Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 819 posts

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

#711

Post by ksajadi »

NichoPaolucci wrote: post #667
ksajadi wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very interesting. Anecdotally I’ve found the opposite to be the case. But I’m very interested in understanding more. Thanks for sharing

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

#712

Post by vablings »

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.

Yeah, this argument is bullshit. You can head over to Openrouter and look at the token cost for deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-pro. They are very competitive on the open market

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

#714

Post by jujube3 »

oblio wrote: post #591
jujube3 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, there's an "enormous incentive" for people to run their own data centers rather than using AWS. And yet, cloud is growing and on-premise is shrinking. While I hope local AI continues to exist, I'm skeptical that it will take over, for the same reason running your own servers hasn't taken over. It's just hard, and involves spending huge sums of money up front. It's also not really clear how much tokens are bei…

Infrastructure is massively complex and multi cloud is super hard to do. Switching LLMs is... a drop down. Now, that doesn't mean running your own LLM will be easy, but this will mean it's a lot more likely that there will be at least regional LLMs, in my opinion. I.e. there will be Google, whichever (if any) is left standing of OpenAI or Anthropic, and then there will be Chinese hosted LLMs, probably Indian hosted L…

You're using the future tense, but all of those things already exist. Google exists, Amazon Bedrock exists, DeepSeek's cloud product exists, etc. etc. But this isn't relevant to what the post you are replying to said, which is that "cloud-based, metered AI being a dominant work mode [is a] fad". Since all of those things are cloud-based, metered AI.

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

#715

Post by nobleach »

timacles wrote: post #709
bunderbunder wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those companies are certainly writing more code. But It isn’t clear that they are increasing their economic productivity. It could even conceivably have the opposite effect by fueling a race to the bottom. e.g. an interesting possible canary in this coal mine is that there’s been a 200% increase in the rate of new apps appearing on Apple’s App Store, but it has not been accompanied by a 200% increase in the rate at w…

I would go as far as to say writing more Code has almost no impact on their economic productivity. What drives those companies is infrastructure and networks

So far the place where I've seen "more code being written" having a postive effect, has been in paying down tech debt and reduction of overhead. We've rewritten services (bringing multiple microservices back under moduliths) and cut costs. But I'm talking about net-negative code. That's not the point you're making. I agree that puking out 20 new features likely wouldn't gain us more revenue.

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

#716

Post by abirch »

helloplanets wrote: post #678
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…

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…

I would day that the dotcom was directionally correct but the timing was wrong. For instance you had pets.com in 1999 but in 2020 you had chewy.com. It's like you had broadcast.com in 2000 but by 2020 you had YouTube that was making more in ad revenue than the next 4 largest competitors.

With investing timing matters a lot.

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

#717

Post by vablings »

beAbU wrote: post #585
grogenaut wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you not just move the epxensive part (the gpu itself) to a new carrier board in that situation? Also isn't most of the cost of the GPU itself the design of the board, not actually making one, esp if you can move the heat sinks around?

"just"

BGA Reflow rework is not rocket science, How do you think the PCBA gets assembled in the first place? Its much easier if you dont care about the boards at all and with the huge die sizes on these accelerator chips its worth it to do a board swap

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

#718

Post by cduzz »

helloplanets wrote: post #678
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…

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…

AI data centers that exist and are operational are running at maximum capacity. That's why you see things like the tiny little data center run by xai showing up as a valuable resource to xai (on the sale side) and anthropic (buy side). It is "only" 300 megawatts and there's a 1.25 billion rent on it per month.

If all these other data centers were anywhere near coming on line, that 300mw data center would be a rounding error not a line item as it is right now.

So someone's signed contracts for way more and way larger data centers, someone's purchased billions in hardware for these not yet operational data centers. I'm wondering how depreciation's going to work on all these assets...

Anyhow, I'm not really sure what "max capacity" is here, nor am I really aware when they're going to be delivering the operational assets that are currently levered to their eyeballs and consuming 1/3rd of the memory made on the planet.

As far as inference vs training, have new gotten radically better than old models or only marginally (at the cost of 10x or more the training costs)?

Very exciting stuff.

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

#719

Post by palmotea »

inemesitaffia wrote: post #614
palmotea wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All fair but very much assumes that salaries are rational. Why do we pay some engineers 10x as much for the same role just because they are in a different location? Who's this "we" you're talking about? Are you a software engineer or a temporarily embarrassed billionaire? Do you think the rational thing is to pay the lowest regional salary worldwide?

If your competitors do, you likely will

> If your competitors do, you likely will

This kind of race-to-the-bottom logic needs to be rejected: by workers, business culture, and the government.

Unfortunately business culture embraces races to the bottom (for everyone but owners and executives), and uses its lobbying might to push the government into tolerating or even supporting it. And there are a lot of deluded workers who (for some reason) seem to be feel smart when they parrot the ideas of people who want to screw them.

Post reply on HN