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

Post by lesostep » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 8:13 AM UTC

timacles wrote: post #502

geysersam wrote: post #345

Earlier 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.

Post by dgellow » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 8:23 AM UTC

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #420

dgellow wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Using a shittier model is just more work for the user, I’m not sure why anyone does it, unless they’re playing with it like a toy.

Post by postsantum » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 8:25 AM UTC

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…

Post by inemesitaffia » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 8:27 AM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #612

missedthecue wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So you have on one end the token revenue trending down, on the other end the training cost going up for the next frontier models, and you need to pay back your 10y debt." Not necessarily, the bond holders could simply take a massive hair cut and lose shitloads of money. On the topic of bubbles and exuberance, Jeff Bezos made the salient point that there was a massive over-invested biotech boom in the 1990s and tons…

Those data centers are specifically for AI workloads. Let’s say everything crashes and we now have all the data centers, what do you do with them? GPU are pretty specialized hardware, without AI a data center full of outdated graphics cards isn’t really too valuable. It’s really not obvious the infrastructure we are building for AI stuff is something that will benefit humanity over time. Without talking about the fac…

Post by maplethorpe » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 8:38 AM UTC

jujube3 wrote: post #290

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?

It's cope. People desperately want to believe that AI coding is going away so that they can go back to partying like it's 2020. So there's a huge number of HN posters claiming that the price of tokens will go UP over time rather than down (that's how Moore's Law works, right???) or that code bases that AI contributes to will spontaneously combust, or something.