Why are people getting these high spending numbers? A 200 USD subscription for either Codex or Claude should give you plenty of usage. What am I missing? Are they just being dumb?
Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
511–520 of 819 posts
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
Current AI datacenter/model development investment rate is roughly 1T/year. That's a lot. But the US economy is 33T/year. So the investment pays back (roughly) over ten years if, each year, the AI investments increase overall productivity by 0.6%, assuming the AI companies can capture half of the value of that productivity gain. > „[AI vendors are] paying for a fixed cost with a depreciating commodity“ That's just a…
I'm surprised people think LLMs, a thing which mainly excels at advertising, spam and writing code is going to generate that much economic activity.
Companies whose main core competency is writing code were already making up a big chunk of the economy before AI. Also, less wealthy companies were constrained in their use of software by the inability to afford the salaries of talented programmers (and ripoff practices from software consulting companies who in theory could help). Lowering the cost of building software systems ought to unblock a good amount of economic activity as the technology diffuses.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The costs to hire management and "support staff" like TPMs that scale with SWEs that help them meet goals is proportional to SWEs - often that is taken for the higher end fully loaded costs, depending on how you define it. Office space in downtown SF, Mountain View, or Palo Alto costs more than office space for back office workers in Nashville or Utah. Firms that hire SWEs often have fringe benefits like free food et…
Wait what are the sleep medications they actually recommend?
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#514Why are people getting these high spending numbers? A 200 USD subscription for either Codex or Claude should give you plenty of usage. What am I missing? Are they just being dumb?
The subscriptions are not available to enterprise users. Enterprise users must pay per-token. A $200 subscription gives you roughly the equivalent of $1500 in per-token billing.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#515I still have never hit a ceiling with my Claude Max $100 account, much less the Max $200 account. I'm not burning tokens needlessly, nor running it all day, but I do use CC almost daily. What are these devs doing that they are burning more than $1500 in tokens a month? Maybe it's just me, but I still find that I really have to "shepherd" the AI and work with it to get the results I want. And I read every line of code…
You are paying account pricing. Uber is paying API pricing. You're $100/m plan is likely equivalent to thousands of dollars of API pricing. You are being subsidized by the companies using AI.
I wasn't aware the Max $100/user plan wasn't available to Enterprise; it used to be IIRC
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#516> 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…
One aspect Paul Kedrosky mentioned recently is the concept of „duration mismatch“. The price per token goes down over time (either because the AI vendor reduces due to competition pressure, or because customers are now incentivized to use older cheaper models). But datacenters are financed through debt, with the assumption their revenue increases over time. Quoting him: „[AI vendors are] paying for a fixed cost with…
If you have a good model router, you can route to older, cheaper models that run on older hardware, for simpler tasks. That helps labs extend the economic life of their hardware investments. They will likely fight it at first though as they see it as reducing ASP.
This is why I'm building role-model, a routing protocol and a router runtime: https://role-model.dev/
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is your argument that $1500 / mo is too much? Why would the engineering team not be more rigorous in their model selection given a constraint?
If you had a business task to complete that was only possible with ai and it cost you >$1500/month of work, how long would you have to delay the task so that it's cheaper long run to buy hardware and do local models? $1,500/mo * 14 months = $21,000. If local models are 14mo behind as many in HN say it may be profitable to just wait. Maybe just spend a few hundred dollars of your tokens and buy hardware piece by piece…
It also presupposes that open models will bridge that gap towards opus4.5, which was really when I drank the AI coding koolaid
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#518I still have never hit a ceiling with my Claude Max $100 account, much less the Max $200 account. I'm not burning tokens needlessly, nor running it all day, but I do use CC almost daily. What are these devs doing that they are burning more than $1500 in tokens a month? Maybe it's just me, but I still find that I really have to "shepherd" the AI and work with it to get the results I want. And I read every line of code…
just don't care about the output. Produce more. Don't check the results.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of the articles and CFO’s saying so, and companies like Uber cutting back on AI spend.
Uber cutting back to ~$1,500/engineer/tool/month makes it look to me like they think there's at least $1,500 of monthly ROI to be had per engineer.
So touche, but since it's usage per task it's kind of weird.
This means that the average engineer is efficient at (say) identifying the first 10 tasks they should do but there are diminishing returns after that? That seems like a weird pattern. Wouldn't it be more likely that certain tasks have a ROI based on how efficient the task is generated?
Like I'm trying to imagine in my head, if you think an engineer is more efficient with the tool, why deny them more tokens. I guess so they think to use them more efficiently?
So, maybe I conclude that I think your conclusion that there must be $1500 per engineer is flawed. And even if it were true, I don't think the benefit would be evenly distributed. I suspect this is a first pass at figuring how to budget them and there will be a second pass.
While it certainly reeks of motivated reasoning, Jensen Huang assertion that an expensive engineer should be using at least their salary in tokens feels more logically sound to me (assuming the average engineer is efficient at using tokens, I have a feeling it's a normal distribution)
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
The costs to hire management and "support staff" like TPMs that scale with SWEs that help them meet goals is proportional to SWEs - often that is taken for the higher end fully loaded costs, depending on how you define it. Office space in downtown SF, Mountain View, or Palo Alto costs more than office space for back office workers in Nashville or Utah. Firms that hire SWEs often have fringe benefits like free food et…
Wait what are the sleep medications they actually recommend?
DORAs. Rather than being sedatives, they directly target receptors in your brain that make you think you should sleep. I think the oldest one came out in like 2011.
It's kind of like neuroscientists found the trigger to tell your brain "we're going to do a clean shutdown now, trigger transition to runlevel 0".
Quiviviq, Dayvigo, Belsomra. All still on-patent, so they don't have generics and are pretty expensive (like $1000/mo if your insurance doesn't cover them). A lot of doctors won't recommend them in practice because most of their patients won't yet be able to get them covered.