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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

#441

Post by [deleted] »

dakolli wrote: post #384
WarmWash wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#442

Post by luisgvv »

vb-8448 wrote: post #426
marcosdumay wrote: post #401

Just to put this in context. If every company did this, all over the world, with that same limit, we are talking about something around $45B monthly in revenue for all AI companies to share.

There are a lot of places in Europe where 1.5k$ is more than 50% of the total cost of an employee. And the obvious question: what it's the cost of that revenue? Because it looks huge but ...

Don't you forget about India and Latinamerica... No way I see companies paying that much for outsourced employees

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

#444

Post by ThunderSizzle »

sdevonoes wrote: post #381
tmp10423288442 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hope this is sarcasm, or "half" my job doesn't exist or something. Or you talking about full time non-dev scrum masters?

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

#445

Post by sirsinsalot »

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?

Fear of loss to competitors embracing a technology creates a fear driven adoption.

Let me ask you this: is any technology worth so much break-neck adoption without first seeing clear evidence of ROI? No. The adoption is irrational.

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

#446

Post by tacticus »

chadgpt3 wrote: post #405
HDBaseT wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They didn't replace all the chips like with the FDIV bug though. What did it cost them? Only reputation?

Not even that in the end.

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

#447

Post by hansvm »

munk-a wrote: post #392
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…

Why would double be a good rule of thumb for typical US SWEs? Most of the costs aren't proportional to salary, and the ones which are aren't anywhere approaching 50%, much less double.

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

#448

Post by RussianCow »

dakolli wrote: post #396
tokioyoyo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ll…

By "cost" I think the parent means the provider's own costs, not the cost of inference to the customer. The cost of land, labor, and electricity are significantly lower in China than in the US.

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

#449

Post by RussianCow »

fg137 wrote: post #274
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.

It's called AWS. Bedrock is right there. Price or data policy is never the issue. The models themselves are the problem -- most large US companies are not going to touch them. Source: directly involved in these discussions. You can downvote as much as you'd like but you can't ignore the facts.

> The models themselves are the problem -- most large US companies are not going to touch them.

Can you expand on this?

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

#450

Post by sirsinsalot »

Barrin92 wrote: post #219
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 there are so many people that still believe that AI coding is a fad? Because there's not a single piece of evidence that this has improved the quality of the delivered software, or for that matter even the speed of features any of these companies produce, in fact if anything the opposite. The point of software development, the hint is in the name, is to develop software, not consume tokens. If Uber was now full…

How dare you mention evidence! This isn't engineering you know!
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