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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

#651

Post by samat »

ashdksnndck wrote: post #512
timacles wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 econom…

I am yet to see that ‘companies with great ideas which simply cannot afford those very expensive developers’. For the most, issue is not programmer costs. Mostly it’s inability to formulate the MVP which makes sense.

‘uber for my industry’ is not a sensible business strategy

Honestly, if you know guys whose bottleneck is pure software dev — please let me know, I have a good, experienced team in Eastern Europe, we can do wonders in product development. But coming up with sensible business ideas and executing on them in the real world is crazy hard and extremely rare.

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

#652

Post by c7b »

1,5k. For two months of that spend you could buy a machine that can self-host decent models, plus a year's worth of electricity. It's not up there in terms of quality, but with a bit more effort it works pretty decently. I'm completely baffled that that's not way more common, is it really just the quality?

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

#653

Post by Marciplan »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #645

How are people using so many tokens? I'm on the $200/month enterprise plan for Claude Code (because it's a better deal than the API pricing) and I don't come close to the limits. If you use stuff like opusplan and /advisor so you use Sonnet for most of the work and only Opus for the really complex stuff then it's quite easy to keep costs low without affecting performance.

BigCo's are not using the plans we are using, they can't.

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

#654

Post by VBprogrammer »

c7b wrote: post #652

1,5k. For two months of that spend you could buy a machine that can self-host decent models, plus a year's worth of electricity. It's not up there in terms of quality, but with a bit more effort it works pretty decently. I'm completely baffled that that's not way more common, is it really just the quality?

I'd think for most companies the pace of change is too high at the moment. Give it a few years, a bit of a plateau in the improvements in frontier models and I can't see how many of these companies don't implode under the weight of competition on inference prices.

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

#655

Post by GuB-42 »

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.

AI GPUs have terrible graphical capabilities, if at all. They can run shaders, but they are lacking in texture units, rasterization, etc... huge bottleneck here.

These AI "GPUs" are worse for gaming than even the crappiest actual GPUs (with a G as in Graphics). Also, the display drivers won't support them, not officially at least.

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

#656

Post by mewpmewp2 »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #359
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly feel like my own learning has accelerated after using AI. Simply because now it's so easy to write the same thing in so many different languages, I can e.g. learn pros and cons of each language, which otherwise would have been I think unfathomable to me. I have now created so much stuff I wouldn't have had time to create. I setup k3s, and tons of what would be otherwise unnecessarily complicated stuff on m…

The question is if you already had intuitive understanding of what those things “are”. The languages and systems have been easier to learn once you picked up a couple. Same applies here as well. The question is, how quickly does a junior with no experience builds intuition without trial and error.

But surely, it's a matter of curiousity? If you are curious you will naturally want to look deeper to understand what is going on. If you are not curious, then you wouldn't have done very well before either.

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

#658

Post by dmos62 »

c7b wrote: post #652

1,5k. For two months of that spend you could buy a machine that can self-host decent models, plus a year's worth of electricity. It's not up there in terms of quality, but with a bit more effort it works pretty decently. I'm completely baffled that that's not way more common, is it really just the quality?

Decent vs best-money-can-buy. Further, a self-hosted LLM will be much slower.

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

#659

Post by gck1 »

ccusage for codex tells me the medium feature I prompted in codex, with a $200 subscription, running for 72 hours and still not delivering full result would have cost ~ $2200 at API rates.

I also misconfigured something in my agent's configuration and a simple web tool request (maybe 4 turns) through OR went to GPT-5.5 accidentally and that cost me ~$0.4.

I have no idea how any business can afford API rates without having a mindset of casually setting money on fire.

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

#660

Post by reddec »

c7b wrote: post #652

1,5k. For two months of that spend you could buy a machine that can self-host decent models, plus a year's worth of electricity. It's not up there in terms of quality, but with a bit more effort it works pretty decently. I'm completely baffled that that's not way more common, is it really just the quality?

Second here. From recent Alibaba Qwen conference: the all-in-one box (DC in a box - I think I was called Apsara, 0.6x0.6x1.5m) plug and play, 1.5TB GPU RAM, capability to run in a fully air gapped environment, any open models... All of that is roughly $300k one time. And this box can do non LLM tasks as well. Performance (throughput) around 20k t/s. Delivery time - around 2 months. For any medium sized company its perhaps cheaper to just buy it once than spending 1.5k for cloud per user
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