M$ is changing the billing model and /r/GithubCopilot isn't very happy about it.

This post is https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1tbfkui/ill_just_leave_this_here/ but there are a lot like it.

These users — much like the users of effectively every subsidized AI subscription — never really knew how much anything they did cost, because Microsoft intentionally hid the actual cost of prompts and allowed users to spend obscene amounts as a way of boosting growth for GitHub Copilot.

Not even close to just microsoft... I've tried probably most products by now, and almost all them obfuscate the token and monetary cost of each prompt and each prompt's actions. Then even after you understand that you're going to have and credits and multiple layers of quotas/ratelimits, you rarely have any idea of how many credits a prompt is going to want to use. You can get anything from a whole task complete for 0.33 credits to 30 credits blasted on something that doesn't work.

Microsoft is so garbage what the fuck is a PRU or an AIC

They have the same kind of bullshit for fabric. You call them and ask them to explain how a certain process costs a certain number of CUs and literally their own people can't. Fucking joke.

Just inventing currency out of thin air. There has never been a more cooked company every day I become more convinced

new zitron post about the pricing change

https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-doesnt-have-roi/

Hilarious https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1tttch0/just_one_prompt_and_i_got_50_of_my_whole_month/

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Lol this shit is going to destroy the global economy so hard. Nobody is paying for this garbage.

So the token nonsense is just these AI companies creating in game currency, right?

kind of... most of these systems, if you're not literally paying per token, you're still paying for a maximum number of tokens you can use, but they also often include 5 hour quota windows and 7 day quota windows. Then if you need 2x as much usage, it's always a jump to $200. At that extreme price jump (which probably gives you 5x quotas), you're better all paying for all the $20 plans from codex/claude/google than actually paying $200. also each model is different, so you can switch when one is down or quotas you or when one of them is just better at a task for no discernible reason (which is actually pretty common).

but to you're original point, it's like they combined the worst parts of subscript with the worst parts of buying in game currency.

Tokens are supposed to be close to how much these LLMs cost to use per prompt, they would never intentionally undercut their growth so it must actually costs Microsoft close to $6000 to let them do this lol

Yeah I think this person is just using an absolutely insane amount of AI. Like they probably just run the AI 24/7. So now that its billing their for their actual usage its super high. lol

better switch to deepseek

Literally the only reason I can imagine someone not using it at this point is sinophobia lol. It performs very well and even for the pro model, tokens are ridiculously cheap.

They probably use the more expensive models.

I have a coworker who only uses the most expensive claude model for everything and my boss is happy about it

Tokenmaxxed

Right, I assume there is some correlation, but it still hits like funny money meant to obscure the real cost to the end user.

Could be that performance targets for M$ executives have changed and they suddenly no longer get their bonus based on AI adoption but on financial numbers again.

Yeah it's often a hybrid of pay per use and monthly subscription.

The tokens often correspond to some kind of linguistic unit similar to but not quite a word. Copilot appearantly bills in credits not tokens so it's even more obscure.

Gotcha, okay. Yeah, the obscurity is the thing that was most immediate to me. Obfuscation of the costs is part of the business model I’m sure.

And they are perfectly capable at charging fractions of cents for cloud compute so that excuse doesn't cut it. Definitely ment to obfuscate pricing.

These costs are far less obfuscating. AI companies have been trying to hard to hide the true costs of computation for a long time, but the need to pay for what they're doing is catching up to them. They have been massively subsidizing all of their users by charging a flat fee and not making them pay for the actual computation costs.

Here's a great article about what's going on: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ais-economics-dont-make-sense/

Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m gathering is happening. The adoption phase of the business model is long gone and they are now trying to recoup and keep the whole thing afloat in spite of the how unsustainable it is.

I bookmarked that article, Ed is one of the writers I’m always meaning to check out.

They got a $70 token discount, literally no reason to complain here.

$69?

Yeah they're just making shit up. Welcome to the end of crapitallism where the prices are all made up and the dollar has no value!

I think AI companies legitimately think that people will continue to use their AI stuff when it costs this much. They don't realize that a ton of the current AI usage is just bored/lonely people using it a ton because they don't have anything else to do. They might pay some to keep using it if they get addicted to it, but they aren't going to pay anywhere near what these companies think. And thats what they plan their investment into data centers around. It's pretty dumb.

also the idea that the only reason you didn't make an app is because you didn't have the money for programmer and a graphic designer. now you get everything with a $20/month plan! and even if that promise materialized to reality for one person, you still have a worse version of the original problem: no matter what you want to do, 1000s of people with 1000x more money than you either already did your app idea, or are going to instantly clone your app idea and destroy your market share with their advertising budgets.

I don't know why you losers need 30 people to run a website I just created an updated version of our banking app in Claude yesterday afternoon and it works perfectly. Ship it and let's have a meeting on Friday.

