David Pan retweeted
I got some issues with this.
The $132m/year is not real at all. Closer to $3m at today's prices, and as low as $1.2k within a year.
Yes, $132m -> $1.2k. Hear me out.
1. The price listed is not accurate at all.
$11m/month is just wrong. Real "api cost" is prolly $100k-$500k per month range.
The 1.5T tokens number includes cache'd tokens. I looked at my own usage, and 33.5B tokens came out to $0.56/m (under 1/10th of Peter's $8/m estimate).
I'm primarily using expensive models like Opus and Astra, and "1.5t tokens" would still have cost me ~$800k. If I used cheaper models and hit cache more, easily could get as low as $100k.
2. Intelligence is getting cheaper incredibly quickly
I know our LLM bills are going up and everyone is stressed about it. Totally reasonable! It's not because intelligence got more expensive.
Artificial Analysis tracks how "cost at a given intelligence level" drops over time. It used to drop at ~10x/year. Now it's at 30x lower in 5 months. (see image)
Assuming the $100k from before, cost could get as low as $3k/month in a few months, and if trends continue, $100/month by this time next year.
Obviously there will be smarter models and we will move to them, but replicating her experience today with equivalent models will be $1.2k/year by next year.
3. Nobody said this is normal
Lauren is the 0.0001% of "agentic engineer". Measuring her work as "$ in -> software out" is reductive and wrong.
Her spend should be looked at as a combination of product/eng, research, FDE work (pstack), and marketing. Worth $350k/day? No. Worth a mil or two a month? Absolutely.
She is exploring what happens when you ignore the cost of intelligence. She's not doing this because Cursor expects every company to spend $10m/year on tokens.
She's doing it because that $10m in tokens is going to cost $10,000 in a year or two.
poteto's cursor profile is public. She's used 1.5T tokens in the last 30 days.
Assuming an avg rate of $8/M that's $384k/day or $11m. In the last 30 days. Per year thats $132M.
Let's assume Cursor has some insane deal with Anthropic and gets 90% off. That comes out to $38k/day or $1.1M in Sept/Oct.
$13m will get me 26 sassy staff-level all stars for $500k/yr
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The Cursor profile at cursor.com/@lauren shows 1.5T tokens used. Cost estimates at $8/M do not account for prompt caching common in agent coding, where cache reads are billed at ~10% of input rates per analyses of Anthropic pricing. This results in lower effective costs.
cursor.com/@lauren chudi.dev/blog/claude-pr… carlosaragon.online/blog/anthropic…
David Pan retweeted
What’s so interesting about this is that SpaceX is getting to eat their cake and have it too - they get the benefits of being a lab, vertical integration into inference, and being a Cursor style router.
They have a SOTA model so labs can’t bully them, they can capture margin on 3P models through inference, and somehow (Elon!) they have access to Suno and MJ as well. They can offer the overall best, the pareto best or the best for a tail modality and the house always wins.
Amazing on so many levels.
SpaceX doing what it does best: build at epic scale
SpaceX's supercomputing facilities in the Mid-South rank among the world’s most advanced AI training clusters, spanning over 2.5 million feet, millions of GPUs, and over two gigawatts of compute → spacex.com/Mid-South
David Pan retweeted
Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked.
It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch.
Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three weeks later, it launched to the world. Less than a month in, millions of Grok Bots are already helping people get work done.
Roman Ugarte (@romanugarte_) incubated, launched, and now leads product for Grok Bot. This is the first time he's told the story:
🔸 Why they started fresh instead of building it into Cursor
🔸 The two non-obvious bets that made it such a success
🔸 What they learned from manually onboarding the first 200–300 users
🔸 Why they spent the weeks before launch *unshipping* features
🔸 The first prompt to try when you open it
Watch the full episode right here on X 👇
Major upgrade to cloud agents today:
- On-demand scaling in your own cloud
- Works on AWS Lambda, Cloudflare, and more
- Browser control on Mac or Linux
Engineering is now 50% product management, 50% agent management.
Both are very hard to do well.
@dhh explained on the @lexfridman pod.
Day one for the Cursor team as SpaceXAI. Let's go.
Cursor is now part of @SpaceX.
Today, we have officially closed our acquisition. We will join the @spacexai team to help make Grok the world's most useful AI and improve Grok Build, Grok Bot, Grok API, Cursor, and more.
SpaceX has built some of the most inspiring and impressive technology in the world, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to become part of such a special company. Onwards.
David Pan retweeted
I got early access to Grok Bot and I'm hooked.
I haven't been this excited about a new AI product in a while.
It's like OpenClaw, but super easy, reliable, and less scary to use. I think this will be a huge new product line for Cursor/Grok/SpaceX.
I've already found so many ways to use it that have meaningfully made my life better:
1. Matchmaking people looking for jobs with companies who are hiring (see below)
2. Auto-replying to support emails (saves me hours!)
3. Scanning my credit card statements and finding recurring subscriptions to cancel
4. Sending me (really good!) briefs for upcoming podcast guests
See below for my actual set of agents that I've been using and chat with daily.
Great work on this team Grok Bot.
(I'm not an investor in this, nor do I have any ties to this product/company. I'm just a fan!)
David Pan retweeted
Being at @cursor_ai for almost a year, I was always secretly jealous that GTM work didn't hit the productivity gains that Software Eng and Support had with the onset of AI. It was there, but it just wasn't the same. Since @bot was released internally, I finally feel it
#bot <3
This thing was just a prototype with a handful of users six weeks ago. Most of Cursor now uses it every day. We hope you like it as much as we do.
David Pan retweeted
What feature or capability you want the most out of @cursor_ai right now?
Everyone thinks of Cursor as a tool for coding. We thought so too. But inside the company, many of our use cases aren’t coding at all: research, data analysis, bug triage, and project management to name a few. As it turns out, coding agents are a pretty good foundation for all kinds of work. Could be a sign of what’s to come.
It's why we have to build integrations like this xitter.cf/cursor_ai/status/20843…
I’ve been talking to CTOs about their AI spend. One of them saw it grow 10x in the first half of this year. The velocity gains have been great so she’s okay with it. But another 10x would be a problem. Common story.
They now do monthly reviews with the CFO, budget reallocation based on performance, ownership that cascades down the management chain. It's boring. But it works.
Cursor’s job is to get you more intelligence per dollar. The rest is good old fashioned management.
We briefly went insane and decided every software engineer should also become an expert in model benchmarks, thinking levels, and cache hit rates.
Cursor Router is out today. It picks the model for each task based on measured quality against cost. Fable 5 level performance for 60% less.
Some numbers from this experiment that broke my brain:
$10,600 vs. $1,300 for similar quality
Same 100% test score: 64k LOC vs under 10k
Peaking at 1,000 commits per second
