I know of a friend's company in India who purchased inference, at 4% of the actual price and states that it gave him an unbeatable competitive edge in their large running video influence pipelines. Any new competitors could not offer their pricing at all.
Primarily that operated because registering a new company getting free AWS credits was a very tiny cost
No wonder social media is so shit nowadays. All that brainwashing and propaganda from third world countries, now at 4% the price!
I don’t know if that’s true of India or not, but I like to give comment authors the benefit of the doubt that being specific about the geography was helpful context here
[1 ]https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/130...
imagine ford starts renting out company cars at a huge discount so they can get people to buy the same model for themselves after they drive it at work. its the exact same car and costs the same amount to make, they just take a loss on it and use by anyone other than employees is banned in the contract.
some small company realizes they dont really use their cars that much so they rent them out again for 3 days a week to get some extra cash. is that fraud? it costs ford nothing because they get the same payments either way, they just lose potential profits. they are the ones who decided to set up a loss leader and take the risk of someone "abusing" the system so we dont need to use public resources to defend their strategy. that wastes taxpayer money to protect corporate profits, and it creates moral hazard because ford (anthropic) is not the one paying for enforcement.
If a company entered into a rental agreement with Ford it probably included a provision disallowing re-rental. The contract would have been priced according to their personal use.
So yes, this would be a clear case of fraud.
Signing up for a service as a personal user and reselling the services against the terms of the agreement is fraud, too. A lot of people give this a personal pass because they imagine individuals doing this and the internet never likes holding individuals and personal users to terms of service, but remember these token resellers are not casual users trying to sell off extra quota.
These are organized fraud rings set up to abuse the services. Not innocent individuals trying to get a few extra bucks each month.
If you look at the discount rates, it wouldn't even be possible to resell tokens from the subscription plans at this discount rate and break even. The sources of these tokens are getting into fraudulent payment methods, stolen credit cards, and fraudulent chargebacks, among other things.
How would one even word a bulletproof subscription contract for agentic tokens, anyway? You can't forbid automation because sub-agents are automation. You could forbid "using tokens for the benefit of more than the human who signed up" but then what do families (especially with kids) need to do? What if your friend asks you a question and you turn to a chat model? Forbidding "reselling" tokens outside of a household sounds like the closest terms but that's leaky for anyone who travels a lot, etc.
Fixed cost per token simply works.
I have some past experience with subscription plans for a much less interesting product. Abuse is inevitable. As you do your math on the subscription costs you look at the actual usage across all accounts, which includes the abuse.
Cleaning up abuse was still a priority because it meant we could give more service to the real customers. It's a frustrating battle because you actually want to give good service to the real customers, but you also want to let each account do as they please with their susbcription. That latter priority probably fades fast for something like an LLM company when you discover that the abuse has become automated and is scaling up so fast that it's tilting the math toward degrading service for everyone.
> Fixed cost per token simply works.
As a consumer, I benefit greatly from the subscription rates. There's a lot of grumbling about how they should go to fixed token for everyone but I'm over hear happy with the subscription plan offerings while they last.
reverse the pricing structure; give modest discount once you go over certain amount of tokens, then you are incentivized NOT to start multiple accounts.
require first few transactions to be pre-paid to get around at least some of the card problems.
Of course, that would fuck over subsidized plans, but I don't see any option to keep them if you want to avoid the flood
Is this some kind of attempt to make the other side look better by making the worst argument you can?
It turns out to be a pretty complex program to solve at scale. Token fraud is a lucrative market and the adversaries are surprisingly sophisticated. It's a cat-and-mouse game, accelerated with AI.
(If you'd like to work on this, we are hiring :))
Client-side detection can always be sidestepped, and you need to intermediate the actual inference to get enough signals to make an accurate prediction. There are hundreds of listings for cursor tokens/credits right now.
We use canary values to detect the resellers, and I believe that's the only approach that will actually work at scale.
I disabled automatic downgrading/rerouting because it sometimes takes me a second to tell when the answer came from a different model than I wanted. You could easily sell Opus as Fable for a good while.
Here are the two open source proxies listed in the article: https://github.com/songquanpeng/one-api and https://github.com/QuantumNous/new-api
Do these numbers make sense? $0.13 usage per $1 spent?
At $1 of usage for $0.13, the reseller is making a tidy profit on top of whatever subscriptions they're reselling.
There are quite a few other mitigations that could be done by providers that aren't mentioned in the article.
"$0.13 of usage per $1 spent"
So I spend a dollar and I get 13 cents worth of usage?
I guess it means the otherway around but I'm not seeing how that phrasing works. Are they paying a premium to access US models?
i think this alone is the biggest bear signal
I assume most of it is just people who want cheaper access to these models and don't mind subsidizing access via somebody who is simultaneously distilling the model.
This is about controlling who gets to use the tokens for what, not about payment fraud.
In my opinion, banning individuals from using some services because they happen to live in a particular geographical location is morally wrong and providing ways of circumventing such bans is morally defensible.
This is about people circumventing the model company's attempts to protect their intellectual "property" (which, if you insist on that incoherent usage of the word "property", they themselves stole from the rest of us).
It's equivalent to buying a DVD in the US which is region-locked to Asia. Grey market, not black market. If you use a stolen credit card to buy that DVD, well tat's a totally separate matter.
1. Tokens are model-specific: e.g. tokens used by Anthropic cannot be used in models of other companies.
2. Tokens are generated by GPU cards. They measure the power of GPU cards.
3. Tokens cannot be separated from the models. You sort of "connect" the software part (models) into the hardware part (GPU cards) to use the tokens generated from the hardware.
GPUs "generate tokens" in the same sense that human feet "generate steps"
You can't compare token counts across different providers to get an absolute measure of "total work done" for the same reason that you can't compare step counts across different people to get an absolute measure of "total distance traveled"
You should do a bit of reading on what a token is. The short answer is that it’s a series of 2-4 bytes of information turned into an integer.
Your comparisons are akin to asking “are amazon gift cards the same as a bunch of pesos?”