Wait - you spent north of $400,000?

People love to flex by using the API costs for their subscription tokens.

I personally find it ridiculous. The cost is what you paid, not what someone else could have paid. Markets and all that.

It would be like using spot instances on AWS but flexing by boasting about how much on-demand $$ compute you used.

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Capricorn2481 11 hours ago | parent [-]

In this case, I think they are just giving you an idea of what it cost to do this. They aren't saying it's prescriptive

	▲	Rapzid 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Except.. It doesn't really give you an idea what it cost? That's not what it cost. How much did it actually cost? Who knows! It's also TheoGG sooooo.. Those influencer instincts tho.

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sghiassy 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Assuming he used $400,000 in tokens, but used subs

I wonder how much AI companies lost on this?

Edit: not that I’m worried about them, I’m just curious

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esperent 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I wonder how much AI companies lost on this?

Probably zero, or even a profit. The idea that these companies are making a loss on subscriptions is an unsubstantiated HN fallacy.

On the contrary, they're probably making a small profit on subscriptions, or at least break even, and absolute bank on API pricing. Anthropic recently reported an 80% gross profit margin, for example.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/anthropic-t...

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adrianvincent 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Profitable, if you just ignore how much money they spend

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janalsncm 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Excited for their IPO just to put this to bed, one way or another.

	▲	rich_sasha 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It might, but also might not. I would imagine the economics are genuinely very tangled up even before you start obfuscating it - it’s very hard to fairly allocate fixed costs between training and inference. I think a clearer picture would be from inference-only orgs.

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MBCook 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What are “subs”?

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sghiassy 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Subscription

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MBCook 11 hours ago | parent [-]

So you pay $20/mo, let it run for a long time, then claim you used the equivalent of $1/2 million?

	▲	scotty79 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think he has 5-10 of $200 subs, but yes, that's the general idea.

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JacobAsmuth 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most of it was wasted on OpenAI tokens. It actually cost them $24k USD according to the github description.

	▲	LeFantome 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So, you could do it for a couple hundred bucks using DeepSeek.

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aizk 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No that's the theoretical token value cost based on chaining multiple 20x subs.

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hedgehog 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sibling dead comment said it already but that's likely an estimate of what it would cost via API and in practice it was a few hundred or thousand dollars of subscription fees.

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colomo 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

$420,000 worth of tokens, though I'm pretty sure he used subs.

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pebal 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An absurd amount. The cost wouldn't exceed $500 under a subscription model.

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spense 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I did over $400,000 in API priced tokens

i'd bet this is a few subscriptions over a few months rather than paying directly for tokens.

	▲	TiredOfLife 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This was OpenAI provided unlimited usage for evaluation. The current working version made by Opus was the one that used a couple of 100$ subs

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woozlewuzzle 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder how that cost compares to paying a human programmer to produce the same end result.

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kyguy23 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]