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

Post by Forgeties79 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 8:54 AM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #164

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…

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…

Post by HWR_14 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 9:04 AM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #330

biztos wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to not un-build the data centers, they at least have to make more than it costs to operate them, and also not have some attractive liquidation value (the land, maybe). I could imagine something like “inference is done at home or in China, that’s the price to beat” and it’s not worth keeping all those GPUs cool out in Nevada.

But the parent comment was that one of the bigger costs in these data centers was the interest expense on the borrowed money. A restructuring removes or heavily reduces that amount. The fiber laid during the dotcom bubble never paid back the investors or lenders, but it's still profitably connecting customers all these years later.

Post by Frieren » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 9:08 AM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #304

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…

"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…

Post by PunchyHamster » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 9:16 AM UTC

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…

Post by PunchyHamster » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 9:17 AM UTC

inemesitaffia wrote: post #617

dgellow wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You sell the GPU's to remote gaming companies. Replace servers with regular compute.