Yeah, I think it is pretty obvious at this point that users have gotten over their skis a bit on the fixed rate plans. I suspect a lot of folks were playing around with agentic workflows on a $10-200/month plan and then started implementing them at their companies under enterprise accounts not realizing that API based billing would result in easily 10-100x the costs. Running hundreds of agents 24/7 is all fun and games when you can do it for beer money. Not as fun when it is super yacht money.
As an anecdote, Github is changing their copilot plan to usage based billing next month. They released a tool that allows their users to estimate what their bills will look like under the new plan based on their past usage. There are some screenshots online from users showing their plans will go from $40/month to $3-5k/month. I imagine this is happening everywhere. These tools absolutely can do more than they were capable of just six months ago. But if the true costs are as high as it appears, folks are going to be much more judicious with how they use them moving forward.
GitHub doesn't have access to its own models so it has to pay the prices of the model it uses.
People confuse price with cost all the time. The price of Opus has dropped from $75/1M output tokens to $25. That's the price. The cost is much lower and according to Dario, about a month ago, they had about a 73% margin.
I don't understand how anyone would use GitHub copilot...it's basically running a custom harness and using close to API pricing for Opus. This is why Microsoft is cooked in this game.
But yeah, I don't understand why people switch from subscription to API prices for Claude. They're way higher, but again that's price and not necessarily the cost to Anthropic to serve.
For the longest time Copilot was the best deal in town. For $10 a month you would get ~1300 requests. A single prompt was counted as a request, and it didn't matter how many tokens were used or how many loops the agent did. It was a spectacular deal. Of course, now that they are moving to API based billing the plan is a not really a deal at all. The monthly plan is essentially pre-paying for API credits, which are use it or lose it and they are not discounted in any way.
And FYI, most enterprise accounts were forced to switch to a hybrid monthly seat license plus API based usage earlier this year. So that is why we are probably seeing so much alarm over Ai bills at the enterprise level. Companies went whole hog on agentic workflows not fully appreciating the costs structures of their new plans. Didn't help that pretty much every VC and board was probably breathing down their neck that if they didn't jump on the AI bandwagon they would get left behind.
I'm really annoyed at github for only allowing export of a single month of usage.
There were a lot of people (here included) that were absolutely abusing github - getting Opus to generate its own subagents for days on end with a single premium request. If THAT'S $3k/mo, I'm honestly not worried.
I was just asking sonnet, 5.4, opus, in single agent session to fix a problem for 20 minutes...if THAT'S $3k/mo, then AI is truly cooked.
Yeah, I don't doubt that there was some abuse going on. But keep in mind there are plenty of reports out there that companies were setting up tokenmaxing leaderboards essentially encouraging this type of behavior from their employees. So I think the broader point here is that the insane growth that Anthropic has experienced over the last six months might be a temporary blip due to companies scrambling to take advantage of these more powerful agentic capabilities while not fully understanding the resulting costs.
I think for your use case, the most likely outcome is that you are going to need to be on a $100-200 month plan if you want access to the cutting edge models. But on the other end of the spectrum, you could probably get closer to $10-20 month using Chinese models. My usage was closer to yours, with the occasional tokenmaxxing sprint just to experiment a bit and test out the limits of the plan. I am not quite sure what I will be doing next month once it moves to API billing but I suspect I will move to openrouter and one of the open source CLI harnesses.
If the market is "efficient", then the debt should work against the market cap. For example if we assume a $50B offer at 50%/50% debt and stock, then we should expect the market cap to only increase by $25B. And for GME shareholders, they should expect their stock price to stay roughly the same because that $25B market cap would be offset by a corresponding increase in the number of shares. The debt would increase the enterprise value of the company, which is the more comprehensive metric to use when trying to value a company as it takes into account both debt obligations and cash on hand.
Of course the market may move the price up or down based on how much they like the merger. If they think there is some synergy here, they may move things higher. If they think the debt is too burdensome or have other issues with it, they will move the price lower. But all things being equal, any market cap increase of a buyout should be offset by the dilution that was incurred to finance the deal.
What looks like a "hack" here though, is that Cohen tied his incentive structure to market cap and not share price. The fact that his award is in the form of options and not RSU's does add some incentive for a higher share price, but at the end of the day, it looks like he can get 100% of his award by simply buying companies using dilutive stock issuance. Not sure how much the GME faithful appreciated that at the time of the vote. I think Elon did something similar in his incentive package.
The jury is still out on this. Those tax based deprecation schedules are largely a relic of traditional data centers, where workloads are fairly moderate compared to AI use cases. Additionally, power and rack space constraints can complicate things quite a bit. If next gen chips are significantly more efficient and you are currently constrained by power availability, you might pull your old servers and replace them with the newer ones regardless of how much useful life you have left.
I am all for Europe establishing a bit more autonomy in regards to energy and defense, but let's not forgot there is a very real reason things are the way the are. Europe had a long history of warfare and the post-WWII was specifically designed to try and reign that in. And as the U.S. is finding out, you can have a largely pacifist population, but it only takes one motivated individual to seize the reigns of power and kick off ill advised military adventures. So I think there is a rather convincing argument to be made that sometimes it is better to just not have those capabilities in the first place.
