alt Hacker NewsYC's Garry Tan uses AI agents so much, he spends up to $200K a year on tokens
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YC seems big on quantitative metrics. Is there anything that says he is more efficient than 3 or 4 years ago. Is YC as a whole?
> he’s suffered from “cyber psychosis” and sometimes barely sleeps
Sleep is one of the most important things in the world. Why not have the agents work while you sleep?
He’s gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers in this racket
I can't recall software being conspicuous consumption until the advent of the AI token. Maybe the first "I am rich" app in the app store for $999.
> As an early OpenClaw adopter who is now a power user, Tan says one thing he’s learned is not to treat AI agents like traditional software. Some people are so worried about “repeatability and safety that they actually trade off all of the beautiful parts of working with an AI agent, which basically can be so similar to a human,” he said.
This is insane. He's turning the failure of his AI assistants to do what he wants every single time and to do it in a safe manner into a positive thing. Failure as a positive!
I wonder how many of those agents get lost in a loop and just uses tokens, asking the same questions over and over and responding and asking
> ...his agent also helps him run his life. “It’s read all of my email and all of my Dropbox. It’s read, like, all of my Apple Notes, even my therapy notes going back 20 years”.
> He describes using AI agents as getting help with “almost anything that you do in your day-to-day life. (...) Almost anything you want to do, it knows you, and it’s there to help. And it will actually sort of run ahead and say, ‘What about this?’ Or it’ll help you see around corners.”
Wow, impressive. Both the capabilities and how much he's willing to share.
Is it worth $17k per month? I don't think so. But people spend more on luxurious cars and such, so if you've got money to spare...
> Y Combinator is also using an agent that is “rebuilding the way we operate at YC. We now have an internal AI agent, for instance, named Stray Light that kind of has a personality, and then it has a company brain. It actually has the total context of every founder we’ve ever backed, anyone who’s ever emailed us, like all the applications.”
Holy anthropomorphization. But besides that, what's the goal of doing this? Keeping a handy overview of when and why who said what?
Headline aside, I agree with him wholeheartedly that the future of AI is personal agents, and that costs have to come down for that to happen.
Not cloud costs, though; consumer costs. These agents must run on-device for privacy protections, because anything less will be a global non-starter. That means we need models that excel on phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops; we need home compute modules to run larger, “frontier”-class models for bigger tasks but without guzzling electricity (the Mac Mini’s power envelope is an ideal target); we need smart harnesses that can foist off inference to bigger models elsewhere on your private network of devices as needed without the user prompting for specific thinking modes or model names. All of this has to happen automatically, privately, securely, without leaking data to advertisers or surveillance companies.
It’s hard work, but it’s definitely the future of AI. I would argue the business case is solved with being able to build bespoke stacks of kit and run models through neocloud providers with ZDR policies. It’s the consumer angle that’s hard to crack, because everyone wants a repeat of Web 2.0 for ad-dollars instead of a privacy-centric modern tech stack that forces companies into lower revenue streams.
Kind of low isn't it?
Come on. If you have a Claude Max 20x plan ($200/month) you're massively subsidized and your API cost is anywhere from $5000-14000 per month.
(Figures vary, see e.g. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christham_4-weeks-on-claude-2... for $13,700/mo.)
If you hit your limits on two Max 20x plans, you could very well be exceeding $300k/yr in token use at current API rates.
"Do my job, make no mistakes"
That's basically gstack
I spend that much at API rates with a couple subscriptions
he just needs to put the finishing touches on g-stack and then programming will be solved. just another $50k will do it i think!
The thing is, it's not actually that hard to spend at that kind of rate.
I wouldn't say this was the norm, but I have burned through £1k of tokens in a couple of days before. And, on that same gig, I realised a test I was considering running would burn £2.5k worth of tokens over the course of a few hours so spent a couple of hours of my own time re-engineering it to get that down to £150.
The point is that I don't necessarily know that spending a shitload of money on tokens really tells us anything useful. If he's getting a return on that investment, fine, whatever.
Obviously most of us couldn't afford to spend that much ourselves, no matter how much value it might deliver, and many of our employers wouldn't be too happy if we spent it on their dime either. Equally, if you can, and it's delivering real value, then I don't see why you wouldn't?