[cranium]

I don't understand why simonw's comment is dead, because he mentions a real counterpoint to the video: API token prices are NOT the raw costs for any provider. I'd even say that inference needs to have quite a juicy margin to cover for all the other costs. It would make no business sense to sell API tokens at a loss: nobody knows yet how to price intelligence, so why start in the red when it's the only source of revenue?

It's a different story for subscriptions. According to my rough computation (N=1), a Claude Max 20x at $200 gives you access to around $8k worth of tokens per month – but they don't cost Anthropic $8k! – and there I think they'd make a loss on every token maxxer which may or may not be compensated by subscriptions that are not used. But that's not the end of the subscription story.

Once you are "enterprise" you pay for token use and there is no way around it: Anthropic does it and so does OpenAI. The subscription is the gateway drug to token maxxing. When people are hired in an Enterprise job, they'll come with their habit of using AI for all and any task.

All to say that: yes, AI labs are bleeding money but on everything else – datacenters, training models, talent,...

[lelanthran]

> It would make no business sense to sell API tokens at a loss: nobody knows yet how to price intelligence, so why start in the red when it's the only source of revenue?

All VC funded businesses start selling in the red. What makes you think these ones are going to be different?

[simonw]

Huh, I had not realized my comment was [dead] - it's here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492313 (I see it as not-dead, which I guess is how the dead system works) (UPDATE: it's no longer dead)

I was calling out the video for starting with:

> If you paid for that usage through a standard API, those 10 billion tokens would cost you around $15,000 a year. That is the real unsubsidized price. No discounts, no incentives, just the raw compute costs.

When "raw compute costs" is entirely misleading to describe API pricing.

[IceDane]

> According to my rough computation (N=1), a Claude Max 20x at $200 gives you access to around $8k

According to my own personal `cc-usage` script, I'm just about to hit $15k in the past 30 days, and that's about half 5x and half 20x. And I'm not someone running openclaw or letting my agents spin around 24/7 - this is just very active agentic coding, where I'm constantly involved.

[beAbU]

> It would make no business sense to sell API tokens at a loss: nobody knows yet how to price intelligence, so why start in the red when it's the only source of revenue?

The only consistent bullet point in the playbook of venture capital-driven startups for the last 30 years is to sell $1 bills for $0.50 and then hope to make it up in volume.