The thing is, it's not actually that hard to spend at that kind of rate.
I wouldn't say this was the norm, but I have burned through £1k of tokens in a couple of days before. And, on that same gig, I realised a test I was considering running would burn £2.5k worth of tokens over the course of a few hours so spent a couple of hours of my own time re-engineering it to get that down to £150.
The point is that I don't necessarily know that spending a shitload of money on tokens really tells us anything useful. If he's getting a return on that investment, fine, whatever.
Obviously most of us couldn't afford to spend that much ourselves, no matter how much value it might deliver, and many of our employers wouldn't be too happy if we spent it on their dime either. Equally, if you can, and it's delivering real value, then I don't see why you wouldn't?
At what point do you buy a Mac studio or AMD Gorgon Halo and try running some of these tasks in local models? Surely don’t need frontier models for all this work.
If his brain is the thing malfunctioning, then his brain may not be capable of (1) correctly diagnosing the problem as a lack of sleep or (2) honestly prescribing "do things to get better sleep" as the fix.
People in psychosis don't exactly weigh all of the options with a level head. He may not recognize that he has "cyber psychosis" or that his lack of sleep is a bad thing.
My take is that disclosures like these are always humble brags and/or marketting (look at how much I can afford to spend) with minor complaints rolled in to disguise this fact.
> “It’s too expensive right now,” he said, adding that he knows the amount of money he spends on AI agents is “a crazy privilege that not everyone can do.”
> As an early OpenClaw adopter who is now a power user, Tan says one thing he’s learned is not to treat AI agents like traditional software. Some people are so worried about “repeatability and safety that they actually trade off all of the beautiful parts of working with an AI agent, which basically can be so similar to a human,” he said.
This is insane. He's turning the failure of his AI assistants to do what he wants every single time and to do it in a safe manner into a positive thing. Failure as a positive!
Looks like this is getting downvoted, but it is absolutely true.
Garry Tan is fully aligned with Elon Musk in going after MacKenzie Scott's charitable giving, making spurious arguments that she's doing it in the wrong way when they are all just running cover for the fact that she's one of the few at that level of wealth being charitable at all these days.
Silly woman, she should give her money away the right way, which I guess is by attempting to buy political power.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042593 - HN discussion (5 comments) on that particular rant of his. And it looks like you were one of the few people to comment on it, so really this is for other people who are missing the context of our comments.
> ...his agent also helps him run his life. “It’s read all of my email and all of my Dropbox. It’s read, like, all of my Apple Notes, even my therapy notes going back 20 years”.
> He describes using AI agents as getting help with “almost anything that you do in your day-to-day life. (...) Almost anything you want to do, it knows you, and it’s there to help. And it will actually sort of run ahead and say, ‘What about this?’ Or it’ll help you see around corners.”
Wow, impressive. Both the capabilities and how much he's willing to share.
Is it worth $17k per month? For me, absolutely not. But people spend more on luxurious cars and such, so if you've got money to spare...
> Y Combinator is also using an agent that is “rebuilding the way we operate at YC. We now have an internal AI agent, for instance, named Stray Light that kind of has a personality, and then it has a company brain. It actually has the total context of every founder we’ve ever backed, anyone who’s ever emailed us, like all the applications.”
Holy anthropomorphization. But besides that, what's the goal of doing this? Keeping a handy overview of when and why someone said something?
Naming your internal AI agent after the massive run down home of an uber rich but probably insane family of confusing clones who made god level AIs (from Neuromancer)... Classy.
> Holy anthropomorphization. But besides that, what's the goal of doing this? Keeping a handy overview of when and why someone said something?
You'd be surprised how important such an overview can be in relationship-based businesses. People spend a lot of time trying to track down a vague memory they have of someone telling them something. CRM platforms are big for a reason, after all.
Is that how these figures are being calculated? Because if so, that's laughable. I always interpret those to mean that they are literally paying $200k/year to Anthropic, not ~$2k.
Headline aside, I agree with him wholeheartedly that the future of AI is personal agents, and that costs have to come down for that to happen.
Not cloud costs, though; consumer costs. These agents must run on-device for privacy protections, because anything less will be a global non-starter. That means we need models that excel on phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops; we need home compute modules to run larger, “frontier”-class models for bigger tasks but without guzzling electricity (the Mac Mini’s power envelope is an ideal target); we need smart harnesses that can foist off inference to bigger models elsewhere on your private network of devices as needed without the user prompting for specific thinking modes or model names. All of this has to happen automatically, privately, securely, without leaking data to advertisers or surveillance companies.
