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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

#681

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

vb-8448 wrote: post #226
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?

I used to work in datacenters, during spinning disk era we had technicians from vendors basically every couple of days to replace some broken part. When the massive switch to ssd happened instead of having them every couple of days it was 3 or 4 times per month. Despite no moving parts things broke anyway and, even if it doesn't break, the vendor can make you change the technology just by playing with maintenance cos…

My understanding is that a lot of AI data centers are still heavily relying on spinning HDDs, which is why seagate, western digital are selling more HDDs than ever before.

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

#682

Post by phillipcarter »

timacles wrote: post #502
geysersam wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Two of the things you’ve listed are some of the most profitable activities in our economy.

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

#685

Post by LtWorf »

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #260
lbrito wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a non sequitur. "companies are already paying thousands per seat" has zero correlation with something being a fad or not. There are much more reasonable rationales explaining why companies are acting the way they are than "because AI coding is not a fad"

Can you name a service that charged companies thousands/seat/month that turned out to be almost or completely useless? There's lots of random services sold to corporates that are not very useful (all the random benefits besides health care, life insurance, and other big-ticket items), but the per-seat charge of those is much smaller.

All the NLP experts that companies bring in to make those seminars despite it has been debunked decades ago for example…

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

#686

Post by dubcanada »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #666
White_Wolf wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Don't know why people keep parroting this, this is incorrect. Chinese electricity prices are equal or slightly cheaper then most of North America. But significant pockets such as those around the Quebec or other hydro plants are significantly cheaper then Chinese power pricing.

Not only that, China may subsidize AI, but so does the US.

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

#687

Post by LtWorf »

mike_hock wrote: post #364
tmp10423288442 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name a service that charged companies thousands/seat/month that turned out to be almost or completely useless? There's lots of random services sold to corporates that are not very useful (all the random benefits besides health care, life insurance, and other big-ticket items), but the per-seat charge of those is much smaller.

Every consultant ever, but to be fair that's not per seat.

Hey I'm a consultant. They pay me to be a regular developer but they cannot hire since they just fired thousands of people which they apparently did need, turns out.

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

#688

Post by VBprogrammer »

dmos62 wrote: post #665
VBprogrammer wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have my use covered by my employer but we also have budgets and limits.

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

#689

Post by LtWorf »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #562
tokioyoyo wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, you might be right. But this simply doesn't reflect my daily reality. All I can say is, nobody in my org is creating 10,000 PRs. But everyone is using Claude Code for virtually all commits. We've been doing it since about Opus 4.5ish. So far, so good. Generally we've modified our timelines heavily, systems are working as intended, company is still making money. There are some AI-authored commits that had m…

I have the same experience. Slow is smooth with AI is still productivity improvement.

But is it enough of an improvement to justify the cost? (Since the current raises are probably just the beginning)
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