Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
anthonypasq | on: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
perhaps the personal computer? Companies were spending 3-5k (10-15k inflation adjusted) on every employee for just hardware.

everyone making comparisons to the dotcom bubble seems misguided. this is clearly computing 2.0 imo

thewebguyd | parent | next
No disagreement on computing 2.0, but companies spending 3-5k per employee for hardware isn't generally a monthly cost. It's a at the time of hire, and then once every 3 to 5 years after that, for a monthly amortized cost of about $50/employee.

I have my concerns with current inference pricing in that there's a non-zero possibility for a rug pull in the future for the subscription plans for organizations and individuals that can still use them. For now, its only companies larger than ~150 users that need to pay per token, but what if that wasn't the case? Not every company can afford over $1k/month/employee to give them access to AI tooling, further making it harder to compete against the behemoths. If we get to a point where an individual can no longer pay $100/month for nearly unlimited usage and instead must pay per token, that's going to be a problem.

Personal computing eventually became an equalizer (until we started centralizing on mainframes again, aka the cloud) because it got cheap. My hope is that inference also gets just as, if not cheaper.

I have high hopes for local AI and open weight models and we will continue the ethos of local, personal computing and not needing to offload everything to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google, etc. to get work done once the hardware and hardware availability catch up.

GrinningFool | root | parent | next
Any kind of rug-pull is a serious concern. Companies are re-orienting their entire development processes around these tools. Sure they can go back, but it will require a much larger and more expensive effort than to transition in the first place.

All companies who make this transition will be more or less at the mercy of model providers.

dghlsakjg | root | parent
Every employee doesn't need $1k in token spend per month, either. That kind of spend makes sense for technical workers in r+d.

Most other workers are served fine by $20-30 worth of tokens on a budget model. You don't need Opus to help support write emails.

loading story #48389517
dghlsakjg | parent | next
The Dotcom bubble is an interesting comparison.

The general thrust that everything would be online was correct, it was just that the market mistimed and misallocated of capital by a decade or more. There was massive spending on infrastructure capacity that we wouldn't end up needing until the 2010s. There were hype driven valuations completely disconnected from business fundamentals just because a company was an 'internet' company. Things were going from cutting edge to obsolete in less than a year. There were breathless promises that this was business 2.0! Of course, none of that sounds remotely like what is going on today...

I'm optimistic about AI, but I also don't think that it is going to change everything as fast as promised.

threetonesun | root | parent
The question you always have to ask is what problems does it directly solve. I personally think most of the current problems in software development and really the world at large are not time-bound problems but alignment issues, and all an LLM can really do there is be some 3rd party oracle that gives you an answer without needing other humans to agree with you.
loading story #48390360
loading story #48389486
jghn | parent | next
Two things can be true at the same time. It can be true that this is here to stay. It can also be true that companies are grossly overvalued right now and that the market is irrationally exuberant. This would mean we could both have a crash and also see AI coding be the new future.
pixelesque | parent | next
Hardware's not generally a subscription, monthly cost though.

You update it for them every 3/4 years (if they're lucky).

It probably makes a bit more sense to compare it to existing software subscriptions like Office, or the old-school 'per-seat' licenses per user for software.

thewebguyd | root | parent
There's some software that can cost $1k or more per seat/month, but it's pretty rare. Big tier ERPs usually fall in the ~$600/seat/moth range, specialty engineering stuff can hit over $1k, Bloomberg terminal, etc. I wonder if what Uber's building with that $1.5k/month/employee is actually delivering the same value that something like an ERP would to the entire org...
pmg101 | parent
I think the right comparison is the invention of the microprocessor. At that time people were grappling with a lot of the same things we are today - would it automate jobs away, would it transform education and the work place, etc.