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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

#631

Post by le-mark »

satvikpendem wrote: post #259
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…

Don't worry, they'll just lobby to ban Chinese models instead to keep their token revenues high. > Compounding the problem, labs in China often release dual-use capable models as open-weight. Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed, making the model available to any state or non-state actor to use for malicious purposes, including the cyber and CBRN misuse those safeguards were built to p…

> Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed

Safeguards trained into the model (ie exist in the weights) can’t be removed.

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

#632

Post by evolighting »

throw98 wrote: post #622
evolighting wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, have you ever been to China and could hadely found anything familay? - Oh, they must have been blocked from entering the Chinese market! But none of that is true. You could see global brands everywhere here — Tesla, Unilever, KFC, Apple, and so on. --- Or have you ever actually done cross-border trade? Or any international business collaboration? If you had, you’d definitely realize that what’s really stopping yo…

Have you ever heard forced IP transfer and partnerships?

One-Drop Rule + Long-Arm Jurisdiction = Everything eventually comes under US control. That's what I see, don't need to 'hear' it from

Why even bother with 'forced IP transfer' when you can just take it?

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

#633

Post by PunchyHamster »

geysersam wrote: post #345
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…

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…

The cost of power cost increase alone on industry gonna erase all gains from it.

You can't consider it in vacuum. AI takes limited resources. So far it winded up cost on near every consumer electronics that runs an OS, and it winded up cost of energy that is used by the entire industry and every single customer

It's not just the cost of datacenters, it's cost of infrastructure (that given current direction of US govt will just be paid from people's fucking taxes and bills..) and cost of other industries turning outright unprofitable "thanks" to demands of AI

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

#634

Post by theshackleford »

baggy_trough wrote: post #280
chmod775 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be real. Most of the time you ask an LLM "Why did you do it like this?", it responds with something along the lines of "Oops. My bad. You're right to point this out." You even have a fair chance of getting a response like that when there isn't anything wrong and the question wasn't rhetorical - which perfectly illustrates the level of the genuine understanding LLMs operate at.

Can't remember the last time that happened.

I encounter it constantly with the latest models. Claude is particularly prone to it.

> I shouldn’t have said that with confidence

> I got ahead of myself there

> I overstepped, allow me to correct that

It’s wild seeing how often it’s wrong, and I only know it’s wrong because I am an SME or actually reading the sources. Most of my coworkers are not SMEs with what they are asking and do not read the sources.

A huge part of my job now is fixing fuck ups and failures resulting from these slop jockeys who have already moved on to slop up the next task.

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

#635

Post by bvcp »

scuff3d wrote: post #339
OptionOfT wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because companies are betting that this spending will allow them to reduce cost by firing people. Right now the AI LLM PRs we're seeing are just introducing more work for other people, while these so-called builders are looking good with their new dashboards and functionality they're demoing. But you can't talk to them about the flow of the code. You can't ask them for their thinking as to why certain things are. It'…

Literally in the middle of ripping apart a vibe coded mess at work to figure out what's even worth keeping. Not fun :(

use ai to do that

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

#636

Post by lcnielsen »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #630
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…

> 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? You just run the models and sell the tokens. The demand will still be there even if there will be less money in chasing new frontier model > GPU are pretty specialized hardware, without AI a data center full of outdated graphics cards isn’t really too valuable. AI accele…

> AI accelerators used in DC are not really "graphic cards" any more, you ain't running gaming on it

I think the lighter 40 series cards like L40 still have OK graphics features. But otherwise yeah, after the Ampere generation graphics features went down the drain. The A100 and A40 cards can do graphics well but it already makes no sense in terms of power-to-performance ratio.

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

#637

Post by gamerslexus »

seventhtiger wrote: post #308
chmod775 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be real. Most of the time you ask an LLM "Why did you do it like this?", it responds with something along the lines of "Oops. My bad. You're right to point this out." You even have a fair chance of getting a response like that when there isn't anything wrong and the question wasn't rhetorical - which perfectly illustrates the level of the genuine understanding LLMs operate at.

When you criticize AI, always remember that the alternative is the average employee. Today's models are pretty good.

To adequately validate work you must be at least at the same level, so if you were right (which dunning-kruger suggests unlikely) that would mean your "terrible" average employee is given a tool that will 10x their output which they cannot even check for correctness. And correctness will be low if the average employee is bad like you say, because it means they will give badly specified tasks and even with the best of us it's garbage in, garbage out. I am sure there is no way this can backfire.

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

#638

Post by White_Wolf »

vidarh wrote: post #331
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…

We can tell that the inferencing costs for many of these models are low enough that these models are being sold close to real costs on the basis that many of them are open weight and available from third party providers who have no incentive to subsidize them. I think the frontier labs will need to drop their high per-token prices at least for their low and mid-level models for the reason that several Chinese models…

I really doubt Deepseek is subsidised. It's roughly the same price everywhere you look. Deepseek is using the Huawei hardware (as far as I managed to understand from various articles) and hence the savings.

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

#639

Post by saalweachter »

solatic wrote: post #563
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…

> Stocks going down didn't un-research drugs Drugs cost pennies to manufacture after they are researched and make their way through the approval pipeline. There are many generic drug manufacturers who can work off the existing formulas. The more apt comparison is that LLMs won't be un-trained. Opus 4.8 now exists. Even if Anthropic somehow went bankrupt, that particular asset could, at the very least, be sold for pro…

Research does get lost over time. The whole point of the patent system is keeping that from happening; if the drug company goes bankrupt, even if they lose all their internal documentation in the process, hopefully the patents and other public paperwork provides enough information for an unrelated company -- either having acquired the patent rights, or after the patent period ends -- to reconstruct the processes with less investment then the original research.

If a bankrupt AI company maintains enough of a skeleton crew to consolidate and archive its intellectual property it could be sold off to another company, but there are also timelines where it all ends up digital dust in the wind.

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

#640

Post by spacemanspiffii »

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…

It is also possible that capping at $1500 will give you ~99% of the benefits. So even with gains that are much higher, a cap could be a rational decision. Also, most decisions, especially around AI aren't exactly rational, so I wouldn't read to much into this number.
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