OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

https://twitter.com/steipete/status/2055346265869721905

by eamag • 2 months ago

163 202 2 months ago

twitter.com

mtct88• 2 months ago

It's a very peculiar way to flex.

Avicebron• 2 months ago

It's like the nerd equivalent of rolling coal?

discordance• 2 months ago

I work at a bigtech and we’re being measured on how many tokens we consume.

We know it’s totally stupid, but unfortunately tokenmaxxing is real. I know our management line isn’t that dumb, but this is what you get when the business is selling it.

Ekaros2• 2 months ago

Lot of online presence seems to be tied to consumerism. That is consuming anything, more ostentatious the better. This is just specific digital version of that.

comboy• 2 months ago

worth mentioning that openai hired him some time ago

zxornand2• 2 months ago

And was he 5x more productive in those 30d than a years worth of a dev making 200k/yr?

Doubtful lol, dudes killing the environment just for fun at this point.

vessenes7• 2 months ago

If you review the openclaw release schedule and code output you will see that yes, he was. I’m not saying you’ll like what you see, but the openclaw release schedule is well faster than human ability to assess it.

SecretDreams2• 2 months ago

That's a metric for management to pump AI if I've ever seen one.

rowanG077• 2 months ago

It's fast for sure. But not 5 years of dev time compressed into 30 days fast.

Philip-J-Fry3• 2 months ago

With a lot of these AI tools yea, they release very often. But half the features they add aren't even that useful. They just add shit because they can and they introduce bugs and change behaviour all the time.

Opencode has the same problems. They often do multiple releases of that app a day, yet within the span of a week or two I have had to update my config because some random change has altered the behaviour and my permissions broke. Or I've noticed the way the app renders is suddenly different.

Yet, my day to day usage has barely changed since the version I installed last year. It's like everything changes but nothing changes.

realusername• 2 months ago

the openclaw release schedule is well faster than human ability to assess it.

That doesn't sound very positive to me...

risyachka• 2 months ago

Thats the single reason it is faster. Just pushing to prod whatever.

All projects can become fast if they drop guardrails.

This does not correlate with productivity increase

minraws• 2 months ago

I am not joking when I say this, if you pay me 1.3 million dollars today, I will get so much more done with just a single 200$ codex sub in 30 days than he has in 30 days, I can promise you that.

I just checked the code and feature outputs, and I can build all that in 15 days, for 1.3M USD. Fuck I would do it for 1M...

Scratch that, if it's 300K then sure I could do the same too, if you paid me that for 30 days of work. Lmao, the quality and the feature volume is just not worth anything worth paying so much money for.

I am not saying this because I don't like LLMs or I may think that AI coding can't work, but folks whatever openclaw has built for that much money is not worth nearly that much money...

throwatdem123113• 2 months ago

I read the OpenClaw subreddit for comedy. Every release just floods of posts about how everything is constantly broken and people stoping using it because of how broken it is.

kingstnap• 2 months ago

I just looked at and you weren't kidding. There are significant changes every few minutes 24/7.

https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commits/main/

GitHub insights over the last week.

Excluding merges, 216 authors have pushed 5864 commits to main and 6568 commits to all branches.

On main, 6965 files have changed and there have been 418,110 additions and 126,691 deletions.

In one month Peter makes 12k commits. So he is spending about $100 per commit depending on how much other stuff is going on.

That means he spends about

lxgr8• 2 months ago

It’s clearly also faster than its developers can handle.

wiseowise5• 2 months ago

And was he 5x more productive in those 30d than a years worth of a dev making 200k/yr?

He was. When it comes to marketing. This is was most people don't understand. Peter is a great marketing guy who got hired because of a hype vision, not because he is an outstanding engineer. Think of it like OpenAI hiring MrBeast of the coding world.

Iolaum• 2 months ago

I 'd say he is an outstanding engineer as well. He may favor output over security more than outstanding engineers at 2025 but in the 2026 world what he does is impressive. And with OpenAI's resources he has turned OpenClaw's security woes around. Latest versions are much more secure than 2 months ago.

