Pylimitics

The leading AI vendors are starting to remove the curtains around how many tokens you’re using and how much they cost. In large corporate settings, token cost has been effectively zero for individual practitioners. In my most recent corporate gig, I was strongly encouraged to make as much use of Codex and its ilk as possible. No chargebacks. Not even any information about how much it might cost if my department were paying for the tokens I used.

Individual accounts have been pretty much the same. I am completely sure that I use more tokens than my Anthropic subscription actually pays for. In fact I’m pretty sure it’s a lot more.

But the behemoths are hoping to go public and raise ginormous amounts of money, so they’re going to have to start standing up to some scrutiny. Including being a bit more honest about how and when they plan (or hope) to start making a profit and paying back the equally ginormous amount of debt they’re already in.

Thus stories like this are popping up; Uber has put a limit on AI usage for their engineers. The details are missing, like what kind of system is tracking that spending and what happens if someone blows through their cap. But the essence of the story is clear: this AI stuff is not free, and in fact it can get very expensive very fast. It was just free at first, in order to make it easy to start relying on it.

I’ve heard somewhere this is a tactic used by drug dealers.