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.
You definitely don't need frontier models for all this work.
And, in fact, I got it from £2500 to £150 by careful model selection (I ran a trial over a small dataset with different models until I found the least expensive/capable model that would reliably do what I needed), using a local model for one step, and paring down the inputs as well so the token count plummeted.
Yeah I see the same thing at work. Most of the people burning crazy numbers of tokens aren't doing any amazing work. They're just using fable to write their emails and do their web searches.
They feel like they're super smart but it's just as smart as hiring a $500k/yr PhD as a PA to schedule your meetings and answer the phone. Sure it does a good job but you're just wasting money and abilities.
They feel super edgy and bleeding edge but all they really do differently is switching the AI chat from auto to the most expensive option all the time. When I see what they're using it for they're only grasping the basics of its abilities.
They're also people sending 2 page AI generated emails that make no sense for literally everything where a "Yeah sure let's do that" would have sufficed.
Unfortunately most of these are business leaders who just want to look edgy and "all in on AI" so we can't really limit their tokens. Yet they're also the ones saying we spend too much and want to limit some of our dev teams actually putting it to good use.
- Mac Studio M5 Ultra, 80-core GPU, 256GB memory, 2TB storage -- $11,299.00.
- Power (385w continually 100% of month) is $40/mo (my regional) or $480 annually. Let's say power is 3x more expensive in California, which it probably is, that's still only $1,440 annually in power.
The Studio M5 Ultra has a worklife of at least 3 years.
You have to be using an incredibly small amount of usage for your math to math here. Go price out a few MW or better site then ask a neo cloud how much that same amount of compute will cost at an API.
Yup, run multiple agents on expensive model in loop via API.
You can do it if your employer has endless pockets.
Example: $30/1M input tokens (I don’t count output or cache, for simplification), you have several daily agents for everything => 3M tokens daily per agent * 10 agents ~> $900/day => $328k/year (API spending)
If I were spending $200k on tokens then I sure would expect some mind boggling results. I don't know much about what this person is doing with them and maybe they've launched several companies or created several new inventions .... but that's what I'd expect personally at that spend.
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 many others have said, that's not even slightly impressive. Someone maxing out a single claude ultra plan on opus 5.5 is already doing ~$160k+ per year if the massively inflated API prices are used. I personally have 5 and the only thing stopping me getting more is concern about being banned, I could easily double my usage if it was safe and convenient. Hell, I could probably 10x it or more.
Once you make the jump to agents managing agents the only limit is your budget and your harness's ability to coordinate. We'll all be using far more tokens than this in a year or two.
I absolutely can imagine a video game doing that, especially if there were some way to make the consumption be conspicuous.
In Tan's case, I think the "fun" thing is the right way to look at it. He gets to play at being a big shot developer and show off on Twitter, so clearly he feels he's getting some value from his spending even if no-one else does.
There is a more serious question about to what degree the AI vendors have a duty of care to prevent addicts from getting themselves into financial trouble - perhaps they might in future face the sort of regulation applied to high street bookmakers. I doubt Tan would fail any putative affordability test, though, so it would still be up to him to seek help for his problem if he feels its getting out of control.
Well, I run a number of apps that have users who appreciate them (I hope?) and they simply wouldn't exist without AI giving me the leverage to build them. So.. yes? What's a "return", anyway? It's worth it to me, obviously!
But you might have hit the nail on the head - yes, it's extremely fun and maybe that's the main reason after all. And FYI many, many people pay a lot more than $1k/m for video games.
If you claim it as a business/work expense (In Australia, that gives you a 47% discount), 1K is not even one day's salary for a well-paid dev and just about one day for an average paid dev.
Day job, multiple side projects which are their own entire public apps, research, personal agents, running and developing the custom harness that orchestrates all of the above..
It sounds like a lot when I type it like that, but it's not actually that much if you delegate brutally. Like I said, I'm constantly token starved and could do a lot more!
You can get access to DeepSeek 4.1 Flash for almost nothing, on a $1, $10, or $100 subscription. That can complement your 5 Claude accounts, or replace some. DS Flash 4.1 is so fast and cheap it’s ridiculous
All such sites are data harvesting operations. They'll collect your transcripts and sell that data to model companies to train on. It's a big business.
