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Comment by COAGULOPATH | Hacker News Reader

That's definitely weird, and I wonder how legal it is.

They can charge whatever they want.

In my country, it's illegal to charge different people differently if there's no explicitly signed agreement where the both sides agree to it. Without an agreement, there must be a reasonable and verifiable justification for a change in the price. I think suddenly charging you $100 more (compared to other consumers) without explaining how you calculated it is somewhat illegal here.

They explain how it's calculated, you just have to trust their calculations are correct.

There's no change in price. They charge the same amount per token from everyone. You pay more if you use more tokens. If some tokens are hidden, used internally to generate the final 'public' tokens is just a matter of technical implementation and business choice. If you're not happy, don't use the service.

Well imagine how it looks from the point of view of anti-discrimination and consumer protection laws: we charge this person an additional $100 because we have some imaginary units telling us they owe us $100... Just trust us. Not sure it will hold in court. If the both sides agree to a specific sum beforehand, no problem. But you can't just charge random amounts post factum without the person having any idea why they suddenly owe those amounts.

P.S. However, if the API includes CoT tokens in the total token count (in API responses), I guess it's OK.

> But you can't just charge random amounts post factum without the person having any idea why they suddenly owe those amounts.

Is it actually different from paying a contractor to do some work for you on an hourly basis, and them then having to "think more" and thus spend more hours on problem A than probably B?

I think they'd just decide to not sell in your country rather than deal with that.

where's this? the soviet union?

this completely rules out any form of negotiation for anything, ever

It doesn't rule out negotiation. That's what the part about a written agreement is for.

It merely rules out pulling prices out of thin air. Which is what OpenAI is doing here, charging for an arbitrary amount of completely invisible tokens. The shady part is that you don't know how much of these hidden tokens you would use before you actually use them, thus making it possible to arbitrarily charge some customers different amounts whenever OpenAI feels like it.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41535865

There's no problem if a specific sum is negotiated beforehand. Doesn't OpenAI bill at the end of the month post factum?

yes, I practice LLM Law and this is definitely illegal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com