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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

#671

Post by bel8 »

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…

Add MiMo 2.5 to the list. Priced like DeepSeek, performs similarly but it also has vision capability.

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

#672

Post by mekael »

teeray wrote: post #209
agumonkey wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would use these exact facts as a sign that it's maybe not what it seems. It's much too big and too fast to feel stable. It might keep at that level, increase even more, or drop down to a saner level of use / allocation.

I can see a corporate future where tokens are haggled over in department budgets just like any other line item. Some projects will get more of them, other projects will get less of them. "Use AI for everything" will become "use AI economically and build things that outlast our budget for it."

Neat fact, those kind of conversations are already happening at ${DAY_JOB}.

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

#673

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

dgellow wrote: post #176
bijowo1676 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do GPU chips really depreciate physically? There are no moving parts, I dont think memory chips or GPU chips deteriorate naturally. I think its only accounting depreciation. I have been using my laptop for a decade, what is stopping datacenters from using the purchased GPU chips for a decade?

GPU do depreciate indeed, but here the depreciating commodity is the token, not the hardware. You sell cheaper token with the same hardware

When everything is said and done it'll be datacenters in American competing with ones in China that have several times lower electricity prices. Token prices will drop to a level that will be unprofitable for American data centers and they will need to close.

Thats the main issue here.

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

#674

Post by seventhtiger »

Frieren wrote: post #572
seventhtiger wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> the alternative is the average employee. Today's models are pretty good. I have never seen anywhere in the world people that hates so much the working class as people do in the USA. In my country the average employee is competent, they do their work and create wealth for the nation. Again, only in the USA people think that billionaires are the ones creating value. Total non-sense indoctrination.

I'm not American or ever worked in the USA. It's not a judgement of human value. It's a judgement of work output.

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

#675

Post by seventhtiger »

gamerslexus wrote: post #637
seventhtiger wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All enablers also enable mediocrity. That's not new. At least when the non-mediocre engineer has to work with someone, they can have a tireless responsive partner.

I find this varies by individual, but the AI taking care of so much boilerplate and rote work of coding, and taking the role of architect, test designer, and reviewer is a lot more productive for me. Check the code may take the same skill, but it's an order of magnitude less work.

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

#676

Post by jordanscales »

square_usual wrote: post #8
PessimalDecimal wrote: post #3

These are still at currently subsidized prices. We'll see if they think they're getting $1500/month of value when that buys significantly fewer tokens.

There is no evidence that per-token inference prices (which is what Uber is setting a cap on) is subsidized.

The evidence that per-token inference _is_ subsidized is (a) competition is a bloodbath (b) these companies are raising more money than any company has raised ever (c) a maybe-profitable quarter is maybe-coming for Anthropic after maybe-signing a compute deal with SpaceX that legitimizes both companies.

The evidence that per-token inference _is not_ subsidized is... a quote or two from Dario and Sam Altman

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

#677

Post by LtWorf »

com2kid wrote: post #532
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'…

> Because companies are betting that this spending will allow them to reduce cost by firing people. I've never worked at a company that didn't have a technical backlog measured in years.

If they don't hire to get it done it means they don't think it's really important to get it done.

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

#678

Post by helloplanets »

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…

AI data centers are being already used at max capacity, aren't they? I have a hard time imagining people would suddenly use AI less than they do as of today, let alone collectively drop it altogether. So the worst case scenario is that they'd need to be auctioned off way under what they'd be worth now, but still for someone to use them for AI.

Inference is much cheaper than training a new model, so running them just for inference is a completely different thing than having to price in the fact that at the moment all of these companies need to compromise between compute for inference and compute for training new models. If no new models were to be trained, and all the compute was inference only, that would change everything when it comes to the overall compute cost of AI.

Dotcom infra buildup is a bad comparison, in that it wasn't even close to being all utilized. The infra was completely overproportional to the day to day usage.

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

#680

Post by __alexs »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #668
__alexs wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not exactly a problem for cloud gaming.
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