I occasionally get my agents to do sensitive things; I'm not comfortable having my transcripts collected and sold, so I don't use them. They say they anonymize them but who can ever tell? Not for me, thanks.
This is my daily intrusive thought. "Why the hell am I doing any of this? Why am I not yelling louder at people that have so much and give so little?"
This website is full of people that could save millions of human lives in aggregate, but choose not to and actively argue against the idea because, and I do swear it's a damned curse at this point, "there is no incentive to do it."
I'm not even remotely rich. I have no "savings" or "investments". Yet I have a comfortable life in a house with access to food and care as I need. Sometimes I really hate it.
To your last part, then you’re ok man. Sounds like you have your kindness and empathy intact. It sounds like given the avenue, you would organize for what is right. You have perspective but don’t let it consume you. You need to be healthy because if you care, there might be a chance in the future where you can put that care toward change. And you need to be in your best state to have the largest impact.
There are many people in this world who have more, view people as dirt, and dedicate their lives to keeping people down. Good, kind people who are disempowered by a system that betrayed us all are not at fault. Feel better man.
You cannot change the world, you need to accept that. However, you can have a hell of an impact on your surroundings, like your close family, neighborhood or city. Focus on that. Social media made us forget that.
I use a supervising agent, so if my sleeping agent has insomnia, the supervisor puts it back to sleep. It's helpful to have the supervisor put on relaxing music or read it something boring [1].
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.
If he was good at it, he would be sleeping more because you would be doing less work.. The fact that he's sleeping less means he's not as good as optimizing his agents as he thinks he is.
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.
Had an idea for rich people where they buy their own AI server. The value add is the handling of hardware and software is all provided by the company. It’s a luxury experience like the iPhone so inherently privacy focused. It’s E2E so non-technical users just see AI at the end delivered in the best way possible with any customizations they want. You build the most comprehensive profile on their life which every AI company would love but it’s possible because you’re actually privacy-focused. Call it MyAI.
> Is there anything that says he is more efficient than 3 or 4 years ago.
This is a difficult question to answer ! I would ask a related question which is equally hard. Has AI-use increased your human cognitive capability or decreased it ?
Decreased it. I no longer carry the entire code base in my head. Used to be someone could describe issue to me & I could know exact line where bug was. Sometimes laying in bed I'd realize some line was wrong
I accept this loss because the productivity is there. & hope to retire in a few years if things don't go south. For people entering the field I worry
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.
Look at this guy using shell commands instead of asking his agent to count the lines. You’re going to get left behind bro! Your boss won’t pay you to do that!
It looks like Matt Van Horn, who I've met when he was at the original Digg, also is contributing to all kinds of projects on GitHub and releasing his own. Coding agents could be a curse for a few, and a blessing for many.
The common trope is, "keep an eye on what the rich want."
Gary is rich. Let's assume now, he spends between $10-20K/month USD on tokens. Whether he gets overwhelming tangible value out of that token spend is immaterial.
What he's getting out of it is a mix of social signaling value and actual perceived productivity. I don't know, but I doubt he has measuring the ROI on the token investment.
Much like someone gets various kinds of value out of a a personal tutor for their child. Or a high powered executive who continues to request budget for a "Chief of Staff" and related personnel in 2026.
The question is whether this is signal, or noise. Will everyone who has the budget aspire to spend money on tokens as a subtle way of projecting value with some tangible benefit? How long of a runway does this have?
Much like a Chief of Staff office, there's more to manage...but you you get some tangible benefit by having people to whom you can [in theory] delegate tasks and trust they will be completed. To some degree none of this matters, value is in the eye of the beholder.
What a time to be alive. Rich people continue to spend money with abandon, just on different things.
Edit: I work at technology company. If I were spending $10-20K/month USD in tokens I would immediately get flagged by Finance and receive a note from my EVPs Chief of Staff/Business Admin. My usage and prompts would get audited and I would be asked to create a report justifying the business impact of the spend.
Note, however, that Garry also holds a much longer lever in his hands. It's very likely that he does get a huge ROI from the token spend because if it helps him make just one slightly better investment decision per year, that's millions in return.
The rich always have leverage. The questions I'm asking are broader market questions...
Does it matter that he's spending this much money on tokens? What's the derived signal?