No no. You don't understand. I am simply the smartest and most creative person ever and thats why I need an AI to do all the actual work for me? But my ideas are top notch. Nobody else could possibly do what I made this AI do. My app that tracks how thoroughly you wipe your ass day to day is entirely original. Wiplr is the next big thing I swear! /s

They're just marketing to each other now.

Their vision is AI will gernerate and demand their own tokens. AI prompting AI inserted into the MIC machine with drone swarms and automated factories. What could go wrong?

Certainly an AI trading bot in order to maximize profits because tha5 is what it was taught to do consequences be damned, wouldn't task and order a physical body to Ultron themselves into. That would be implausible

I'm not worried about AI takeover at all honestly. These LLMs are not intelligent and are not something that would ever be a like terminator threat imo. But they are an economic threat. These companies are basically lighting trillions of dollars on fire and thinking its going to make a profit somehow. Then its going to destroy entire local economies and environments when they build these huge things, and abandon them there. The treasury markets will crash due to the Iran war Trump started too and interest rates will rise causing a broad liquidity crisis and a global depression. The 2000s and the 1900s are rhyming far too much for my liking.

i'm worried about ai warfare where vibes based classifier built out by coked out iof nazi decides that graph of my social connections looks like hezbollah operative and drone strikes me by my phone location in 1h but ymmv.

I feel like its gonna be that one scene from that marvel movie where the evil people are like "We have identified our targets" and then it shows a map where its like every single person who exists lol. I think it was the captain america one with the giant flying aircraft carriers.

kind of, the problem is general person will trust it for some reason, while carpet bombing a city looks bad, leveling a city with precise munitions and telling each time "ai said so" looks like responsible moral warfare as evidenced by entity behavior

the problem is general person will trust it for some reason

yeah, AI shit is soooo popular with the general public right now

(a) military loves ai

(b) public loves military

(c) if some competently speaking colin powell 2.0 says we identified 10000 targets and eliminated them, 80% of usa will clap like seals

I really don't think it matters what the general person in the west thinks lol. It's never mattered before. It's not like the US hasn't killed millions of innocent people over the last few decades. The only thing thats going to stop that is when other countries can fight back. Like Iran is now. There is no timeline where the typical American rises up and demands their government stops murdering people in the numbers needed to actually force a change.

I agree it's unlikely any time soon. but you really think there's no limit to how bad US material conditions can get and still no meaningful pushback?

Maybe by that time there won't be anything we can call an ""American government"" so you win again

Dumb LLM's are also a threat lol. I won't be surprised if they hook up American nukes to Grok.

Yeah but that's not so much the LLM being the threat as the idiot human being the threat. It would be no different then like me putting a cat in the same room as the big red button. When it steps on it and launches nukes its not really the cat doing it. It's the fact that I was an absolute moron who locked a cat in that room for some reason. And idiot humans have always been the main threat when it comes to nukes.

Except that the cat will never call itself Mecha Hitler. AI is reinforcing human dumbness to a level never seen before.

They are charging basically full-time coder amounts now. Maybe not at sillycon valley salaries but that's not a reasonable benchmark.

Can't wait to go urbex in the abandoned data center in 10 years.

if we zerg rush, at least a few of us will make it out with free GPUs without getting shot

I want the SSDs personally. Gotta store all my extralegally acquirred media.

Playing extraction shooters to get some practice in

All the Escape From Tarkov hatchet runners are salivating

Kimi K2, Deepseek 4, Qwen have been pretty good and very cheap.

While Claude may be somewhat better, it's not worth it.

The problem here seems to me mostly just how many tokens Copilot consumes. Deepseek pro is maybe 10x cheaper per token.

(edit: correction appearantly some of the models cost 6 credits per token and the credits are like 10x more expensive than deepseek pro tokens. This might still not be correct, it's pretty complicated and I honestly don't care enough to actually to die diligence since I don't use it)

I can't remember which article I read that mentioned it, but I think the stats are something like AI has cost billions (could have a trillion, but don't quote me cause I'm paraphrasing), and still hasn't generated any profit. At all.

It'll never be profitable. They're selling a dream.

Bundling it with existing business contracts and raising the prices might be profitable. Provided that it's not actually used much.

It'll be cheaper to use Indians than use Claude. Every major American model is subsidised to get people addicted.

My AI enthusiast friends are interested in hosting their own model on a beefy laptop or a rack in their back closet. There are just so many better options than giving Microsoft $6000/month (or $600/month).

https://isaiprofitable.com/

I feel like you could get a specialized local model to the level of Claude code without destroying the earth with data centers, and running in your house on your gpu, for a fraction of the cost. I'm almost positive this is the result of end game venture capitalism playing out like the sad final days of an addict who never quit. Cause if you could lie and say you are building god for a trillion dollars would you? Capitalists would.

Markov models?

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