12arwlaz2• 2 months ago

That is a good comparison. He has the charm and output quality of Mr Beast, but also his marketing prowess.

Now let's wait until the moderators clean up the wrongthink. He also has censors on his side.

simianwords3• 2 months ago

_yawn_ I keep hearing "hype vision". What part of openclaw is hype? It literally works and the adoption has gotten better.

We really need better standards for disagreement.

Ferret7446• 2 months ago

Yes, because doing things 12x faster is extremely valuable. How much do you think companies would pay to do things 12x faster? Your competitors take a year to ship a feature that you can ship in a month

RevEng2• 2 months ago

Generating 12x the amount of code/commits/releases isn't a useful metric. That could just as easily be 12x more code to maintain or iterations needed to get it working. Products are measured by the value they provide, not by the resources it cost to create them.

thomasahle3• 2 months ago

He used 600B tokens in 30 days.

I use more than 150B/month with just 15 codex accounts.

60 accounts is "just" $12,000/month. So Peter could "save" 100x by using monthly accounts.

Of course, he doesn't have to, as he works at OpenAI now.

MadxX792• 2 months ago

Sounds like a healthy industry, selling tokens at 1000x below cost.

SecretDreams2• 2 months ago

It's to build a moat, of course!

Narrator: there was no moat

wolttam2• 2 months ago

API pricing isn’t cost, we don’t know what cost is.

impulser_• 2 months ago

I would bet money Anthropic and OpenAI are actually profitable on inference. The problem is they have to spend large sums of money to train models that are essentially worthless after a few months.

simianwords3• 2 months ago

This performative concern over token costs and subsidisation comes from either ignorance or some latent ideology signalling.

ianm2182• 2 months ago

What do you do with all those accounts?

arkadiytehgraet2• 2 months ago

Probably trying to fix their broken personal website with the half of the links there not working at all.

peteforde• 2 months ago

What I truly don't understand, as a daily heavy Opus 4.7 user, is how you can coherently prompt 15 different parallel conversations at the same time.

For me it's not even a "what the hell are you working on" so much as complete inability to understand how you can keep so many different processes working on distinct tasks. It simply doesn't map on to how I use these tools.

I spend most of my day writing extremely detailed prompts and that's how I'm able to get the sort of excellent results that confound skeptics. But I have to be honest with you: I don't think I can write (or think) fast enough to do two of these at a time, much less 15.

I definitely could not review what they are generating with any degree of confidence.

I'm really hoping you can explain what the heck your usage pattern actually looks like, because reading this makes me feel like I'm missing something.

thomasahle3• 2 months ago

I'm trying to recreate all the commercial EDA stack in open source. (RTL simulators, synthesis, formal proof tools, etc.)

Building compilers has a _lot_ of parallel tasks agents can work on.

Wish me luck..

stikit• 2 months ago

those costs are not just tokens used for prompting . costs include agent loops, etc

tom1337890• 2 months ago

After trying openclaw a bit myself, no wonder. Without the best models, capabilities drop significantly. And I guess he has a lot of automations and stuff, which explains the 19'000 daily spend. I hit my personal spend limit when it cost like 40 USD to get Google auth tokens working. Which is very complicated when you run openclaw on a vps. And it even broke like a week after. Maybe one could justify the 40usd if it would save my time instead. But I was babysitting openclaw doing it anyhow. So I actually double spend. Money plus time.

Btw, same frustration for me setting up signal, Whatsapp or slack...

vessenes7• 2 months ago

It’s a moving target for sure. I’m excited for the LTS release series - keeping up with twice or three times weekly releases is not for humans :)

boesboes• 2 months ago

He should be brought to the hague XD

pixl97• 2 months ago

Why just him, and not every other user on HN that has said things like.

"Programmers don't need unions or professional standards, it will stand in our way of making as much money as we can, and will slow down the speed of software development".