Why isn't he spending more?! Spend on intelligence seems to have no limit, and he's rich after all right?
What's the limiting rate of return on token spend for the rich?
Does Gary represent an archetype of other rich people who also want to spend money on tokens at that rate? ...if not more?!
As someone who has only ever used these free AI agents and who is not a software developer or computer scientist by trade, could someone please explain the concepts of tokens and their worth and harnesses and what exactly all of those things accomplish?
None of these are effective questions for this forum. You should copy and paste your post and my response into your free chatbot of choice.
Evaluate the original post and response and build a high level learning plan with citations and references that covers each of the topics in the original post. Start the learning plan with an overview of effective prompting techniques with specific examples to research individual topics.
A Token is a unit of data used by large language models. Tokens used to be pretty analogous to 3-6 letters of English text, but things have become more complicated with the advent of multi-modal generation
Large language models are usually priced on MTok or “million tokens”. You’ll often see LLMs priced at $X/MTok for input and $Y/MTok for output.
A harness is a program that interfaces with a large language model and provides it tools and context to achieve a goal. Codex and Claude Code are good examples of harnesses.
What exactly all of this accomplishes is not something I can answer for you :)
[Your text] --> [List of numbers (tokens)] --> [List of [List of numbers describing a concept/term/thing/job/item/etc] (embedding)]
That final thing (List of embeddings) is what gets fed into the LLM, so that it can produce (List of embeddings most likely to follow afterwards), which is then turned back into text.
> and their worth
Tokens are priced based on the model you're using. In general, expect to pay more when you need to use larger models. (Note: Exceptions exist, but treat them as exceptions)
The space as it is now prices tokens based on:
- how many tokens it needs to process (input),
- how many it needs to generate (output), and
- how often you send the same chunks of text that their system already has on file (cached).
> and harnesses
A harness is something that adds in tools & directions for the LLM, so that it can do its tasks. In a dumbed-down semi-visual summary:
---
[Text about what the LLM should be & what they're allowed/not allowed to do]
[Text about available tools & how to call them]
[Your text here]
---
The harness, if its part of a program/app, then looks at what the models generate in response, and does the (file writing/reading, tool calls, web searches, subagents, etc.), based on the formatted output that the LLMs should produce.
> and what exactly all of those things accomplish
Depends on the goal of the user. Some use them as assistants, most use it for coding.
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.
Not only that. They simply multiply tokens used with API price per token, but ignore that about 90% of tokens are cached ones that are significantly cheaper.
This figure really depends on whether it's API rates or actual spend. One Claude Ultra subscription ($2400/year) gives you nearly $100k a year in tokens if fully utilized.
For a normal person outside the Startup world this news is super confusing and frustrating while most people who already use ai heavily think this is nothing and they are surprised by the fact that he is not even spending that much!
> 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!
To be fair, using the scientific method to disprove superstitions is what the Enlightenment was all about and that is the most significant engine of growth and flourishing humankind has known.
That said, I approach AI with deep skepticism. I try to learn it, including its strengths and weaknesses. But I don't blindly trust it.
Coincidentally, my stock brokerage just yesterday sent an email reminding users that anything their agents do using the user's credentials is the responsibility of the user.
Since failure is such a likely outcome in a startup, "failure as a positive" is a mindset that a startup accelerator must propagate to keep founders going. And when you sell a message for long enough, you start to believe it yourself.
That he calls it Cyber Psychosis is so telling! No Garry, were not yet in the Cyberpunk universe and that's not how you get Cyber Psychosis. It's a man with a lot of money spending too much on hyper fixation.
I love that the world’s dumbest guys all get up and pay the computer to tell them they’re big special boys then publicly say stuff like “my brain is bad in a video games way”
> he’s suffered from “cyber psychosis” and sometimes barely sleeps
At his level the skill is about getting money out of the right pockets, not really about being particularly smart or even very good at managing business.
It reminds me of how we laugh at scam emails for being poorly written and obviously a scam, but the theory is that this filters out all but the most gullible people so the conversion rate on anyone that replies is high.
If your business model is taking money from gullible investors, maybe it's reasonable to appear (or actually be) incompetent so that you don't accidentally waste your time on people who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid.
> ...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?
