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I see that with openai too, lots of responding to itself. Seems like a convenient way for them to churn tokens.
by dawnerd 6mo ago
I see that with openai too, lots of responding to itself. Seems like a convenient way for them to churn tokens.
- OtomotO 6mo agoThis, so much this! Pay by token(s) while token usage is totally intransparent is a super convenient money printing machinery.
- y1n0 6mo agoNone of these companies have compute to spare. It’s not in their interest to use more tokens that necessary.
- malfist 6mo agoAre you saying these companies don't want to sell more product to us? Because that's the logical extension of your argument.
- keeda 6mo agoNo, the argument is they want to sell more product to more people, not just more product (to the same people.) Given that a lot of their income is from flat-rate subscriptions, they make money with more people burning tokens rather than just burning more tokens. After all, "the first hit's free" model doesn't apply to repeat customers ;-)
- boringg 6mo agoNot true - they absolutely want to goose demand as they continue to burn investor dollars and deploy infra at scale. If that demand evens slows down in the slightest the whole bubble collapses. Growth + Demand >> efficiency or $ spend at their current stage. Efficiency is a mature company/industry game.
- dawnerd 6mo agoThat doesn’t mean they also can’t be wasteful. Fact is, Claude and gpt have way too much internal thinking about their system prompts than is needed. Every step they mention something around making sure they do xyz and not doing whatever. Why does it need to say things to itself like “great I have a plan now!” - that’s pure waste.
- empthought 6mo ago> Why does it need to say things to itself like “great I have a plan now!” How else would it know whether it has a plan now?
- parliament32 6mo agoSure it is. They're well aware their product is a money furnace and they'd have to charge users a few orders of magnitude more just to break even, which is obviously not an option. So all that's left is.. convince users to burn tokens harder, so graphs go up, so they can bamboozle more investors into keeping the ship afloat for a bit longer.
- WarmWash 6mo agoIt's an option and they are going to do it. Chinese models will be banned and the labs will happily go dollar for dollar in plan price increases. $20 plans won't go away, but usage limits and model access will drive people to $40-$60-$80 plans. At cell phone plan adoption levels, and cell phone plan costs, the labs are looking at 5-10yr ROI.
- solarkraft 6mo agoIf this claim is true (inference is priced below cost), it makes little sense that there are tens of small inference providers on OpenRouter. Where are they getting their investor money? Is the bubble that big? Incidentally, the hardware they run is known as well. The claim should be easy to check.
- parliament32 6mo agoTo be clear, I'm talking about subscription pricing. API pricing for Anthropic is probably at-cost. I dare you to run CC on API pricing and see how much your usage actually costs. (We did this internally at work, that's where my "few orders of magnitude" comment above comes from)
- deckar01 6mo agoYou don’t have to use compute to pad the token count.
- grey-area 6mo agoA simpler explanation (esp. given the code we've seen from claude), is that they are vibecoding their own tools and moving fast and breaking things with predictably sloppy results.
- ngruhn 6mo agoAll the labs are in a cut throat race, with zero customer loyalty. As if they would intentionally degrade quality/speed for a petty cash grab.