It’s hard work, but it’s definitely the future of AI. I would argue the business case is solved with being able to build bespoke stacks of kit and run models through neocloud providers with ZDR policies. It’s the consumer angle that’s hard to crack, because everyone wants a repeat of Web 2.0 for ad-dollars instead of a privacy-centric modern tech stack that forces companies into lower revenue streams.
I don’t think the privacy-centric vision is going to happen. Very few non-tech people care enough about their privacy to figure out the necessary infrastructure.
The future of personal assistants is most likely akin to Muse Spark, and yes I expect Meta is training on all of those interactions and using them to target ads.
Counter-point, they can't serve as a knowledgeable discussion partner, programmer, search engine, or your personal psychologist. Not saying that they should.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
The thing is, it's not actually that hard to spend at that kind of rate.
I wouldn't say this was the norm, but I have burned through £1k of tokens in a couple of days before. And, on that same gig, I realised a test I was considering running would burn £2.5k worth of tokens over the course of a few hours so spent a couple of hours of my own time re-engineering it to get that down to £150.
The point is that I don't necessarily know that spending a shitload of money on tokens really tells us anything useful. If he's getting a return on that investment, fine, whatever.
Obviously most of us couldn't afford to spend that much ourselves, no matter how much value it might deliver, and many of our employers wouldn't be too happy if we spent it on their dime either. Equally, if you can, and it's delivering real value, then I don't see why you wouldn't?
> would burn £2.5k worth of tokens over the course of a few hours
details please, if it's interesting
Evaluation loops do this easily. You have to run hundreds of reasoning jobs in parallel and very quickly you can torch thousands of dollars.
Any 3D work in blender can burn that easily. Add video editing to that mix in any capacity.
At what point do you buy a Mac studio or AMD Gorgon Halo and try running some of these tasks in local models? Surely don’t need frontier models for all this work.
YC seems big on quantitative metrics. Is there anything that says he is more efficient than 3 or 4 years ago. Is YC as a whole?
> he’s suffered from “cyber psychosis” and sometimes barely sleeps
Sleep is one of the most important things in the world. Why not have the agents work while you sleep?
> Why not have the agents work while you sleep?
Even better, why not have the agents sleep for you?
EDIT: for those who say this is not realistic, I've had Claude sleep for 10 hours in just 30 seconds. Saved me an entire night.
If his brain is the thing malfunctioning, then his brain may not be capable of (1) correctly diagnosing the problem as a lack of sleep or (2) honestly prescribing "do things to get better sleep" as the fix.
People in psychosis don't exactly weigh all of the options with a level head. He may not recognize that he has "cyber psychosis" or that his lack of sleep is a bad thing.
That's probably exactly why. Some of my latest nights have been attempting to prepare a long-running overnight task for an agent.
It was productive, but as you say, it's dangerous to gamble with sleep.
He’s gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers in this racket
I can't recall software being conspicuous consumption until the advent of the AI token. Maybe the first "I am rich" app in the app store for $999.
Pretty sure Joel Spolsky said “we purchase the best machines money can buy for our developers” like 20 years ago. So it’s hardly a new concept.
I've seen the other side of that coin: "my program is blazing fast in my machine, I don't know why those naggy users are complaining!"
AWS spend and other service bills?
My take was when people would post those large bills it was mostly to complain about Amazon or a process having gone wild for comedic purposes.
My take is that disclosures like these are always humble brags and/or marketting (look at how much I can afford to spend) with minor complaints rolled in to disguise this fact.
> “It’s too expensive right now,” he said, adding that he knows the amount of money he spends on AI agents is “a crazy privilege that not everyone can do.”
Superchats and other livestream gifts
Agree I meant mostly in the vein of "look how much I can spend on XYZ because I'm rich and I can" with questionable value.
> As an early OpenClaw adopter who is now a power user, Tan says one thing he’s learned is not to treat AI agents like traditional software. Some people are so worried about “repeatability and safety that they actually trade off all of the beautiful parts of working with an AI agent, which basically can be so similar to a human,” he said.
This is insane. He's turning the failure of his AI assistants to do what he wants every single time and to do it in a safe manner into a positive thing. Failure as a positive!
So what has he built?
"Garry's List" for dark money (this is an established political term, look it up!) donations. Basically you can donate anonymously to a SuperPac.
Software? I'm not aware of anything.
Psychosis?
A site where he complains about rich people being charitable, among other things.
Looks like this is getting downvoted, but it is absolutely true.
Garry Tan is fully aligned with Elon Musk in going after MacKenzie Scott's charitable giving, making spurious arguments that she's doing it in the wrong way when they are all just running cover for the fact that she's one of the few at that level of wealth being charitable at all these days.
