yeah where i work has been at $150 a week with a pretty generous over ride if you ask.
people self limit when there are caps. if you give people unlimited they wont even use sonnet easy things.
Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
771–780 of 819 posts
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#772> 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…
One aspect Paul Kedrosky mentioned recently is the concept of „duration mismatch“. The price per token goes down over time (either because the AI vendor reduces due to competition pressure, or because customers are now incentivized to use older cheaper models). But datacenters are financed through debt, with the assumption their revenue increases over time. Quoting him: „[AI vendors are] paying for a fixed cost with…
Right. Which means tokens are actually being priced well under cost once you factor in all this datacenter/GPU capex. Also worth noting the datacenters are not purely for training. They're for inference too.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#773Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The Mac is very feeble compared to the big iron that the providers run so will be much lower performance. Also many companies would prefer engineers work on the domain problems instead of working on novel LLMs.
I meant “roll your own” LLM for use not build new ones.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#774How many more months do we need to wait, until big companies realize that flash models work just fine if you: 1) Don't ask LLMs for big changes 2) Review everything and point them in the right direction Large models still suck at big changes, they produce questionable architecture and you still have to review the code, if your project is serious enough. The codebase quickly become a mess, if you don't pay enough atte…
opus to produce workflows, flash 3.5 to do them.
Chinese models prob work too, but idk since i cant use them at work
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#775Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your unwavering praise of LLMs' performance which does not match anyone's reality? OpenAI or Anthropic would be paying you, like they pay bot farms and other influencers, and they would expect marketing in return, which you provide in boatloads. Your job is to be an influencer, I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that this is a possibility.
The asset I most value is my credibility. The reason so many people read my writing and find it useful is that they see me as a credible source of information: in a world full of clickbait and misinformation, I have a reputation for providing an independent voice that occupies that rare middle ground between "AI will kill us all" doomerism and "AI will solve everything" hype. Credibility is hard to earn and easy to s…
> I don't think so, but the whole point of "subconsciously" is you don't know for sure.
I provide ad-hoc consulting and training services to a number of different companies and organizations. If any of those represent a conflict of interest with my writing here I will disclose that in the relevant post. [1]
"you don't know for sure" is why you shouldn't be your own arbiter of what represents a conflict of interest.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#776Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Latvia, the net salary for a Java dev is around 1729 - 4314 EUR, based on https://www.algas.lv/algu-informacija/informacijas-tehnologi... (crowd sourced data) For the employer those employees cost between 2945 - 7736 EUR per month based on https://kalkulatori.lv/lv/algas-kalkulators (income and social taxes). So on the lower end that's (1500 USD ~ 1300 EUR) close to half the total expenses of such a developer, on…
I wonder how this plays out. Perhaps programmers in these countries will use cheaper models like Deepseek and they will be able to compete better, so offshoring continues?
> Perhaps programmers in these countries will use cheaper models like Deepseek and they will be able to compete better, so offshoring continues?
Even here, companies don't really trust Eastern providers that much, so they'd be looking for someone in the EU running DeepSeek instances, which might come with a bit of markup. Those orgs would also sometimes be weary of OpenRouter which to me seems like shooting yourself in the foot by being so picky.
That said, DeepSeek V4 Pro (with Max reasoning) is pretty okay and I'm using it instead of Opus 4.8 (my Max 100 USD subscription weekly limits ran out today) and it can do stuff passably (even better than Mistral's offering and has nice context window), but compared to the amount of work I can get done with Anthropic's models, it keeps occasionally fucking up and I have to go back and correct it, so lots of token waste. Maybe it's close to SOTA from 6-12 months ago, though, which is pretty cool on its own, though - just less confidence in its output.
It's like trying to limit the costs and therefore not gaining the maximum added value from the technology. Similarly for those trying to run stuff on-prem, we don't really have the electrical grid here for large scale inference in-country, nor is anyone exactly salivating at the idea of dropping multiple tens of thousands of EUR to build out something passable. I do host some stuff on a bunch of Nvidia L4 cards (Qwen3.6 35B A3B) and while the model has its uses, it's also a far cry from SOTA.
So I guess it depends - compared to an Anthropic subscription it kinda sucks, but then again if you have to pay for Anthropic's tokens those are robbery and then DeepSeek looks like a no-brainer alternative.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#777Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yep, that’s one source of pressure, for sure
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#778Earlier 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…
The AI pundits often seem to apply the logic that code output is directly proportional to revenue and/or profit, and as such it follows that an AI usage increase leads to more code which leads to more revenue. I don't believe this aligns with the reality of any major company, unless your business is in the literal sense "selling code" your revenue and profit is tangential to the quantity of code you produce. Google i…
Agreed. I think it’s more likely to expect that most of it is pure waste.
My impression is that most software development work is not profitable. Either the project is abandoned, or it fails, or it gets shipped but doesn’t generate positive ROI. But, like how venture capital works, the minority of projects that are successful make enough money to cover the rest.
Some portion of this is because demand for software projects in general is less than perfectly elastic. So more software does not automatically mean more software sales.
It also seems plausible that, in general, companies tend to fund the projects that are most likely to be profitable. They aren’t perfect at it, but I doubt they’re just rolling dice.
Which would imply that the new work companies can take on thanks to developer productivity gains will tend to be ones that are less likely to generate positive ROI.
meaning AI may only produce a net increase in waste, which only serves to erode profits.
Add to that that it’s been years now and we still don’t have an example of someone army-of-oneing a killer app or anything like that. It’s beginning to feel like another iteration of the amazing blockchain revolution that was always & forever just around the corner.
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
#779Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the vibe coded stuff is sometimes great, sometimes it breaks stuff, sometimes it breaks things that we fixed multiple times earlier. The PRs are too large, nobody can review that mess and you better be on call for your deployment. Maybe it will get better, maybe not. I dont know yet.
The massive PRs is something that probably has to end. You can ai generate smaller changes in reviewable PR sizes. It probably even helps the AI code review tools to break the work in to smaller logical chunks too.
Yes you can, and this is still the most realistic use of AI llms, but this is a 2x multiplier, not 10x or 20x
Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
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