Still doesn't explain where $17k of tokens is going. I can believe someone could burn that many tokens, but most of what he's described there could be managed pretty easily on one of the $100-200 a month subscriptions I'd think.
The only way I can imagine to burn that many tokens is just to run every task fully through the most expensive LLM with no real strategy. Like indexing emails should be a combo of scripts and small summarizing prompts I'd think.
Naming your internal AI agent after the massive run down home of an uber rich but probably insane family of confusing clones who made god level AIs (from Neuromancer)... Classy.
> Holy anthropomorphization. But besides that, what's the goal of doing this? Keeping a handy overview of when and why someone said something?
You'd be surprised how important such an overview can be in relationship-based businesses. People spend a lot of time trying to track down a vague memory they have of someone telling them something. CRM platforms are big for a reason, after all.
Counter-point, they can't serve as a knowledgeable discussion partner, programmer, search engine, or your personal psychologist. Not saying that they should.
That usage probably comes from a couple of 200$ a month subscriptions. Hardware to run something that approaches frontier at acceptable speed is at least a million.
> 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 question thst matters is: is he more productive than someone with a standard $30/mo Claude subscription? Or with no AI?
It's pretty obvious $200k/yr in tokens is a ludicrously huge spend. Trying to pretend it's not to show how leet you are is weird. But the interesting topic buried here is what value he's creating with such a spend and how it benchmarks against alternatives.
Because that is the value prop of AI. If it doesn't stand up against options when measured clinically and objectively then what's the point of it
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.
You definitely don't need frontier models for all this work.
And, in fact, I got it from £2500 to £150 by careful model selection (I ran a trial over a small dataset with different models until I found the least expensive/capable model that would reliably do what I needed), using a local model for one step, and paring down the inputs as well so the token count plummeted.
Yeah I see the same thing at work. Most of the people burning crazy numbers of tokens aren't doing any amazing work. They're just using fable to write their emails and do their web searches.
They feel like they're super smart but it's just as smart as hiring a $500k/yr PhD as a PA to schedule your meetings and answer the phone. Sure it does a good job but you're just wasting money and abilities.
They feel super edgy and bleeding edge but all they really do differently is switching the AI chat from auto to the most expensive option all the time. When I see what they're using it for they're only grasping the basics of its abilities.
They're also people sending 2 page AI generated emails that make no sense for literally everything where a "Yeah sure let's do that" would have sufficed.
Unfortunately most of these are business leaders who just want to look edgy and "all in on AI" so we can't really limit their tokens. Yet they're also the ones saying we spend too much and want to limit some of our dev teams actually putting it to good use.
You don't.
Once you factor in cost of electricity and depreciation of hardware, it is more expensive to run locally.
There are many arguments for running local but cost isn't one of them.
> but cost isn't one of them.
Let's do quick back of the napkin math.
The Studio M5 Ultra has a worklife of at least 3 years.You have to be using an incredibly small amount of usage for your math to math here. Go price out a few MW or better site then ask a neo cloud how much that same amount of compute will cost at an API.
> 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.
Yeah, it was basically this, and running a whole lot of agents concurrently to churn through the dataset faster.
Yup, run multiple agents on expensive model in loop via API.
You can do it if your employer has endless pockets.
Example: $30/1M input tokens (I don’t count output or cache, for simplification), you have several daily agents for everything => 3M tokens daily per agent * 10 agents ~> $900/day => $328k/year (API spending)
Any 3D work in blender can burn that easily. Add video editing to that mix in any capacity.
If I were spending $200k on tokens then I sure would expect some mind boggling results. I don't know much about what this person is doing with them and maybe they've launched several companies or created several new inventions .... but that's what I'd expect personally at that spend.
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.
Not sure why that counts. An engineering workshop buying mint quality lathes would just be considered "Buy once, cry once" in my eyes.
Lathe sure. But what about shiny macbook pro to ssh into aws
> machines
That's hardware.
I personally recall hardware flexing going back to SGI, but nothing like "look at my salesforce spend".
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!"
Getting your app to run on the worst devices was artistry. Assuming the lowest IE and windows environment.
Hardware for sure. Big statement giving the entire company macs vs pc. Apple spelled it out in those ads.
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.