With that said, HN does provide the tools to find users that said things like this and if I wasn't lazy I'd love to find at least a few that said things like the above, but are now pearl clutching over AI being bad they are going to crush the things down to singularities.

wiseowise5• 2 months ago

What a clown. And Twitter bozos will cheer and clap. As far as money spent, this is still much better than rounding up and/or bombing brown people, but shows insanity of the current market. The saddest part is that bootlickers/temporarily embarrassed AI millionaires will defend this.

And of course I'm just yet another envious hater from "the orange website". Your conscience is clear, AI bros. /s

vessenes7• 2 months ago

OpenClaw is the fastest growth open source project ever. This isn’t clowning.

boxed2• 2 months ago

Both things can be true. The Chinese communist party was one of the biggest social movements ever. Millions died.

wiseowise5• 2 months ago

OpenClaw is the fastest growth open source project ever.

By which metrics?

This isn’t clowning.

Why?

orphea• 2 months ago

Yep, and surely it has nothing to do with buying GitHub stars. Very organic growth.

backscratches• 2 months ago

Lol if your only metric is "I say so"

yygt• 2 months ago

Ah here he is, the bozo who posts with bluster caught out again

fg1373• 2 months ago

Fastest, so?

You need to try really hard to convince me that OpenClaw is more important or has done more good than React or the 10 projects "below" it.

As any if this matters.

throwatdem123113• 2 months ago

Who gives a shit. It’s a trash project.

athrow• 2 months ago

What does he have to show for it?

Nzen• 2 months ago

tl;dr Peter Steinberger shared a product demo for CodexBar [0] with a graph of OpenAI token usage. This graph shows one million spent, prefers gpt-5.5 and spent twenty thousand today.

[0] https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar

However, I do not see a strong reason to believe that this is his actual, personal usage. It could be all openclaw usage or some subset of openai usage, given that he is inside them. I suspect it is far more likely to be fake data [1] that exercises the graph library in a visually satisfying way. Notice that it has no usage for a 'week' after April 15 (a Wednesday), but picks up a bunch later. As marketing copy it needn't have any basis in reality [2]. I should hope openai would put a procedure in front of their entrepreneur acquisition that prevents accidentally exposing trade secrets [3].

[1] https://github.com/faker-js/faker

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/lf2n4...

[3] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PostingWhatYouSh...

christoph2• 2 months ago

I view this type of post (his, not yours) as meta deception. I only became aware of this type of deception and its power from a bit of reading in to magicians and stage craft in the last few months. There’s a video on YouTube as well that does a great job of breaking down a Derren Brown stunt that uses it to great effect manipulating the TV viewing audience.

I’d actually seen the original DB episode years before when it first aired and it definitely had an affect on me through this form of manipulation - it altered my internal understanding of marketing/advertising, which was the actual underlying purpose of the episode.

It’s altered how I internally accept and process information from any 2nd or 3rd hand source. BTW, people aren’t necessarily always aware they’re doing it. We all suffer from our own internal biases and deceptions, and sometimes we spread them unknowingly!

WickyNilliams5• 2 months ago

Could you link to the video?

elicash• 2 months ago

This reply implies it was his own usage (in fast mode):

https://x.com/steipete/status/2055428360789016964

Tiberium2• 2 months ago

This is quite a misleading title because this is the raw API cost, but he (obviously) has unlimited usage as an OpenAI employee. Moreover, if you use e.g. the $200 Codex sub, you get about ~$5k-$6k monthly API usage if you spend every week of your usage, if not more, which shows that the raw API cost is not how much it (likely) costs to OpenAI, unless they're subsidizing all this.

He did clarify that it was with fast mode. Without fast mode it'd "only" be $300k in raw API cost, or ~60 $200 Codex subscriptions.

rvz• 2 months ago

But even going with the $5k - $6k monthly usage on a $200 codex subscription even going over their limits is also unrealistic in the long term and that is just ONE person.

