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OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

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Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#51

Post by danpalmer »

Robdel12 wrote: post #39

Once you see how much crap they’re running to police the agents on the repo, you’ll ‘get’ the spend https://x.com/steipete/status/2055405041843052792 I won’t lie, if I had the access to this, I’d do the same exact thing.

"All that automation allows us to run extremely lean"

He has a different opinion of what it means to be lean than almost everyone else. That's fine, he's allowed to, but it's something you have to understand to make sense of any of his comments on things. He has a radically different set of values to most people.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#52

Post by peteforde »

thomasahle wrote: post #6

He used 600B tokens in 30 days. I use more than 150B/month with just 15 codex accounts. 60 accounts is "just" $12,000/month. So Peter could "save" 100x by using monthly accounts. Of course, he doesn't have to, as he works at OpenAI now.

What I truly don't understand, as a daily heavy Opus 4.7 user, is how you can coherently prompt 15 different parallel conversations at the same time.

For me it's not even a "what the hell are you working on" so much as complete inability to understand how you can keep so many different processes working on distinct tasks. It simply doesn't map on to how I use these tools.

I spend most of my day writing extremely detailed prompts and that's how I'm able to get the sort of excellent results that confound skeptics. But I have to be honest with you: I don't think I can write (or think) fast enough to do two of these at a time, much less 15.

I definitely could not review what they are generating with any degree of confidence.

I'm really hoping you can explain what the heck your usage pattern actually looks like, because reading this makes me feel like I'm missing something.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#53

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

Robdel12 wrote: post #39

Once you see how much crap they’re running to police the agents on the repo, you’ll ‘get’ the spend https://x.com/steipete/status/2055405041843052792 I won’t lie, if I had the access to this, I’d do the same exact thing.

But it's a self fulfilling prophecy. They need all this stuff because it's a vibe coded app where bugs are randomly introduced, the architecture is overcomplicated and sucks, and stuff is just added for the fun of it.

Do existing companies run entire end-to-end product integration tests on every single change they make to a repo to make sure something hasn't broken? No, they just architect things in a way such that a minor change to something can be tested in isolation. And that can be automated, deterministically and efficiently.

Where I work we can release changes to our production site in minutes almost completely autonomously with high confidence with absolutely zero AI agents in the loop. How did we do it? With lessons learned from the past 5 decades of professional software development experience.

Lets not forget what OpenClaw is at it's core. It's a glorified cron scheduler. Why on earth does any of this effort need to exist. It's not that deep, it's not that complex, it's all AI for AI's sake.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#54

Post by christoph »

Nzen wrote: post #23

tl;dr Peter Steinberger shared a product demo for CodexBar [0] with a graph of OpenAI token usage. This graph shows one million spent, prefers gpt-5.5 and spent twenty thousand today. [0] https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar However, I do not see a strong reason to believe that this is his actual, personal usage. It could be all openclaw usage or some subset of openai usage, given that he is inside them. I suspect it…

I view this type of post (his, not yours) as meta deception. I only became aware of this type of deception and its power from a bit of reading in to magicians and stage craft in the last few months. There’s a video on YouTube as well that does a great job of breaking down a Derren Brown stunt that uses it to great effect manipulating the TV viewing audience.

I’d actually seen the original DB episode years before when it first aired and it definitely had an affect on me through this form of manipulation - it altered my internal understanding of marketing/advertising, which was the actual underlying purpose of the episode.

It’s altered how I internally accept and process information from any 2nd or 3rd hand source. BTW, people aren’t necessarily always aware they’re doing it. We all suffer from our own internal biases and deceptions, and sometimes we spread them unknowingly!

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#55

Post by MattDaEskimo »

Tiberium wrote: post #24

This is quite a misleading title because this is the raw API cost, but he (obviously) has unlimited usage as an OpenAI employee. Moreover, if you use e.g. the $200 Codex sub, you get about ~$5k-$6k monthly API usage if you spend every week of your usage, if not more, which shows that the raw API cost is not how much it (likely) costs to OpenAI, unless they're subsidizing all this. He did clarify that it was with fast…

How is it misleading if this would be the consumer's cost?

Eventually Codex's subscription subsidization will diminish to near-zero, like the rest of the providers.

It's extremely important that people understand how expensive these models currently are. Even $300k in raw API costs is alarming for the output.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#56

Post by danpalmer »

voidfunc wrote: post #48
wolttam wrote: post #40

Nobody here talking about what this represents for demand on these models, if these numbers aren’t made up. One person using 600B tokens in a month. The most I’ve hit is around 500M tokens and I thought that was a huge amount. We’re going to have some major compute shortages for a while

500m tokens is easy... I'm burning about 2b a week.

Anyone can burn tokens. Using them for something useful is the hard part.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#59

Post by wolttam »

MadxX79 wrote: post #10
thomasahle wrote: post #6

He used 600B tokens in 30 days. I use more than 150B/month with just 15 codex accounts. 60 accounts is "just" $12,000/month. So Peter could "save" 100x by using monthly accounts. Of course, he doesn't have to, as he works at OpenAI now.

Sounds like a healthy industry, selling tokens at 1000x below cost.

API pricing isn’t cost, we don’t know what cost is.
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