> I can't recall software being conspicuous consumption
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich
As many others have said, that's not even slightly impressive. Someone maxing out a single claude ultra plan on opus 5.5 is already doing ~$160k+ per year if the massively inflated API prices are used. I personally have 5 and the only thing stopping me getting more is concern about being banned, I could easily double my usage if it was safe and convenient. Hell, I could probably 10x it or more.
Once you make the jump to agents managing agents the only limit is your budget and your harness's ability to coordinate. We'll all be using far more tokens than this in a year or two.
What do you do that you are maxing out 5 accounts
I want to know if there are any returns on that. Even with the insane discount on API prices.
Or are people paying $1K/mo (subsidized) just because AI is fun? Can you imagine a video game charging $1K/mo?
I absolutely can imagine a video game doing that, especially if there were some way to make the consumption be conspicuous.
In Tan's case, I think the "fun" thing is the right way to look at it. He gets to play at being a big shot developer and show off on Twitter, so clearly he feels he's getting some value from his spending even if no-one else does.
There is a more serious question about to what degree the AI vendors have a duty of care to prevent addicts from getting themselves into financial trouble - perhaps they might in future face the sort of regulation applied to high street bookmakers. I doubt Tan would fail any putative affordability test, though, so it would still be up to him to seek help for his problem if he feels its getting out of control.
Well, I run a number of apps that have users who appreciate them (I hope?) and they simply wouldn't exist without AI giving me the leverage to build them. So.. yes? What's a "return", anyway? It's worth it to me, obviously!
But you might have hit the nail on the head - yes, it's extremely fun and maybe that's the main reason after all. And FYI many, many people pay a lot more than $1k/m for video games.
Even if it was just for fun, $12,000 a year for a hobby is not cost prohibitive for a lot of people.
If you claim it as a business/work expense (In Australia, that gives you a 47% discount), 1K is not even one day's salary for a well-paid dev and just about one day for an average paid dev.
Day job, multiple side projects which are their own entire public apps, research, personal agents, running and developing the custom harness that orchestrates all of the above..
It sounds like a lot when I type it like that, but it's not actually that much if you delegate brutally. Like I said, I'm constantly token starved and could do a lot more!
Feeling productive while achieving nothing.
Very clever - your comment is a description of itself
Have you looked at offers from CommandCode and similar? https://commandcode.ai/pricing
You can get access to DeepSeek 4.1 Flash for almost nothing, on a $1, $10, or $100 subscription. That can complement your 5 Claude accounts, or replace some. DS Flash 4.1 is so fast and cheap it’s ridiculous
All such sites are data harvesting operations. They'll collect your transcripts and sell that data to model companies to train on. It's a big business.
I occasionally get my agents to do sensitive things; I'm not comfortable having my transcripts collected and sold, so I don't use them. They say they anonymize them but who can ever tell? Not for me, thanks.
No, he spends that much on tokens. Not he subscribes to ultra and then uses the equivalent amount on tokens.
That there are people like you in a world with starving children sincerely turns my stomach.
There really is no excuse, is there?
This is my daily intrusive thought. "Why the hell am I doing any of this? Why am I not yelling louder at people that have so much and give so little?"
This website is full of people that could save millions of human lives in aggregate, but choose not to and actively argue against the idea because, and I do swear it's a damned curse at this point, "there is no incentive to do it."
I'm not even remotely rich. I have no "savings" or "investments". Yet I have a comfortable life in a house with access to food and care as I need. Sometimes I really hate it.
To your last part, then you’re ok man. Sounds like you have your kindness and empathy intact. It sounds like given the avenue, you would organize for what is right. You have perspective but don’t let it consume you. You need to be healthy because if you care, there might be a chance in the future where you can put that care toward change. And you need to be in your best state to have the largest impact.
There are many people in this world who have more, view people as dirt, and dedicate their lives to keeping people down. Good, kind people who are disempowered by a system that betrayed us all are not at fault. Feel better man.
You cannot change the world, you need to accept that. However, you can have a hell of an impact on your surroundings, like your close family, neighborhood or city. Focus on that. Social media made us forget that.
If that is the case, how do you use HN or any social media without vomiting all day?
> 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.
Care to share your agent setup and harness? I've been trying to do something similar but my Claude only sleeps for about 2 hours before waking up.
I use a supervising agent, so if my sleeping agent has insomnia, the supervisor puts it back to sleep. It's helpful to have the supervisor put on relaxing music or read it something boring [1].