Lets say I was at the casino and was spending a lot on casino chips but I also happen to work at the casino. I'm not really losing money whether if I win / lose since I'm using the houses money and there's little risk involved on every dice roll or press of the button. The risk is far higher if I don't have that level of access and continue to spend the same amount of money on lots of tokens (or casino chips, spins or button presses.)

The same is true here with these agents. Some companies will realize that they can no longer afford to spend millions a month on tokens or even startups spending $5k - $6k per person per month on tokens.

I can only see local efficient models making sense on recovering from this unnecessary spending or even light gambling on tokens.

Terretta2• 2 months ago

Even at unlimited budget, there is a crossover where outsourcing thinking to the machine costs more than the machine.

What I mean by this:

1. Intern, analyst, junior, or offshore level coding is cheaper when done by the machine.

// Side note: There is good reason the industry invests in suboptimal output from this set which moves to the "cost" column when using an LLM, but nobody's accounting for that.

2. For the interns, analysts, junior, or offshoring to do the right thing costs a multiple of the coding effort: the PdM/PjM stuff of course, but also the Stakeholder, Product Owner, Architect, Principal Engineer, QA, and SRE stuff.

3. If you are not a principal or staff engineer level engineer, you are likely unqualified to catch and fix the errors LLMs make across engineering, much less these other PDLC (product development lifecycle, which includes SDLC and SRE) loop.

4. For LLM output to be useful, your 'harness' has to incorporate all of that as well, which because it's so much harder than transliterating spec-to-code, balloons tokens exponentially.

5. Today it is faster, more efficient, and costs less, to work with LLMs "XP" (eXtreme Programming) style, pairing with the LLM actively co-creating and co-reviewing, steering for more effective turns.

So, your options are:

- ship garbage while costing less than a median first world SWE

- pair with the LLM actively for the benefits of XP

- add enough harness and steering the LLM costs more than SWEs, and still needs a human loop “move fast and break things to find out what's broken” style

I would expect that within a couple years, these other disciplines can be baked in enough the machine costs less for everything but surprises.

Grosvenor2• 2 months ago

I would expect that within a couple years, these other disciplines can be baked in enough the machine costs less for everything but surprises.

They already are. I’m successfully using frameworks like bmad to deliver complex apps at that level. My job is to manager the see, as, ux, sre processes and catch errors.

I spend more time refinding prd , epics and stories than I do elbows deep in code.

If I don’t like the output of a story I nuke it change the story and have the flanker try again. I’m using the open source glm, kimi, deepseek models. I expect the full pipeline to be good enough by the end of the year.

MattDaEskimo• 2 months ago

How is it misleading if this would be the consumer's cost?

Eventually Codex's subscription subsidization will diminish to near-zero, like the rest of the providers.

It's extremely important that people understand how expensive these models currently are. Even $300k in raw API costs is alarming for the output.

namenotrequired2• 2 months ago

How is it misleading if this would be the consumer's cost?

Because it does not say “equivalent of”, it literally says he spent money that he did not spend

pama• 2 months ago

Peter shows the near-term future. Raw API consumer price cost is arbitrary. (The frontier labs can put a 100x markup to cover other operational expenses.) The true cost of inference with same-capability models keeps dropping at dizzying rates, especially at the data-center batch size. (Due to both NVidia hardware and algorithmic changes.) So the developments that Peter can achieve today with internal support from OpenAI will be doable by anyone in a few years without breaking the bank.

polski-g• 2 months ago

We know how expensive the (Chinese) models are to run, because there are a hundred inference providers selling them cheaply and competitively.

The money going to the American model companies is not going to their hosting costs.

otabdeveloper4• 2 months ago

unless they're subsidizing all this

They literally are. (If by "all this" you mean the subscription future bait-and-switch plans.)

irthomasthomas• 2 months ago

I think its less misleading this way because every other reader would have to pay $1.3M to emulate his workflow for a similar size project. His discounted internal costs are relevent only to openai.

