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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

#721

Post by gamerslexus »

seventhtiger wrote: post #675
gamerslexus wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 orde…

Perhaps if you need that much boilerplate it's not going to be a well-architected codebase in the first place. Abstract it out, make a lib out of it. Easier to review & test in separation. Loose coupling, high cohesion.

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

#722

Post by marcta »

GuB-42 wrote: post #655
inemesitaffia wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The G in AI GPU stands for "grift"

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

#726

Post by dofm »

jujube3 wrote: post #714
oblio wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was talking more about on-premises, on private cloud and on-device stuff, as I said.

If you look at what Uber is spending per developer per month, they clearly have some headroom to consider whether more-local, unmetered AI tools on device, on premises, in private cloud, can be cost-effectively used to cut down how much money they are pouring into Anthropic and OpenAI. Not least because a bit of centralised effort might lead them to distilled models that are better for their purposes. Some of that budget could go into simply putting a bit more capacity on a developer's desk.

Can they do it now for everything? Obviously not. But IMO there is no reason at all for planning and scaffolding tasks to be done with cloud models, and there are many reasons why it might be better to do document processing without leaving the premises.

The incentives are there on the technical, operations and particularly on the business levels, and the relative disruption of the switch really small, considering that all the tooling can use different models for different tasks already. They must at least be investigating the possibility; it's irresponsible not to.

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

#727

Post by SoMomentary »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #643
SoMomentary wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local privacy respecting inference can be worth it. I use a local model to log everything I do all week to automate my timesheet. I also have it do a bunch of other data tasks. I won't say that larger SOTA models wouldn't do these tasks better than a local model but PII is a concern and my employer wouldn't approve of me just setting tokens on fire everyday to do what I could do myself.

> I use a local model to log everything I do all week to automate my timesheet. Isn’t that just more work than logging it yourself?

Not at all! My company has 100s of clients and we track time in 6 minute increments. I feed in my browser history, terminal logs, session scripts, calendar, git commits, etc etc into it and voila it produces a highly accurate timesheet in no time flat.

Automating it has been way better for me than the alternative of breaking my flow whenever I'm switching tasks to chart my time, or logging all my hours for the week in one sitting. Different strokes for different folks I suppose.

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

#728

Post by warmwaffles »

AgentMasterRace wrote: post #220
eikenberry wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were proposing a solution.. To use flash models and use them in a way that best amplifies your work.

He was making a joke.

Indeed I was. But that's lost on people here.

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

#729

Post by overgard »

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 imagine the trend for AI usage will go up over the very long term (5-10yrs etc.), but short term how much usage is being propped up by employer's forcing their employees to use it? Or by user's being curious about the novelty but ultimately abandoning it if it doesn't do what they want? It'll be interesting to see what changes as tokenmaxxing disappears.

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

#730

Post by kixiQu »

throw0606 wrote: post #724

When blue-collars were loosing jobs they were told to learn to code and now engineers are vilifying AI for taking jobs

Do you believe the same people were saying those things? (Were they really?) The idea that "different attitudes towards labor have been expressed by different people" doesn't feel too remarkable
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