alt Hacker NewsIt's amusing how desensitized we became to AI companies charging money however they like.
Just look at this announcement: "your usage will be measured in tokens, which we do not define, nor give you a way to measure them. The amount of tokens you consume will depend on things you can't control". What is left unsaid is that your subscription will contain an unknown number of those tokens you can't measure anyway, and that they will change the number whenever they feel like it.
You pay for… what, exactly?
I have no idea how this kind of sale is legal, especially in jurisdictions with consumer rights protection (EU).
Replies
This is a help page, not an announcement. You can find detailed information to help estimate costs elsewhere:
> "your usage will be measured in tokens, which we do not define, nor give you a way to measure them
They have an open source tokenizer on GitHub, they indicate which tokenizer they use per model, and they have a simple to use website that tokenize text and visualize it.
The worst thing about tokens is that they call it "millions of tokens."
It should be megatokens.
this argument does not make a ton of sense to me. would it be better if they were charging by the byte? that's fixed and you can measure/control how many bytes you send, but you still have little control over how many bytes you receive, or whether those bytes are useful in the first place.
likewise, suppose you buy a 1gb plan from a mobile isp, then you find a youtube tutorial that you're interested in. the nugget of information you need is 23 minutes in, but you have no way of knowing that upfront, it may not even be there. you can exert some control over how many bytes you send in the headers of the get requests to youtube, but you have little control over how youtube compresses the video you requested. also you download 2 30s ads and a sponsored segment before finding what you were looking for. unfortunately you're now out of data on your plan. do you blame your isp for their shady sales practices? is it youtube's fault? what did you pay for?