Tiberium2• 2 months ago

I did mention that you could use ~60 $200 Codex accounts to emulate his workflow without /fast, or 2.5x that if you used /fast. Not $1.3M

therealpygon• 2 months ago

Hey guys, I’m super good at using tokens.

Business: Amazing, that’s great what did you do?

I ran 50 instances and had them all fix the same bugs at the same time and then analyzed the results of all 50 runs to have AI score each of the attempts, then sort them, then compare them to each other in a round robin tournament style double elimination to ensure I got the best result. Then I had AI convert this into a skill, and then ran all 50 attempts again and repeated the process to ensure that I had the absolute best result. It was amazing and I used 1.3 billion tokens!

Business: That is amazing! What did you fix?

A spelling mistake on the About page.

Peacefulz• 2 months ago

This is the best use of tokens I've ever read. I'm building this skill as we speak to use on our Enterprise Claude account.

Wish me luck on a raise!

lbrito2• 2 months ago

Sounds like a brilliant promo project!

tim3334• 2 months ago

Peter Steinberger is of course currently employed by OpenAI and it probably benefits them for him to find ways for their customers to do that.

cyanydeez4• 2 months ago

"The tokens are how anthropic makes profit" vs "It's not actually worth that amount of usage"

ya'll cant have it both ways; either it's really worth the cost or it's a bunch of token burn with no smoke.

faangguyindia• 2 months ago

how many of those tokens were spent to buy fake stars using fake email signups?

Philip-J-Fry3• 2 months ago

So he's spent $20k in one day. There's not a chance in hell he's actually doing productive work with all these tokens.

Grifters gonna grift. What a state of affairs.

malshe2• 2 months ago

Come on, he is very productive on twitter /s

Ekaros2• 2 months ago

At this point token spend is in itself the product.

Hopefully eventually we will go back to evaluating the output. Not that I am very hopeful that we learn to do it in sensible way.

throwa356262• 2 months ago

I bet you that if openclaw had better context management or could correctly switch to cheaper models for simpler jobs that number would be much lower.

malshe2• 2 months ago

AI bros love hyping about their insanely inefficient token usage. It's become some sort of a dick-measuring contest. And if you work for OpenAI, of course you can claim insane measurements.

Just last week I saw a dude boasting about how they used their $20/month ChatGPT subscription to earn $15 (or similar trivial amount) in a bug bounty by running the model the whole day. Sam Altman replied to that tweet but not entirely positively.

OpenAI has been removing limits on token usage to take on Anthropic but I'm sure most of the users they are acquiring are these AI bros who are burning tokens for the sake of it. Massive price hikes are coming after OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs probably an order of magnitude larger than what happened to ride sharing.

vslira• 2 months ago

Regardless of one’s opinion about AI, from a product perspective this seems somewhat similar to the dev using his 48gb ram machine and latest iphone to test an app that will be used by consumers with entry-level devices

Terretta2• 2 months ago

The mentioned menu bar app is a MITM (man in the middle) and rightly discloses that it gets all your session creds and uses them, along with keychain and full disk access:

Privacy: Reuses existing provider sessions — OAuth, device flow, API keys, browser cookies, local files — so no passwords are stored.

macOS permissions: Full Disk Access for Safari cookies, Keychain access for cookie decryption and OAuth flows...

It's excellent this is disclosed as a reminder of how things work and the tradeoffs you're making to use it.

hansmayer6• 2 months ago

What product or feature did he build with it and how much ARR did it generate for OpenAI?

lofaszvanitt2• 2 months ago

Marketing

fg1373• 2 months ago

I mean, it's OpenAI.

If you look at what happened with Sora, you know none of this matters.

Just wait till this OpenClaw thing is over.

