Posted by mlenhard 7 hours ago
right. Abstractions taken to the max. When tech solves problems that only 0.001% care about. NFT smelt similar.
It's not exactly "underground" if they clearly advertising public channels out in the open.
At first I thought it was so people could steal the traces, but now I wonder if this isn't just laundering startup credits for dollars.
You can easily find them in Chinese tech forum linux.do
so to a startup - you can trade your credits - then get actual cash.
just like you would if trading debt etc.
Demo accounts
Free trials
Unlimited chat relays (eg chatgpt chat)
Leaked company credentials
Etc
Especially for Claude because Anthropic is very good at identifying mainland Chinese and getting them banned in hours. There are many of them who are willing to pay more than the original rate for a stable experience.
It's very hard for them because they'll need a legit phone number and bank cards that are not issued in China, and a clean enough IP, etc. and those better match together to make sense. (Back in the day, ChatGPT required resident IPs, which made it worse, but they worry about growth more now). Obviously, they have to use a VPN to access the real Internet, and most of the IPs they can find are shared with bots and abusers.
The thing will eat itself unless the AI companies find a way to make money directly from it.
can't they detect if someone is reselling their tokens like this ? doesn't seem too hard