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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

#381

Post by sdevonoes »

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.

Not a service, but do you remember Scrum Masters? We had them as full time employees not so long ago. Pure fad.

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

#382

Post by devin »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #353
devin wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"as most arguments don't apply to today's world" makes me want to roll my eyes so hard at you. The vast majority of problems we had with building complicated systems are all still just sitting there. People are speedrunning relearning things we've known about software engineering for decades. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The examples I gave, and the arguments that usually support them don’t really translate into “building complicated systems”. I was talking about the arguments in support of variable naming flamewars, etc. I’m not proponent of AI generating everything without any supervision as of now. But willing to change my mind when it gets better. Most software engineering jobs are not cutting-edge tech, or research, or solving u…

So I accept that “nonsense arguments are nonsense”, but with some minor differences of opinion. Naming of things matters insofar as you care as a human to actually conceptualize the system you’re building. You can call all of this stuff minutiae, and on some level I kind of agree, except for the general vibe of _caring about the quality of the stuff you produce_. That is something that still matters whether it “works”. Like, yes you can get an LLM to gen some junk, but _is it any good_ is still something you are in charge of.

As far as “boring systems are boring”, I can tell you from experience that I work on a pretty boring system, and AI is not all that meaningful in terms of its impact, and it’s not for a lack of trying.

Can it help me create a migration and add an endpoint and such? Sure. But those aren’t the hard problems. They never were.

It’s funny that you think the idea of slowing down is such a bad one, but it is another well-established truth. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. This notion of break/fixing your way to prosperity by way of 10,000 ill-conceived PRs is a fool’s game.

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

#383

Post by epolanski »

f311a wrote: post #37

How many more months do we need to wait, until big companies realize that flash models work just fine if you: 1) Don't ask LLMs for big changes 2) Review everything and point them in the right direction Large models still suck at big changes, they produce questionable architecture and you still have to review the code, if your project is serious enough. The codebase quickly become a mess, if you don't pay enough atte…

I'm legit annoyed at opus 4.8 at any setting above 4.8.

I believe it can be great for vibe coding, but mundane day work? Hell no, I'd rather work with Haiku. It's too slow, checks too many things, it's annoying as hell.

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

#384

Post by dakolli »

WarmWash wrote: post #349
CuriouslyC wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please explain to me how that works. If I download gguf file and run inference with it, how is it collecting and sending data back to China?

This makes no sense, 99% of the people using Chinese models are using them via Western inference providers who are running them and serving them to people over openrouter or whatever. If anyone is stealing your data it would be an American or European inference provider. A model has no ability to send data anywhere.

China bad by default, right?

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

#385

Post by epolanski »

_jab wrote: post #186
f311a wrote: post #37

How many more months do we need to wait, until big companies realize that flash models work just fine if you: 1) Don't ask LLMs for big changes 2) Review everything and point them in the right direction Large models still suck at big changes, they produce questionable architecture and you still have to review the code, if your project is serious enough. The codebase quickly become a mess, if you don't pay enough atte…

It's pretty simple; organizations are willing to tolerate paying $1500/month/engineer, which seems to be roughly inline with "normal" consumption for most full-time engineers. If that number grows significantly, then I bet companies will start exploring flash models more, as you propose.

Which organizations?

Uber is not representative of any trend beyond big tech and VC over funded startups.

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

#386

Post by spprashant »

walthamstow wrote: post #332

I think a lot of people are missing that this is $1500 _per tool_ which is still rather a lot of money.

Outside of coding what other tools expend that kind of tokens? People are not creating that many slide decks or videos are they?

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

#387

Post by NewsaHackO »

djeastm wrote: post #341
chmod775 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that has to do more with the thinking "train of thought" that some models show as what the model is processing before making the response. There shouldn't be a distillation risk with actually asking the model to explain why it made a decision and getting the response.

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

#388

Post by CSMastermind »

A blanket cap makes no sense to me. There's a power distribution of AI use in my company and I'd imagine it's the same at a much greater scale at Uber.

I'd guess there should be a few people Uber is bascially allocating unlimited AI spending to and a large swath they're giving basically nothing.

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

#389

Post by dakolli »

EA-3167 wrote: post #273
Animats wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raise them, more likely. NVidia says that GPU hardware prices won't decrease until at least 2030. The world is out of fab capacity.

Seriously, they’re trying to justify trillion+ IPO’s while setting piles of money on fire, prices aren’t going DOWN.

They aren't going down, but in the meantime they'll cover their ass by bribing their way into the S&P 500 and then use your 60 year old mother's 401k and teacher's pension to fund their risky capital expenditure.

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

#390

Post by nalekberov »

What is the point of allowing a developer to spend $18,000 a year on AI subscriptions? Can't they hire a decent developer who is capable of producing a quality solution faster? Clearly, these decisions are all made by high-level management team.

I was recently talking to an HR person from a European company, and she goes: 'We are forcing our developers to use AI coding agents, but they are still kind of hesitant.' This person had never written a single line of code, nor did she know what software engineering is. For these people, using AI coding agents = faster delivery without breaking anything.

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