Silly woman, she should give her money away the right way, which I guess is by attempting to buy political power.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042593 - HN discussion (5 comments) on that particular rant of his. And it looks like you were one of the few people to comment on it, so really this is for other people who are missing the context of our comments.
https://garryslist.org/posts/mackenzie-scott-s-26-billion-su... - The rant itself.
> So what has he built?
"Garry, this is a text file".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6nem-F8AG8
Finally, the perfect yes-man, the thing execs and VCs always wanted.
a bubble.
> ...his agent also helps him run his life. “It’s read all of my email and all of my Dropbox. It’s read, like, all of my Apple Notes, even my therapy notes going back 20 years”.
> He describes using AI agents as getting help with “almost anything that you do in your day-to-day life. (...) Almost anything you want to do, it knows you, and it’s there to help. And it will actually sort of run ahead and say, ‘What about this?’ Or it’ll help you see around corners.”
Wow, impressive. Both the capabilities and how much he's willing to share.
Is it worth $17k per month? For me, absolutely not. But people spend more on luxurious cars and such, so if you've got money to spare...
> Y Combinator is also using an agent that is “rebuilding the way we operate at YC. We now have an internal AI agent, for instance, named Stray Light that kind of has a personality, and then it has a company brain. It actually has the total context of every founder we’ve ever backed, anyone who’s ever emailed us, like all the applications.”
Holy anthropomorphization. But besides that, what's the goal of doing this? Keeping a handy overview of when and why someone said something?
Naming your internal AI agent after the massive run down home of an uber rich but probably insane family of confusing clones who made god level AIs (from Neuromancer)... Classy.
That was my thought --- an odd and offputting choice of identity
“ Holy anthropomorphization. But besides that, what's the goal of doing this?”
Because they can. It’s as simple as that. To find meaning, to feel in control, to win. To dominate.
> Holy anthropomorphization. But besides that, what's the goal of doing this? Keeping a handy overview of when and why someone said something?
You'd be surprised how important such an overview can be in relationship-based businesses. People spend a lot of time trying to track down a vague memory they have of someone telling them something. CRM platforms are big for a reason, after all.
He must be the most annoying person to try to interact with. Clodslop for days.
Come on. If you have a Claude Max 20x plan ($200/month) you're massively subsidized and your API cost is anywhere from $5000-14000 per month.
(Figures vary, see e.g. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christham_4-weeks-on-claude-2... for $13,700/mo.)
If you hit your limits on two Max 20x plans, you could very well be exceeding $300k/yr in token use at current API rates.
Is that how these figures are being calculated? Because if so, that's laughable. I always interpret those to mean that they are literally paying $200k/year to Anthropic, not ~$2k.
I wonder how many of those agents get lost in a loop and just uses tokens, asking the same questions over and over and responding and asking
Kind of low isn't it?
Headline aside, I agree with him wholeheartedly that the future of AI is personal agents, and that costs have to come down for that to happen.
Not cloud costs, though; consumer costs. These agents must run on-device for privacy protections, because anything less will be a global non-starter. That means we need models that excel on phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops; we need home compute modules to run larger, “frontier”-class models for bigger tasks but without guzzling electricity (the Mac Mini’s power envelope is an ideal target); we need smart harnesses that can foist off inference to bigger models elsewhere on your private network of devices as needed without the user prompting for specific thinking modes or model names. All of this has to happen automatically, privately, securely, without leaking data to advertisers or surveillance companies.
It’s hard work, but it’s definitely the future of AI. I would argue the business case is solved with being able to build bespoke stacks of kit and run models through neocloud providers with ZDR policies. It’s the consumer angle that’s hard to crack, because everyone wants a repeat of Web 2.0 for ad-dollars instead of a privacy-centric modern tech stack that forces companies into lower revenue streams.
I don’t think the privacy-centric vision is going to happen. Very few non-tech people care enough about their privacy to figure out the necessary infrastructure.
The future of personal assistants is most likely akin to Muse Spark, and yes I expect Meta is training on all of those interactions and using them to target ads.
> because anything less will be a global non-starter.
I beg to differ.
I spend that much at API rates with a couple subscriptions
"Do my job, make no mistakes"
That's basically gstack
Why not buy hardware at that point?
hmm isn't that the job of a concierge, or an assistant ?
Didn't you mean to use past tense? "Wasn't that the job ...."
Touché.
Counter-point, they can't serve as a knowledgeable discussion partner, programmer, search engine, or your personal psychologist. Not saying that they should.
he just needs to put the finishing touches on g-stack and then programming will be solved. just another $50k will do it i think!
Website looks still like shit
I think it looks neat and simple.
Also...
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html