True Ventures @madelineminshew says the era of tokenmaxxing is over: spending $10K a day used to be cool. Now it's "what are you doing?" "Cost is a really big thing. For a long time, token maxing was super hot, and it was cool to say, I'm spending 10K a day. And now it's like, what are you doing?" "Sometimes it's definitely worthwhile to have that spend. If you are a small engineering team and you're thinking about your token cost as an employee cost, or if you are tackling a project that needs that, great." "But oftentimes, the hardest work that needs to be done once to prove something or to build something, you can then switch to an open source model after that." "Uber's CTO has spent a lot of time talking about how they're handling this: you do some of the hardest work on the frontier models, and after that, there's a real big push across their entire portfolio right now to find good open source alternatives." @trueventures @tonysphere

True Ventures @tonysphere says Polsia's founder let Anthropic "run kind of crazy" and woke up to a $1.5 million bill. Now he's looking at Chinese open-source models: "We have a company, True, Polsia, and Ben's been really public about, he just let Anthropic run kind of crazy with Anthropic tokens, and he woke up and he had, like, a million-and-a-half-dollar bill." "He's like, no, no, that's not gonna work. I'm gonna go look at some of the Chinese models, open source models, and find the right balance." "We're in a really interesting moment where how do you find cheaper approaches to the tech stack that aren't just all Anthropic and OpenAI-driven. That's a very expensive Ferrari-type model." "They may be the best. I'm not gonna opine on that, but they may be the best. That might be worth it. But you might be able to do really great stuff with 95% of that." @trueventures @madelineminshew