Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamas | Hacker News Reader

Do I understand that spend report right ? 10k USD in a month for AI tokens ? After talking about the environmental cost of AI ?

View on HN

Yeah this is where I stopped. I use AI every day for work but 10k spend to me is a signal that OP is doing something extremely stupid with their AI use.

That's the cost of one employee (and not an expensive one). Do you think it's impossible he's getting more value from the AI than he would from a single employee?

If it's an employee, which I doubt but ok, it's an employee you constantly have to probe, talk to, give instructions to, so, not a really good employee.

Neither of us have any idea whether his manufacturing startup is successful. It looks to be a 5 person team. A google search suggests they had a funding round early this year.

It might, in fact, be that you are more successful with your approach. I have no idea. Congrats if so.

I mean, he must be pretty successful to be able to burn 10k in tokens. If he is successful because or despite of the AI, I don't know and I don't really care ? That wasn't the question.

It's not the case that someone successful is doing everything right and someone unsuccessful is doing everything wrong, I'd grant.

But I think it's odd for you to now say it doesn't matter whether or not his AI token use is leading to success or not. I personally think it's actually really important to learn whether/when this approach is smart.

Depends how you use the tokens. It's not 10k, but I have an agent do an investigation automatically when I get paged, so by the time I get to the computer I have a nice summary. But that's costing me like $5/mo at most.

But you could use tons of autonomous agents for all kinds of things. Probably shouldn't, but you can.

I use AI every day, and I use it quite a bit, and I use Opus more than I maybe should, and even then I'm not even at $2000 in tokens this year. I don't understand how people are tokenmaxxing as much as they are.

Doesn't seem that wild if youre doing large green field dev with frontier models.

Im spending about 2-3K a week on personal projects and 5K a week on corporate stuff.

Crazy. I use claude pro and I barely hit the quota working on greenfield stuff.

You could realistically be burning through ~5k of tokens without hitting the quota. The subscriptions are crazy subsidized relative to the API rates.

I did the napkin math (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46984659) -- LLMs + humans are way more resource efficient than humans alone, even if they speed you up by only 5%.

It's not because LLMs are that efficient, it's because humans are that inefficient.

Yes, this dissonance is the point of the post. The first two sentences use the word, and then it's repeated throughout.

It's nice to see a person who actually acknowledges tradeoff.

For the curious, this seems to be his company: https://www.umh.app

Reply on news.ycombinator.com