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I don’t think this line of thinking is particularly robust because it ignores how AI is being used and where the resource usage is coming from. Right now there

I don’t think this line of thinking is particularly robust because it ignores how AI is being used and where the resource usage is coming from. Right now there are a small number of very very resource intensive use cases that are being subsidized by OpenAI and Anthropic. There are people generating millions of lines of code because it’s basically free at the point of use, despite the code producing very little value. Anthropic and OpenAI frequently “reset” customer limits to allow them to use even more resources at no additional cost. The majority of use cases across business are not generating millions of lines of code per employee. The majority of businesses need just a little bit of automation to radically improve the way they operate. A software engineer making endless projects because it’s free to do so might use hundreds of billions of tokens per year, but an entire manufacturing business could be revolutionized with a few million tokens per year. I think 2 things can be true: 1. There is very little penetration of AI across the economy and huge room to grow in the number of businesses deriving economic value from AI 2. The compute usage today is vastly overrepresented by usage outliers who are not paying the cost of their usage and will stop when forced to pay the cost We could see AI usage 10x while seeing compute decrease 10x if the type of usage shifts. Most businesses just need smarter macros.

zozbot234 1mo ago
> Anthropic and OpenAI frequently “reset” customer limits to allow them to use even more resources at no additional cost. Surely this applies to fixed-price subscriptions, not per-token spend? Large enterprises (the "very very resource intensive" large-scale users) have to pay per token.
- reticulates 1mo ago
  A lot of companies avoid paying for usage by encouraging their employees to use individual subscriptions. Outside of the short lived tokenmaxxing fever dream, enterprises are conscious of their usage with companies like Uber and Amazon reigning in their usage massively and companies like Ramp building their own routers for cost minimization. Facebook is reportedly the company that spent $500 million in a single month on tokens. There are individual non-enterprise users rotating multiple subscriptions incurring $10k+ in tokens per subscription. Facebook’s $500 million month… is equivalent to ~10k individual subscriptions which could be as little as a few thousand of the heaviest users. That’s $500 million when billed on usage, or ~$2 million on plans. The reason resets are such a big deal (people have set up websites to track them, tweets announcing them get millions of impressions) is because there are huge numbers of users pushing their plan limits every single day. If there was huge demand from usage-based customers (the large enterprises) that OpenAI and Anthropic couldn’t meet, they wouldn’t be handing out resets like candy. I think a realistic belief is that Anthropic and OpenAI have vastly overstated demand and are using resets as a way to keep usage artificially inflated at a substantial financial cost. I’d guess fixed price plan users make up at least 95% of usage.

zozbot234 1mo ago

> Anthropic and OpenAI frequently “reset” customer limits to allow them to use even more resources at no additional cost. Surely this applies to fixed-price subscriptions, not per-token spend? Large enterprises (the "very very resource intensive" large-scale users) have to pay per token.

reticulates 1mo ago
A lot of companies avoid paying for usage by encouraging their employees to use individual subscriptions. Outside of the short lived tokenmaxxing fever dream, enterprises are conscious of their usage with companies like Uber and Amazon reigning in their usage massively and companies like Ramp building their own routers for cost minimization. Facebook is reportedly the company that spent $500 million in a single month on tokens. There are individual non-enterprise users rotating multiple subscriptions incurring $10k+ in tokens per subscription. Facebook’s $500 million month… is equivalent to ~10k individual subscriptions which could be as little as a few thousand of the heaviest users. That’s $500 million when billed on usage, or ~$2 million on plans. The reason resets are such a big deal (people have set up websites to track them, tweets announcing them get millions of impressions) is because there are huge numbers of users pushing their plan limits every single day. If there was huge demand from usage-based customers (the large enterprises) that OpenAI and Anthropic couldn’t meet, they wouldn’t be handing out resets like candy. I think a realistic belief is that Anthropic and OpenAI have vastly overstated demand and are using resets as a way to keep usage artificially inflated at a substantial financial cost. I’d guess fixed price plan users make up at least 95% of usage.