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

simonwillison.net

761–770 of 819 posts

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

#761
post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I accept that “nonsense arguments are nonsense”, but with some minor differences of opinion. Naming of things matters insofar as you care as a human to actually conceptualize the system you’re building. You can call all of this stuff minutiae, and on some level I kind of agree, except for the general vibe of _caring about the quality of the stuff you produce_. That is something that still matters whether it “works…

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 think we're probably talking past one another a little bit. I use LLMs. Daily, even. I've been doing so since around the same time. The vast majority of people in my organization are doing the same.

I have watched some projects absolutely explode in LOC added, number of PRs, etc. but I think the more interesting question is: how much of it is directly being done to add customer value, how much of it is churn, etc. you might get some interesting answers.

As so frequently seems to be the case for you and I, we kind of agree but then you drop something that just does not compute for me: "slow is smooth, and smooth is fast" is not specific to "mission critical" systems, it is generally applicable.

As I said in a previous comment, I work on a fairly boring system. Its "criticality" is debatable, but in general we make the same kinds of boring guarantees to our users that even mediocre SaaS products offer: a few 9s of uptime, zero-downtime deploys, etc. AI has made aspects of working on this system easier, but in terms of API surface, how users are using it, how to safely advance its state without breaking existing callers, data migrations across services, and so on, very little has changed.

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

#762

> 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…

I really don’t get it - why not put a Mac Studio with 128gb of ram on every engineers desk and be like “engineer, engineer your local LLM”. Makes no sense to be spending $20-30,000+ per year on cloud providers when Qwen et al are available. And even less sense to be sending all your company code and data to Anthropic and OpenAI when you can keep all that IP in the building.

because local models which can run well using 128gb ram are still not SOTA, yes Qwen is amazing, but nor Qwen 27B neither 35B can outperform Opus 4.6, so why increase rework for your engineers even more, if you can pay slightly more and always use SOTA, until others figure out best practices for running local SOTA's

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

#763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be real. Most of the time you ask an LLM "Why did you do it like this?", it responds with something along the lines of "Oops. My bad. You're right to point this out." You even have a fair chance of getting a response like that when there isn't anything wrong and the question wasn't rhetorical - which perfectly illustrates the level of the genuine understanding LLMs operate at.

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

when you criticize the average employee, always remember that the alternative is the average employee with AI.

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

#764

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…

China is the worst trading partner in the world. They banned most companies from functioning in their country for decades

Worst indeed, hardly anyone trades with them.

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

#765

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…

> Jeff Bezos made the salient point... Big AI investor tells us that investing in AI is good. Oh, the surprise! Does that invalidate this point? Yes. Because it makes no sense. The big money is not going to R&D but to build infrastructure that will be outdated in 5 years.

No, that's not the right read. He said bubbles and exuberance still produce lasting value for humanity, even when investors lose money.

Big money is going to build infrastructure which is fundamentally required for R&D. They aren't separate, they are the same thing. It sounds like you're complaining that Pfizer isn't investing in drug research, they are buying mass spectrometers and micron fidelity microscopes. Same thing!

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

#767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a shittier model is just more work for the user, I’m not sure why anyone does it, unless they’re playing with it like a toy.

I sometimes let Claude Opus create plans, DeepSeek v4 pro implements and writes tests. Claude reviews and corrects. Saves like $2-3 per session. Same quality code.

“Same quality code.” [x] - Doubt

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

#768

> 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…

I really don’t get it - why not put a Mac Studio with 128gb of ram on every engineers desk and be like “engineer, engineer your local LLM”. Makes no sense to be spending $20-30,000+ per year on cloud providers when Qwen et al are available. And even less sense to be sending all your company code and data to Anthropic and OpenAI when you can keep all that IP in the building.

sota models cannot remotely fit in 128gb

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

#770
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think companies will do that. Why don’t they just buy local on-premise infrastructure even though it’s cheaper than AWS? For customer facing, production software, its worth paying a cloud tax to get the reliability guarantee. For tools that are used by engineers for code development, there is no need for such bulletproof guarantees.

Local AI servers are different because they don't have to form a single system. If one AI server goes down, just use the other one. This is unlike customer facing systems where, if your database server goes down, you probably can't just use the other one--the whole system is down.

There are plenty of horizontally scaled systems where the choice is still made to use a cloud provider.

It’s really a lot more about business focus.

I don’t want to hire someone who understands how an email server works if I can pay Microsoft $10/employee/month for an email account.

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