Comment by sublimefire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sublimefire | Hacker News Reader

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Just to sprinkle more details here about MSFT. The usage was trimmed down even more for some orgs and some specific accounts (I think those were vendors and the like). But if you are an FTE and somewhere in CoreAndAI then your limit is like 1M GitHub credits ($10k as article mentions) that could be spent on any model you have access to, e.g. Opus 5x or GPT-x. It is hard to pin down how many people use Claude vs how many just use internal harness over the Opus though. Importantly, Anthropic models are more expensive (not even talking about Fable here as it is a special case) as seen in usage metrics. Peeps can check their usage which has a good breakdown that shows how many tokens were burned on which model and how much that "costs" (the prices as you can imagine are not consumer ones), so IMO this change will drive more people to optimize based on their usage patterns if they are heavy hitters. The easiest path is to just switch to something like Sol/Astra and have similar perf for lower price.

> Peeps can check their usage which has a good breakdown

Must be nice. At Sony we use Copilot (as an MS enterprise customer) and restrictions to token usage circa June have resulted in a hunger games of who-can-use-them-all-first, with the pool usually drying up by the 10th day of each month.

As for usage breakdown: we got a manually-published table most days just showing per-user token usage, until eventually we were told even that was somehow too difficult to provide.

Between that and learning how much the whole of Sony Corporate Group spends on Copilot (spoiler: it's hilariously little), I've sort of run out of disbelief.

I'm so glad I work at a company that isn't looking at our token usage. I mean, we're encouraged to use it but hearing about leaderboards and things is wild - but we also aren't big enough to need API costs, so power users get a flat rate 200/Month subscription or whatever.

I could see finance looking at it from a cost perspective if it was API costs, but sharing it with the rest of the users feels like a different measurement...

To clarify: we don't have leaderboards (thankfully), our issue is more in the opposite direction, with people who do want to make use of the tools (optimally or not) majorly constricted from doing so.

> I could see finance looking at it from a cost perspective if it was API costs, but sharing it with the rest of the users feels like a different measurement...

It is indeed surreal. I am not bullish about this company's technological capabilities going forward tbh.

Ten days of pure slop then bliss for the rest of month sounds like a hilarious amount of whiplash to get monthly.

The fear-and-loathing generated by those colleagues who no longer can or want to synthesize anything themselves after the token-fueled high does indeed make for good popcorn viewing.

> Importantly, Anthropic models are more expensive (not even talking about Fable here as it is a special case) as seen in usage metrics.

Not sure where you see that. The API prices of Opus are cheaper than Astra and there was a study suggesting that the Anthropic abos are offering more bang for the buck:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49975345

Its internal, you can see the breakdown of cache/in/out and prices, but it does not mean this is the actual price MS pays.

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