Whoa. This looks both powerful and expensive.

My prediction is that, this time next year, top developers outside ai labs will be spending 50k USD+ on inference.

Within labs, I've heard spend is already far beyond this per developer.

maxnevermind 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> top developers outside ai labs will be spending 50k USD+ on inference

I think it is more like top companies, not top developers, and the problem with developers in top companies was and is - absolute majority of them are not actually directly working on things that increase revenue, so companies can spend a ton of money and see barely if any changes in the product and the bottom line, so companies, at least legacy ones will be reluctant to sponsor that long term.

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vb-8448 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

50k per month?!

If someone subsidize maybe, but if the companies need to pay no way, unless there is hard evidence of the return.

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andriy_koval 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

not sure how "top developers" are defined here, but there is huge diminishing return curve starts kicking in after $200/month price point for typical eng work.

	▲	obmelvin 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I agree with the diminishing returns on spend, but worth noting that when on an Enterprise seat and paying API rates, I'd say that you can easily spend above 200/mo before seeing the curve begin to flatten Obviously there are a ton of ways to spend money / tokens and people have different levels of experience that will put this ceiling at very different levels for different people.
	▲	svachalek 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If you're talking Opus pricing, it's more like $200/day.

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cactusplant7374 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't TCO lower with Cerebras chips compared to Nvidia? Theoretically, most developers should eventually be running on Ultrafast.

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jaggederest 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean I don't think $50k is the ceiling, unless you're talking about actual cash out. Claude code subscriptions right now can easily clear you $25-35k a year in nominal value for $2400 out of pocket cost.

Given sufficient budget and scope, I could certainly productively burn a half million dollars in tokens a year or more. I think that's where we're headed anyway, buying a 2nd or 5th claude max subscription feels slightly excessive for personal usage, but at a corporate level...

	▲	datadrivenangel 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		at the corporate level you pay full price. And a moderately heavy user dev can easily spend a few $K a month, so yeah. Not impossible, but a high cost, and the diminishing returns definitely kick in