81–90 of 149 posts
That site offers substantial free tokens, is often reported as being flaky and their affiliate links are popping up on different social medias but look sketchy as anything.
How do the users know they're getting what they're paying for? I disabled automatic downgrading/rerouting because it sometimes takes me a second to tell when the answer came from a different model than I wanted. You could easily sell Opus as Fable for a good while.
You can't, it's all reputation based. Similar to whether drug users don't really know what they got were diluted or not.
At Fusion Festival, I saw a big bulletin board completely covered in notices of "we tested this pill, here's a photo, here's what they thought was in it, here's what was actually in it"
They also spelled the name of the charity wrong on all the maps, so that's nice.
One aspect that seems to be missing is the abuse of the free credits provided for new companies by AWS, Azure, and other providers. I know of a friend's company in India who purchased inference, at 4% of the actual price and states that it gave him an unbeatable competitive edge in their large running video influence pipelines. Any new competitors could not offer their pricing at all. Primarily that operated because…
I spent years working on financial integrity at a large ads company and this isn't novel at all! The same resale markets are at play for the last generation of internet giant's products. Highly sophisticated actors, able to cobble together impressions through abuse of the billing systems, stolen financial instruments, taken over accounts, etc, create massive markets of discounted impressions for resale. It was very i…
It's the same fundamental problem as "ticket touting" for popular events - if you sell something that's in demand at a price that's far lower than the clearing price of the market, you're creating a juicy arbitrage opportunity that sooner or later somebody is going to try and exploit
This is more like sharing Argentinan $2/m Google Premium subscriptions via a load balancer.
the way i see it there are 3 types of resellers. the ones using fake credit cards to rack up costs and then cancel the card are doing actual fraud. then you got mass free trial abuse which is more of a gray area and i would say its still wrong. but if you sign up for a subscription, pay for it and resell your monthly tokens thats not at all unethical, even if its breaking their terms and costing the provider money. i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> some small company realizes they dont really use their cars that much so they rent them out again for 3 days a week to get some extra cash. is that fraud? Most likely, yes. There's a common fallacy that once you pay someone for a service, you are free to do whatever you want with that service. In the case of the rental car, the contract the company entered into would prohibit reselling the services and limit who ca…
Breach of contract isn't fraud though
The real problem is subscription models. Businesses want recurring revenue so they try to game the ratio of fixed subscription prices to COGS but it's always a game and so whoever can figure out the upside for the company can figure out the complementary upside for themselves. How would one even word a bulletproof subscription contract for agentic tokens, anyway? You can't forbid automation because sub-agents are aut…
The problem is loss making subscription as a marketing tool. But if you do loss leaders that be the risk you take.
Not unlike narcotics being cut with filler
One aspect that seems to be missing is the abuse of the free credits provided for new companies by AWS, Azure, and other providers. I know of a friend's company in India who purchased inference, at 4% of the actual price and states that it gave him an unbeatable competitive edge in their large running video influence pipelines. Any new competitors could not offer their pricing at all. Primarily that operated because…