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Million-Plus-Random-Digits-Symbols-Gu...
It helps to increase your network latency
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.
If he was good at it, he would be sleeping more because you would be doing less work.. The fact that he's sleeping less means he's not as good as optimizing his agents as he thinks he is.
Or, he is operating more agents by staying awake longer.
Don’t make me defend Garry Tan…
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.
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.
Had an idea for rich people where they buy their own AI server. The value add is the handling of hardware and software is all provided by the company. It’s a luxury experience like the iPhone so inherently privacy focused. It’s E2E so non-technical users just see AI at the end delivered in the best way possible with any customizations they want. You build the most comprehensive profile on their life which every AI company would love but it’s possible because you’re actually privacy-focused. Call it MyAI.
> because anything less will be a global non-starter.
I beg to differ.
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?
> Is there anything that says he is more efficient than 3 or 4 years ago.
This is a difficult question to answer ! I would ask a related question which is equally hard. Has AI-use increased your human cognitive capability or decreased it ?
Decreased it. I no longer carry the entire code base in my head. Used to be someone could describe issue to me & I could know exact line where bug was. Sometimes laying in bed I'd realize some line was wrong
I accept this loss because the productivity is there. & hope to retire in a few years if things don't go south. For people entering the field I worry
Is it? For 200k, he has to have the output of 2 humans, otherwise it would also work to "buy" a human for 200k/year.
That's where I struggle - when I would spend 200k/year on AI, i expect me to deliver at least 1 human output more than before.
He will say he is and that will be the end of it.
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?
Markdown files
a bubble.
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.
Also goes to the same weird SV church that started because of Thiel and where he held the Greta is the anti Christ talk.
1920s, Henry Ford: "I want to build automobiles any man can afford, even the workmen in one of my factories."
2020s, techbros: "Here's why it's a huge problem for non-billionaires to have things."
Um. Here's what Henry Ford was actually doing in the 1920s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dearborn_Independent
The robber barons weren't better or more moral. They were afraid of a powerful US government that brought them to heel under popular public sentiment.
That's all it takes to have good things.
> So what has he built?
"Garry, this is a text file".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6nem-F8AG8
Larry, I'm on DuckTales.
Finally, the perfect yes-man, the thing execs and VCs always wanted.
That's a lot of money for one person..I wonder how he manages all his agents and not go insane?
It's hard for me to burn all my weekly limits of claude ultra, codex pro and grok bot 100$ plans on a weekly basis - they are generous for daily use.
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Is there any evidence it has been a good investment?
His tools, gstack, are 360K lines of code. That's probably a lot of tokens and context.
Markdown, not code
Look at this guy using shell commands instead of asking his agent to count the lines. You’re going to get left behind bro! Your boss won’t pay you to do that!
The funny thing is I asked an AI how to do this. And then I ran it myself and learnt something!
It looks like Matt Van Horn, who I've met when he was at the original Digg, also is contributing to all kinds of projects on GitHub and releasing his own. Coding agents could be a curse for a few, and a blessing for many.
The common trope is, "keep an eye on what the rich want."
Gary is rich. Let's assume now, he spends between $10-20K/month USD on tokens. Whether he gets overwhelming tangible value out of that token spend is immaterial.
What he's getting out of it is a mix of social signaling value and actual perceived productivity. I don't know, but I doubt he has measuring the ROI on the token investment.
Much like someone gets various kinds of value out of a a personal tutor for their child. Or a high powered executive who continues to request budget for a "Chief of Staff" and related personnel in 2026.
The question is whether this is signal, or noise. Will everyone who has the budget aspire to spend money on tokens as a subtle way of projecting value with some tangible benefit? How long of a runway does this have?
Much like a Chief of Staff office, there's more to manage...but you you get some tangible benefit by having people to whom you can [in theory] delegate tasks and trust they will be completed. To some degree none of this matters, value is in the eye of the beholder.
What a time to be alive. Rich people continue to spend money with abandon, just on different things.
Edit: I work at technology company. If I were spending $10-20K/month USD in tokens I would immediately get flagged by Finance and receive a note from my EVPs Chief of Staff/Business Admin. My usage and prompts would get audited and I would be asked to create a report justifying the business impact of the spend.
