The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

No wonder social media is so shit nowadays. All that brainwashing and propaganda from third world countries, now at 4% the price!

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.

The problem is loss making subscription as a marketing tool. But if you do loss leaders that be the risk you take.

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

What OpenAI and Anthropic are selling — a flat-rate subscription with both 5-hour and weekly rate limits — is a bit like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

They expect some customers to generate more in costs than they bring in revenue, just like some people at the all-you-can-eat buffet eat more than they pay for, but by the law of large numbers, the mean cost per customer comes out to something the labs are comfortable with.

What the resellers are doing is undermining the labs' assumptions that every person needs to eat and sleep, and hence won't use every 5-hour window to the fullest. It's the equivalent of buing the all-you-can-eat pass for one person, coming into the restaurant with three of the largest suitcases you can find, and filling them to the brim with food, which you later re-sell at much lower prices. In other words, fraud.

This is more like sharing Argentinan $2/m Google Premium subscriptions via a load balancer.

Most likely, yes.

There's a common fallacy that once you pay someone for a service, you are free to do whatever you want with that service. In the case of the rental car, the contract the company entered into would prohibit reselling the services and limit who can drive them and for what purposes.

Some people see these limitations and scream "Not fair! They paid money, they can do whatever they want!" The misunderstanding is that the price they paid was predicated on the specific use. They got a lower price for the rentals because the provider calculated the expected use case and priced it according to that.

If the small company starts renting out the cars to try to maximize how much they're used, that breaks the financial model. That's why this type of use is forbidden in every basic rental contract.

It's the same reason why you can't rent an apartment building and then turn it into an AirBnB. On a smaller scale, it's why you can't go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and load up on food to carry outside to your 5 hungry friends. This type of pricing is everywhere.

There is a vocal online minority who believe user license agreements shouldn't be enforced and individuals should never be considered accountable for following them, but that doesn't even apply to these resellers. This isn't a lowly individual user trying to get back $10 from their $20 per month plan that was going unused. There's no way to even achieve the scale and discounts without mass, automated fraud. They're doing chargeback fraud or using stolen credit cards.

It's not even a crime where the big corporation is the only victim. The higher the volume of fraud on the subscription accounts, the less real usage you and I get for our dollar. These people are jumping on the accounts targeted to individuals like us and abusing them to sell tokens to big corporations trying to abuse them at scale. People like you and I lose when these accounts get their limits reduced or the companies start introducing ID checks and KYC just to use basic services.

I mean, in a more accurate analogy, Ford would be paying for the petrol too.

Inference is expensive and Anthropic did not agree to provide inference to some random third party so that the subscriber can make a few extra bucks.

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.

There are quite a few other mitigations that could be done by providers that aren't mentioned in the article.

"Why is this practice considered unethical?"

Next week: Shoplifting batteries and laundry detergent, and reselling it on Ebay. "Why is this practice considered unethical?"

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060922 and marked it off topic.

> is the pay good enough to justify the atrocities you help to perpetrate?

C'mon, not every ad jockey is flogging fossil fuels, and even some that do repent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcrekESgFQI

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Carey_(novelist)

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?”