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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

#391

Post by fg137 »

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…

What knowledge?

Unless you work in some obscure domain, chances are that any general "knowledge" Claude has "learned" is already public data somewhere.

If you don't believe me, launch Codex and immediately start working on the same project (s). You might discover that all the knowledge accumulated means almost nothing.

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

#392

Post by munk-a »

thundergolfer wrote: post #373

> That means each employee's AI spending cap is ~11% of that median compensation package. Probably better to use the fully-loaded cost of the engineer, which is much higher than their compensation package. The fully-loaded cost is the total cost paid for the labor power of the engineer, and it includes big ticket items such as office space, food, equipment, insurance, payroll tax, fringe benefits, recruiting costs. I…

My usual rule of thumb for the US is north of double the received compensation but something in that range sounds reasonable with such high compensation. It's actually really interesting and underappreciated how that fully-loaded cost varies from country to country. Canada (for most salary ranges) is about half again instead of double owing to the insurance portion coming out of income tax rather than being a hidden expense so Vancouver ends up being attractive for trading 160k USD for like 120k CAD in compensation and then also lowering overhead from 100k USD down to like 60k CAD. The savings can be extremely dramatic.

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

#393

Post by HDBaseT »

bijowo1676 wrote: post #310
tardedmeme wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gradually, and especially when hot. Modern chips are pretty close to the physical limits of how small they can be made, and that means atomic/chemical effects like electromigration are accounted for and determine the lifetime. Every extra 10 degrees Celsius of temperature doubles the speed of chemical reactions. When they stray too close to the line ... you get Intel's 13/14th gen chips that wear out after 1-2 years…

sounds like planned depreciation on Intel's part, they definitely do not design server grade chips for longevity since that would harm their own revenues

It was not planned depreciation, as many chips were failing even before 2 years and this impacted not only PC Builders and Gamers, but also some server infra providers too.

This was simply poor design, it took Intel ages to really figure out what went wrong and "resolve" it.

It cost them far more than it made.

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

#394

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#395

Post by dakolli »

rd wrote: post #180
freediddy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if I could start a US-based company with good data regulation and just serve open-weight models at a competitive price. I feel like the real barrier is just that most companies willing to adopt AI usage enough to make it worth it at this point don't want to be using inferior models.

Have you heard of openrouter? There's 1000 of these companies already. Do something else.

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

#396

Post by dakolli »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #194
rd wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if I could start a US-based company with good data regulation and just serve open-weight models at a competitive price. I feel like the real barrier is just that most companies willing to adopt AI usage enough to make it worth it at this point don't want to be using inferior models.

Yes, you can. There are multiple inference providers out there. The problem is, it’s hard to beat the Chinese providers in cost. And you also have to compete with frontier model providers’ subsidized offerings.

They charge the exact same prices. So many people in these comments have no idea what they're talking about. Even if they did charge less, nobody is going to deal with the latency of sending requests to China.

edit: Actually American inference providers are cheaper for Chinese models. There's way more competition here because the Chinese aren't idiots and investing every last dollar they have into data centers for llms that don't make money..

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

#397

Post by seanlinehan »

CSMastermind wrote: post #388

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.

I would assume that at least one of two things are true:

1. They're costs are so so out of control that they need to impose a blanket cap immediately. Figuring out an allocation mechanism that can be deployed company wide is time consuming and they need to staunch the bleeding immediately, despite it being obviously suboptimal.

2. The few people who should have unlimited tokens were given exactly that. No reason to introduce such nuance to a public PR move. The hard-cap limit is a great negotiating posture with token providers.

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

#398

Post by agumonkey »

johnfn wrote: post #203
agumonkey wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would use these exact facts as a sign that it's maybe not what it seems. It's much too big and too fast to feel stable. It might keep at that level, increase even more, or drop down to a saner level of use / allocation.

So it might either go up, stay the same, or go down? :)

heh yeah, i'm also selling trading advice :p

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

#400

Post by era-epoch »

Reading the headline

Oh that's actually really economical! I wonder if they're doing a lot on locally running models or managing a shared context or knowledge-base in some clever way, maybe just encouraging employees to be efficient and mindful.

...

> each employee

...

> per AI coding tool

...

> I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI

What on this godforsaken earth are all you rich idiots doing???

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