0gs• 2 months ago

you have to admit: he is not as difficult to project paratechnical admiration onto as sama is. maybe the board wants him to be the next ceo

Robdel12• 2 months ago

Once you see how much crap they’re running to police the agents on the repo, you’ll ‘get’ the spend https://x.com/steipete/status/2055405041843052792

I won’t lie, if I had the access to this, I’d do the same exact thing.

tedggh• 2 months ago

Same mindset as Marc Andreessen when working on Mosaic: Design for infinite (Internet) bandwidth.

lxgr8• 2 months ago

That’s an excellent way to lose to your competitor that knows and respects your users’ resource constraints.

danpalmer3• 2 months ago

"All that automation allows us to run extremely lean"

He has a different opinion of what it means to be lean than almost everyone else. That's fine, he's allowed to, but it's something you have to understand to make sense of any of his comments on things. He has a radically different set of values to most people.

vntok2• 2 months ago

His team is basically him and two other humans, powering an ambitious well-known project so successful an industry titan ended up acquihiring him/them. That's pretty lean, no?

Philip-J-Fry3• 2 months ago

But it's a self fulfilling prophecy. They need all this stuff because it's a vibe coded app where bugs are randomly introduced, the architecture is overcomplicated and sucks, and stuff is just added for the fun of it.

Do existing companies run entire end-to-end product integration tests on every single change they make to a repo to make sure something hasn't broken? No, they just architect things in a way such that a minor change to something can be tested in isolation. And that can be automated, deterministically and efficiently.

Where I work we can release changes to our production site in minutes almost completely autonomously with high confidence with absolutely zero AI agents in the loop. How did we do it? With lessons learned from the past 5 decades of professional software development experience.

Lets not forget what OpenClaw is at it's core. It's a glorified cron scheduler. Why on earth does any of this effort need to exist. It's not that deep, it's not that complex, it's all AI for AI's sake.

H8crilA• 2 months ago

OpenClaw has surprisingly few "dumb" bugs. Is it as stable and secure as the Linux kernel? God no, obviously not. But it has never just crashed for me, for example. Bugs are of the type "X with Y and Z disabled and T turned on - doesn't work", where you're likely one of a few people that have ever tried this combination. Not to mention it can then debug itself and file a bug report, with a bugfix - if you give it a GitHub token.

I run it in a firewalled VM and am very conscious about any tokens I give it access to - so far for all I know this was unnecessary.

PS. for me the core feature of OpenClaw isn't the cron, though that is nice. It's the memory and instant extensibility. Like it takes 5-15 minutes to add an SSH tool where all agent requests go through a manual review, together with a good auto loaded description that just works in all future sessions.

shepherdjerred5• 2 months ago

How did we do it? With lessons learned from the past 5 decades of professional software development experience.

Yes, that is _exactly_ the problem that is being solved. Is it easier to spin up some LLMs or pay a team of experienced engineers?

As inference costs fall, which will be cheaper?

xg15• 2 months ago

People freaking out over my AI spend. What nobody sees: Part of what excites me so much about working on OpenClaw is that I'm trying to answer the question:

How would we build software in the future if tokens don't matter?

[...]

All that automation allows us to run this project extremely lean.

Good thing we cleared that up. Another gem from the "if we had self-driving cars, we could just have them cruise on the roads endlessly when not in use and get rid of so much parking space!" school of resource management...

wolttam2• 2 months ago

Nobody here talking about what this represents for demand on these models, if these numbers aren’t made up.

One person using 600B tokens in a month. The most I’ve hit is around 500M tokens and I thought that was a huge amount.

We’re going to have some major compute shortages for a while

voidfunc2• 2 months ago

500m tokens is easy... I'm burning about 2b a week.

danpalmer3• 2 months ago

Anyone can burn tokens. Using them for something useful is the hard part.

onion2k• 2 months ago

Jensen Huang was saying humanity is going to need 1000x the current energy production in the future. He might not be wrong.

amunozo• 2 months ago

Or more probably, he will be wrong. We really need to stop amplifying marketing statements like the bullshit Huang and Amodei tell all the time. There's no much thought behind them, just marketing and wishes.

