alt Hacker NewsI do not really agree with the below, but the logic is probably:
1) Engineering investment at companies generally pays off in multiples of what is spent on engineering time. Say you pay 10 engineers $200k / year each and the features those 10 engineers build grow yearly revenue by $10M. That’s a 4x ROI and clearly a good deal. (Of course, this only applies up to some ceiling; not every company has enough TAM to grow as big as Amazon).
2) Giving engineers near-unlimited access to token usage means they can create even more features, in a way that still produces positive ROI per token. This is the part I disagree with most. It’s complicated. You cannot just ship infinite slop and make money. It glosses over massive complexity in how software is delivered and used.
3) Therefore (so the argument goes) you should not cap tokens and should encourage engineers to use as many as possible.
Like I said, I don’t agree with this argument. But the key thing here is step 1. Engineering time is an investment to grow revenue. If you really could get positive ROI per token in revenue growth, you should buy infinite tokens until you hit the ceiling of your business.
Of course, the real world does not work like this.
Right, I understand of course that AI usage and token costs are an investment (probably even a very good one!).
But my point is moreso that saying 1k a day is cheap is ridiculous. Even for a company that expects an ROI on that investment. There’s risks involved and as you said, diminishing returns on software output.
I find AI bros view of the economics of AI usage strange. It’s reasonable to me to say you think its a good investment, but to say it’s cheap is a whole different thing.