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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

#661

Post by gck1 »

le-mark wrote: post #631
satvikpendem wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't have to remove the safeguards if you can prompt your way around them.

There's a subreddit for people wanting to sex-talk to various models. It just so happens that the same prompt they use to 'jailbreak' SOTA models for sex talks also works if you want to have model write malware, or tell you how to design a highly illegal device.

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

#662

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

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…

Why would I even pay for deepseek? I get deepseek v4 flash for free with opencode. If I somehow run out of tokens for the day, I can just then on my vpn

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

#663

Post by VBprogrammer »

dmos62 wrote: post #658
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.

I think we're all past the "bet-money-can-buy" stage. The most expensive models are an order of magnitude more expensive than the middle ground ones, so you need to be selective about what you run where.

And with a bit of careful routing - there isn't a lot stopping you sending the hard stuff to a cloud model and the average stuff to an on prem model.

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

#664

Post by gck1 »

daemin wrote: post #540
eikenberry wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don't use the cloud-based Chinese providers, use cloud-base US/EU providers using Chinese models. The interesting Chinese models are all open making this issue mostly moot.

A key point here is open in terms of being able to download and use it, not open as knowing what data and instructions were fed into it when training. A paranoid part of me thinks that these models are all inherently biased and instructed to be pro CCP, with specific gaps in their training data related to undesirable historic events and political ideas.

The same thing applies to US models. Check out various system prompt leak repos on github. There are also prompt injections by various parallel "alignment" models that pre-process the prompt before it's sent to the main one with questionable guidance.

You'd be surprised how much of bias exists in easily extractable information. Now imagine how much of that happens during training, that you can't easily extract.

So this is largely a moot point. Yes, Chinese models will likely have some weird things injected into them. But so do the US models. Do I care? Not in the slightest. Models are my code monkeys, and if the code leaves my machine, I assume IP is leaked be it a Chinese model that clearly tells me they do use the data, or US models that pinky promise they don't.

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

#665

Post by dmos62 »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #663
dmos62 wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think we're all past the "bet-money-can-buy" stage. The most expensive models are an order of magnitude more expensive than the middle ground ones, so you need to be selective about what you run where. And with a bit of careful routing - there isn't a lot stopping you sending the hard stuff to a cloud model and the average stuff to an on prem model.

Only people who do pay-per-use optimize this. Most heavy users have their use covered by an employer.

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

#666

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

White_Wolf wrote: post #638
vidarh wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And Chinese electricity prices are some of the lowest

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

#667

Post by NichoPaolucci »

ksajadi wrote: post #522
NichoPaolucci wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We run a "context" repository that enables us to transition pretty seamlessly from model to model (usually codex to claude and back). It has skills / plugins / connectors / tooling in relatively malleable MD files. That's what I see as the future. Rather than exporting IDE settings we'll just carry our markdown to the next best tool. It's hedging a bet at this point, but that's why people say there's no moat. If the…

that's an interesting approach and something i also considered (using git to avoid conflicts). one thing i needed was a "database" (basically a folder of markdowns) with a fixed schema so i can let the agents record their decisions in (for example when the code conflicts with product design spec). this combined with search has been a real lifesaver. this is how it works: https://help.markbase.cloud/humans/collections…

Believe it or not, after writing this comment I was doing some more reading on the task. I'm planning to reorganize our context repo after finding this paper (it argues that AI generated context files can stunt the performance of models):

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11988

For what it's worth, if you were considering building context out.

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

#668

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

__alexs wrote: post #626
inemesitaffia wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nvidia would have to ship game ready drivers for H100s but it could work.

They don't have display-out. You'd have to send back the screen data over pcie to the motherboard for display.

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

#669

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #629
inemesitaffia wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not gonna run game on fucking tensor cores alone

Just do software rasterization and ray tracing and play Cyberpunk 2077 on medium at 720p/30fps, what's the problem?

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

#670

Post by gck1 »

A lot of talk about cheaper models here. Just curios, is there any non-Anthropic model that can do UI well? GPT-5.5 is laughably bad, and I'm never restarting my Anthropic subscription after their 6-month sprint of gaslighting, even if opus was really good at UI.
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