Note, however, that Garry also holds a much longer lever in his hands. It's very likely that he does get a huge ROI from the token spend because if it helps him make just one slightly better investment decision per year, that's millions in return.
The rich always have leverage. The questions I'm asking are broader market questions...
Does it matter that he's spending this much money on tokens? What's the derived signal? Why isn't he spending more?! Spend on intelligence seems to have no limit, and he's rich after all right? What's the limiting rate of return on token spend for the rich? Does Gary represent an archetype of other rich people who also want to spend money on tokens at that rate? ...if not more?!
He has a vested interest in hyping AI / spend because YC overwhelmingly invests in AI startups.
the question is not spend it's outcome.
what has he produced with that?
Revenue for Anthropic to use in their S-1.
what does that have to do with anything?
Gary spending 250K/year on nothing is not strongly related to pros using $200/plan to do much better.
You haven't seen tanstack? He presented to Stanford he wanted to scale that idea to an entire organization not just a solo founder.
He's gonna hit the halting problem
it's a hulking pile of garbage.
He must have the best automatic daily slack summary.
Probably not even that, there are off the shelf things.
I don't think he has produced anything.
Tokenmaxxing was a dumb trend he has not figured out he's out of the loop yet.
As someone who has only ever used these free AI agents and who is not a software developer or computer scientist by trade, could someone please explain the concepts of tokens and their worth and harnesses and what exactly all of those things accomplish?
None of these are effective questions for this forum. You should copy and paste your post and my response into your free chatbot of choice.
Evaluate the original post and response and build a high level learning plan with citations and references that covers each of the topics in the original post. Start the learning plan with an overview of effective prompting techniques with specific examples to research individual topics.
A Token is a unit of data used by large language models. Tokens used to be pretty analogous to 3-6 letters of English text, but things have become more complicated with the advent of multi-modal generation
Large language models are usually priced on MTok or “million tokens”. You’ll often see LLMs priced at $X/MTok for input and $Y/MTok for output.
A harness is a program that interfaces with a large language model and provides it tools and context to achieve a goal. Codex and Claude Code are good examples of harnesses.
What exactly all of this accomplishes is not something I can answer for you :)
> the concepts of tokens
Tokens are what you get when you have to map a chunk of text to specific numbers, so that the LLM can actually work with it.
https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
Reducetively speaking:
[Your text] --> [List of numbers (tokens)] --> [List of [List of numbers describing a concept/term/thing/job/item/etc] (embedding)]
That final thing (List of embeddings) is what gets fed into the LLM, so that it can produce (List of embeddings most likely to follow afterwards), which is then turned back into text.
> and their worth
Tokens are priced based on the model you're using. In general, expect to pay more when you need to use larger models. (Note: Exceptions exist, but treat them as exceptions)
The space as it is now prices tokens based on:
- how many tokens it needs to process (input),
- how many it needs to generate (output), and
- how often you send the same chunks of text that their system already has on file (cached).
> and harnesses
A harness is something that adds in tools & directions for the LLM, so that it can do its tasks. In a dumbed-down semi-visual summary:
---
[Text about what the LLM should be & what they're allowed/not allowed to do]
[Text about available tools & how to call them]
[Your text here]
---
The harness, if its part of a program/app, then looks at what the models generate in response, and does the (file writing/reading, tool calls, web searches, subagents, etc.), based on the formatted output that the LLMs should produce.
> and what exactly all of those things accomplish
Depends on the goal of the user. Some use them as assistants, most use it for coding.
https://openrouter.ai/rankings?utm_source=share&utm_medium=c...
This thread is so full of negativity and cynicism. It's useless.
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.
Not only that. They simply multiply tokens used with API price per token, but ignore that about 90% of tokens are cached ones that are significantly cheaper.
This figure really depends on whether it's API rates or actual spend. One Claude Ultra subscription ($2400/year) gives you nearly $100k a year in tokens if fully utilized.
Anyone worked out the carbon footprint of that ?
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
I wonder how much this happens in these huge multi agent jobs. Two agents quietly changing the same file back and forth.
Might make sense for him to invest in hosting his own models locally. Prices are only gonna keep going up.
For a normal person outside the Startup world this news is super confusing and frustrating while most people who already use ai heavily think this is nothing and they are surprised by the fact that he is not even spending that much!
