Comment by simonw
2 hours ago
One big difference I have with Ed Zitron is I look at companies suddenly getting worried that they're spending millions of dollars on tokens and think "wow those AI vendors are going to make SO MUCH MONEY".
The best price for a product is what I call the "suck air through your teeth" price. You want your customers to suck air through their teeth... and then pay the full amount anyway.
Uber set their per-developer token allowance to $1500 per developer per tool. That suggests to me that they think they can get at least that much ROI out of AI tooling.
Selling $1500/employee/month plans to companies is a great business to be in.
Well hold on. "They" also thought tokenmaxxing was a good idea, until they didn't.
Whether companies pay will come down to the bottom line once the hype around the country club dies down a bit and for that it's still TBD on the actual product cost impact.
Yeah, tokenmaxxing was obviously stupid. Setting a limit is what happens when the adults in the room stop being stupid.
Not sure about that. As I replied elsewhere, it's a forcing function:
> People misunderstand the point of the tokenmaxxing time period, it was to force people to use AI so as to not have them stuck in their way, as some people are, and then to evaluate how it can help the company.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047448#49047826
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that $1.5k is ostensibly not coming out of productivity gains from the AI though.
it's coming out of the salary budget from what i've seen. i've seen a company both say "AI max. it's the future! don't be late" and then go on to increase limits to compensation across the board.
Very true and I don't think you can completely discount the end consumer market either. A large number of the people not currently paying for a subscription are becoming dependent on AI enabled search results. I imagine monetization of those users is in its infancy and will rival the search result ad business eventually