineer who can figure out the rote parts, the medium parts, and the thorny parts.

the goal isn't to have an engineer do that. we should still be throwing powerful agents at a problem, they should just be delegating the work more efficiently.

throwing either an engineer or an agent at any unexplored work means you just have to delegate the most experienced resource to, or suffer the consequences.

Re: Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs

#358

Post by what »

sumedh wrote: post #330
giwook wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and I'm also quite skeptical that Anthropic will be able to remain true to its initial, noble mission statement of acting for the global good once they IPO. At that point you are beholden to your shareholders and no longer can eschew profit in favor of ethics. Unfortunately, I think this is the beginning of the end of Anthropic and Modei being a company and CEO you could actually get behind and believe that…

> At that point you are beholden to your shareholders No not really, you can issue two types of shares, the company founders can control a type of shares which has more voting power while other shareholders can get a different type of shares with less voting power. Facebook, Google has something similar.

No, they still have to act in the interest of shareholders even if they have no voting power.

Re: Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs

#359

Post by jpalawaga »

nilkn wrote: post #206
jpalawaga wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except developers can’t even do that. Estimation of any not-small task that hasn’t been done before is essentially a random guess.

I don't completely agree. Estimation is nontrivial, but not necessarily a random guess. Teams of human engineers have been doing this for decades -- not always with great success, but better than random. Deciding whether to put an intern or your best staff engineer on a problem is a challenge known to any engineering manager and TPM.

or tech lead. or whoever. the point is, someone has to do the sizing. I think applying an underpowered agent to a task of unknown size is about as good as getting the intern to do it.

Even EMs and TPMs are assigning people based on their previous experience, which generally boils down to "i've seen this task before and I know what's involved," "this task is small, and I know what's involved," or "this task is too big and needs to be understood better."

Re: Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs

#360

Post by wg0 »

aenis wrote: post #351
tabbott wrote: post #268

I find it interesting that folks are so focused on cost for AI models. Human time spent redirecting AI coding agents towards better strategies and reviewing work, remains dramatically more expensive than the token cost for AI coding, for anything other than hobby work (where you're not paying for the human labor). $200/month is an expensive hobby, but it's negligible as a business expense; SalesForce licenses cost fa…

That. We already shipped 3 things this year built using Claude. The biggest one was porting two native apps into one react native app - which was originally estimated to be a 6-7 month project for a 9 FTE team, and ended up being a 2 months project with 2 people. To me, the economic value of a claude subscription used right is in the range of 10-40k eur, depending on the type of work and the developer driving it. If…

Who's going to review that output for accuracy? We'll leave performance and security as unnecessary luxuries in this age and time.

In my experience, even Claude 4.6's output can't be trusted blindly it'll write flawed code and would write tests that would be testing that flawed code giving false sense of confidence and accomplishment only to be revealed upon closer inspection later.

Additionally - it's age old known fact that code is always easier to write (even prior to AI) but is always tenfold difficult to read and understand (even if you were the original author yourself) so I'm not so sure this much generative output from probabilistic models would have been so flawless that nobody needs to read and understand that code.

Too good to be true.

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