An employee uses 200k of electricity. Do we fire or promote him?
Sun Tsu would probably say do nothing. World sees you have an ordinary employee using 200k of electricity and you don’t care. Quite a show of force.
Someone needs to tell this guy about the subscriptions
> 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!
To be fair, using the scientific method to disprove superstitions is what the Enlightenment was all about and that is the most significant engine of growth and flourishing humankind has known.
That said, I approach AI with deep skepticism. I try to learn it, including its strengths and weaknesses. But I don't blindly trust it.
Coincidentally, my stock brokerage just yesterday sent an email reminding users that anything their agents do using the user's credentials is the responsibility of the user.
> Failure as a positive
Since failure is such a likely outcome in a startup, "failure as a positive" is a mindset that a startup accelerator must propagate to keep founders going. And when you sell a message for long enough, you start to believe it yourself.
He’s gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers in this racket
Yeah, why not 400k? Low energy.
1.2 or GTFO
That he calls it Cyber Psychosis is so telling! No Garry, were not yet in the Cyberpunk universe and that's not how you get Cyber Psychosis. It's a man with a lot of money spending too much on hyper fixation.
$200k buys you a lot of hardware that will save you lots in the long run. Is he incapable of doing the maths?
I love that the world’s dumbest guys all get up and pay the computer to tell them they’re big special boys then publicly say stuff like “my brain is bad in a video games way”
> he’s suffered from “cyber psychosis” and sometimes barely sleeps
At his level the skill is about getting money out of the right pockets, not really about being particularly smart or even very good at managing business.
It reminds me of how we laugh at scam emails for being poorly written and obviously a scam, but the theory is that this filters out all but the most gullible people so the conversion rate on anyone that replies is high.
If your business model is taking money from gullible investors, maybe it's reasonable to appear (or actually be) incompetent so that you don't accidentally waste your time on people who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid.
> ...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?
Still doesn't explain where $17k of tokens is going. I can believe someone could burn that many tokens, but most of what he's described there could be managed pretty easily on one of the $100-200 a month subscriptions I'd think.
The only way I can imagine to burn that many tokens is just to run every task fully through the most expensive LLM with no real strategy. Like indexing emails should be a combo of scripts and small summarizing prompts I'd think.
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
Major “we built an AI to help our business called Torment Nexus” vibes, yes.
> 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.
“ 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.
I like how the can absolutely never provide anything specific. It’s always „it helps with everything!“. Like what exactly Gary?
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So what has he shipped - let me guess - nothing of wrong.
Interesting he doesn't get free accounts?
Whats in it for the labs if they give Gary Tan free tokens for uhm, Gstack?
That's only 1 SWE or half with sloppy results.
so if he hired a PA instead would he have been more productive?
What does he have to show for it? It helps him out to do research, seems like an expensive helper.
Kind of low isn't it?
I spend that much at API rates with a couple subscriptions
"Do my job, make no mistakes"
That's basically gstack
he just needs to put the finishing touches on g-stack and then programming will be solved. just another $50k will do it i think!
hmm isn't that the job of a concierge, or an assistant ?
Didn't you mean to use past tense? "Wasn't that the job ...."
Touché.
Counter-point, they can't serve as a knowledgeable discussion partner, programmer, search engine, or your personal psychologist. Not saying that they should.
Why not buy hardware at that point?
That usage probably comes from a couple of 200$ a month subscriptions. Hardware to run something that approaches frontier at acceptable speed is at least a million.
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
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I cannot even comprehend how someone spends that much without realizing you can just buy GPUs.
Presumably they spend this much on frontier models. You don't run frontier models on GPU you "just buy".
You can run GLM 5.3 or Kimi K3 on maybe 40k in hardware these days.
Just 200k a year? If this amount is for some folks news worthy get a reality check.
The question thst matters is: is he more productive than someone with a standard $30/mo Claude subscription? Or with no AI?
It's pretty obvious $200k/yr in tokens is a ludicrously huge spend. Trying to pretend it's not to show how leet you are is weird. But the interesting topic buried here is what value he's creating with such a spend and how it benchmarks against alternatives.
Because that is the value prop of AI. If it doesn't stand up against options when measured clinically and objectively then what's the point of it