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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

#361

Post by jmalicki »

HumanOstrich wrote: post #299
jmalicki wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as the demand for GPUs keeps increasing, there are more data centers being built to house them. When you have waitlists for many many months for Blackwell GPUs, keeping the old ones around as long as customers are willing to pay for them is great. If I as a customer have a use case for a machine learning model I developed awhile ago, so an insect identification model, I had an ML researcher/eng develop it bac…

We aren't talking about insect identification models from 2019.

What do you think are running on the T4 GPUs in AWS? A lot of the use cases I know of for them are mid-level computer vision models that don't need to be frontier level.

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

#362

Post by javier2 »

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?

Because the vibe coded stuff is sometimes great, sometimes it breaks stuff, sometimes it breaks things that we fixed multiple times earlier. The PRs are too large, nobody can review that mess and you better be on call for your deployment. Maybe it will get better, maybe not. I dont know yet.

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

#363

Post by hgoel »

foobarian wrote: post #221
bijowo1676 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> There are no moving parts, I dont think memory chips or GPU chips deteriorate naturally I believe they do, but I too would love to know more details because there are several ways this can happen. Electromigration, package failures, VRAM failures, dielectric breakdown... Hopefully there will be studies soon similar to that old Google paper on HDD failures!

Currently it's a pretty big ask to look at the several hundred billion transistors and the interconnects between them to find what broke.

Though, those capabilities are maybe just a few years out, funnily it's taking AI to make it potentially doable.

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

#364

Post by mike_hock »

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #260
lbrito wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every consultant ever, but to be fair that's not per seat.

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

#366

Post by cmiles8 »

5701652400 wrote: post #191

eventually tokens will cost price of energy. and china is miles ahead. china will be major token exporter soon. mark my words.

Electricity actually is only a small part of the data center costs. There are challenges in getting enough electricity that create problems, but the cost of the electricity really isn’t an issue.

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

#367

Post by marcosdumay »

javier2 wrote: post #362
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?

Because the vibe coded stuff is sometimes great, sometimes it breaks stuff, sometimes it breaks things that we fixed multiple times earlier. The PRs are too large, nobody can review that mess and you better be on call for your deployment. Maybe it will get better, maybe not. I dont know yet.

Oh, it won't get any better. LLMs already trained on every bit of code ever published, they won't get any more material.

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

#368

Post by marcosdumay »

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #260
lbrito wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are so many. Can I start with Oracle databases?

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

#369

Post by darkwizard42 »

dadoomer wrote: post #346
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.

You can even just instruct the LLM to create a context file for you! They are surprisingly good at that as well.

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

#370

Post by nothercastle »

missedthecue wrote: post #330
biztos wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to not un-build the data centers, they at least have to make more than it costs to operate them, and also not have some attractive liquidation value (the land, maybe). I could imagine something like “inference is done at home or in China, that’s the price to beat” and it’s not worth keeping all those GPUs cool out in Nevada.

But the parent comment was that one of the bigger costs in these data centers was the interest expense on the borrowed money. A restructuring removes or heavily reduces that amount. The fiber laid during the dotcom bubble never paid back the investors or lenders, but it's still profitably connecting customers all these years later.

It’s true once built the data center can operate right up to a financed data center value of zero. The investors will loose money but the costs of AI will go down as they do
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