It is very difficult to ship and store oil in the volumes that are relevant to modern economies. We are very much in a situation where some regions are business as usual, some regions can't get oil at any cost, and some regions have so much oil they are stopping production because they don't have any where to store it.
In terms of how this impacts prices, the headline number is usually Brent crude, but there are a number of different "flavors" with various geopolitical factors that influence price[1]. For example, the US market is going to respond differently then the Indian market. The former is a net exporter halfway across the globe from the conflict area, the later gets a substantial portion of their oil through the Strait of Hormuz.
If the conflict carries on for a while things will probably normalize across markets as production and shipping adjust to the new reality. But in the short term you are going to have some folks mildly inconvenienced by slightly higher prices, while other folks might not even be able to fill their tanks.
Hard disagree. These are public markets we are talking about, which give companies access to financing from mom and pop investors. No one is forcing these companies to be public, they chose to be public because they wanted access to the liquidity provided by public markets. That liquidity is coming from folks retirement savings.
I was following a company that did an ATM offering in January. By June, less than six months later, they had entered Chapter 11. Things can move fast in the business world. A financing deal falling through at the wrong time can be the difference between business as usual and bankruptcy.
This change would largely benefit insiders and deep pocketed investors/funds that can afford bespoke data sources to fill in the gaps. And it feels like just another attempt by Wall street to force mom and pop investors into the role of dumb exit liquidity.
If you are an index investor, it is probably not worth your time and energy to make any drastic changes because of this particular incident. Space X will comprise a small percentage of the indexes in question, and any impact on your portfolio will likely be imperceptible. And if your holdings are in a taxable account, the tax hit from selling are probably not worth it.
Longer term, folks should be aware that Wall Street has fully caught on to the normalization of index investing and have been looking at ways to use passive investors as exit liquidity. Private equity and private credit are the two recent high profile examples. There was an executive order recently that directed the federal government to consider allowing these asset classes into 401k's. And these sectors have been increasingly making there way into the public markets in various ways (which is ironic considering the name of the asset class). Same story with crypto.
In the past, most passive index investors worried about fees and portfolio composition and diversity. But moving forward it is probably worth thinking about index governance as well. For example the S&P500 has a one year waiting period before an public company can be considered.
Do you have specific recommendations for particularly well-governed indexes? Is something like ESGV insulated from such manipulation? Or is it time for investors to start building their own direct/custom indexing with something like Frec
I have stopped doing index investing and have switched to actively managing my portfolio, so I haven't spent much time looking into it. I have seen a few posts on reddit (r/bogleheads in particular) and it looks like there are some names getting thrown out over there, as well as discussion about particular ETF's rules regarding these types of changes.
My recommendation is do not take investing advise from any post on HN. They are notoriously bad about understanding capital markets. There are a few good posters here but they are boring [factual] with 0 replies.
Do you know if First Brand's actions are considered fraud? Or was this entirely on the lenders to make sure they were in the clear regarding the collateral? Doesn't excuse the lack of diligence, but curious if there was some assumption of good faith that may have played a role in what diligence was or was not done.
It is incredibly hard to make money going short. Even if you are right about the direction, most short positions require interest payments to hold, or have some sort of decay built into the structure. So timing is everything and even then, if the underlying security slowly grinds down (instead of a quick abrupt move) you could still lose if the interest/decay on the short position outruns the downward movement on the underlying.
I have been actively trading in the market for a little over a year now, and while winning on a short position is probably the most satisfying trade for me, the overwhelming majority of those trades are losses and at this point I mostly treat them as hedges. I suspect that is true for most market participants as well.
I think a lot of the hype is coming from content creators who are actually finding it useful for content creation. Generating ideas, organizing notes and research, writing scripts and articles, managing schedules, editing, promoting, etc...
I assume a lot of these folks were already using LLM's quite a bit, but were using the Chat interfaces or had workflows that were split among a bunch of different services and tools. Something like OpenClaw gave them a way to centralize a lot of that and also gave them a way to use natural language to direct efforts. So for them this probably feels like a big step change.
If you are coming from a programming background you were aware that this type of setup has been doable for a while, but you were probably content sticking with Claude code or similar tools because those tools covered most of your LLM based workflows quite well.
And tying this altogether, one of the lowest hanging fruits for content creators is to create content about the tools they are using. Doubly so if that particular tool is starting to go viral. So you end up with a self feeding virality of sorts, as OpenClaw got more popular, more content creators started using it, and then publishing content about it, etc....
For 99% of my use cases, Claude Code is the clear winner. So, when I tried to use OpenClaw to test it out, it just seemed like a worse, slower, less-capable version of Claude Code. And it is. I haven’t seen the use case where OpenClaw can really shine yet, but I’m sure it’s coming. Like others are saying, I’m willing to be convinced, but so far it hasn’t happened.
As an anecdote, Github is changing their copilot plan to usage based billing next month. They released a tool that allows their users to estimate what their bills will look like under the new plan based on their past usage. There are some screenshots online from users showing their plans will go from $40/month to $3-5k/month. I imagine this is happening everywhere. These tools absolutely can do more than they were capable of just six months ago. But if the true costs are as high as it appears, folks are going to be much more judicious with how they use them moving forward.
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