bigstrat20033• 2 months ago

Cui bono? Jensen Huang wants you to believe AI is a necessity and that we will need 1000x the energy because he gets even richer if you believe him. It isn't true, though.

andrekandre• 2 months ago

  > humanity is going to need 1000x the current energy production

and all that heat is going to go where?

yodakohl• 2 months ago

You can look at the output here https://github.com/steipete Sample commit from 5 minutes ago https://github.com/openclaw/crabbox/pull/113 May 2026: 8,826 commits in 94 repositories

maleldil• 2 months ago

He has tests asserting that the output HTML contains specific JS code as strings? What??

lofaszvanitt2• 2 months ago

The OpenClown.

ExTv• 2 months ago

thank god im broke lol

i built my personal app mostly with ollama and it’s been smooth sailing so far. basically openclaw + hermes-style agents running on android phones, and the stuff it can do is kinda insane

throwatdem123113• 2 months ago

Good for him…?! Who gives a shit. OpenClaw is garbage.

12arwlaz2• 2 months ago

So that is $15.6 million in a year. You could get a decent application for that instead of broken slop if you spend it on human salaries.

mekael• 2 months ago

I’ve worked for companies with less than that in total personnel expenditures (100ish people) and they were actually economically productive / provided a tangible service. With 15 million and a year(ish) I could spin up dedicated teams to build multiple profitable applications. That sounds like hubris, and maybe it is, but i’m pretty confident given my domain knowledge.

Has everyone gone crazy?

iejwjw2• 2 months ago

Yes they’ve gone crazy :)

Cool heads will prevail

zxornand2• 2 months ago

I fear our industry has become a circus, even more than it previously was.

xbar• 2 months ago

100x engineers.

clearstack• 2 months ago

the real story is upstream — NVDA has >70% gross margins on the chips powering these tokens. cost drops, margins dont.

steve1977• 2 months ago

And what did he create with it?

mattbrewsbytes• 2 months ago

In the dot com boom there were companies spending like $100+ on ads per $1 of revenue. The cost of customer acquisition was insanely high because of the hype of ecommerce and it was being subsidized by VC and IPO's.

This AI boom feels similar, a lot of hype and the AI usage costs are being subsidized by private equity/VC so far. IPO's are supposed to happen this fall for OpenAI and Anthropic. They're going to have to face the music of corporate governance, accounting rules, reporting revenue, earnings, etc. Subsidizing users seems unsustainable, they need to either jack up rates or downgrade usage per plans. Then there is the circular investments between all of them and Google, Microsoft, etc. Seems like a house of cards.

nlawalker• 2 months ago

It’s hilarious to me, seeing that one of the most fundamental challenges and frustrations of the profession of software development is the inability of management to meaningfully measure productivity and resorting to proxy measures, that a huge and vocal community of software developers have themselves become focused on a metric that maps directly to dollars spent.

wilkystyle• 2 months ago

Was already astounded that after decades of universally agreeing that number of lines of code is a terrible metric for software engineering productivity, devs are now using it as the proof that agentic software development is the future. Can't wrap my head around how lighting money on fire is now apparently something to maximize [0].

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1teswot/pe...

Alex_L_Wood2• 2 months ago

Not only we are looping, we are also adding layers of Idiocracy upon each loop. I kinda envy retired software engineers now, they can just grab the popcorn and watch this dumpster fire without a worry.

cyanydeez4• 2 months ago

at this point capitalism has created its circular economy without providing any benefit to it's surrounding. In this specific case it's closer to a human centipede of circular funding.

laksgandikota• 2 months ago

We could have hired 5 human engineers and they would never forget the context for the rest of their lives.

InvOfSmallC• 2 months ago

and yet openclaw has bugs like there's no tomorrow

isodev• 2 months ago

This is ridiculous, and what do you have to show for $1.3M? So many sustainable projects that can meaningfully improve the planet with even half that funding and he is just converting water and cash to CO2. The scope of the waste is so fucked up, criminal even.

OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

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