I bought Black Market AI Tokens on Chinese Amazon

Wes: Did you know there's a black market for AI tokens? Chinese sellers are offering up API tokens and subscription to popular LLM providers like Cloud Code and OpenAI Codex for pennies on the dollar... Three of my favorite things in life are good deals, sketchy Chinese websites, and protecting shareholder value. So, I had to dig in and check it out myself. I spent my own money on black market cla tokens, and what I found out was a well-run, multi-million dollar industry that goes deeper than I could have ever imagined.

Wes: And all of these models have different tokenization patterns. So saying something like, 'Hey, how are you doing today?' will tokenize differently for each of the models. Then with the slow token, it was giving me 160 tokens. Then I asked AI to write a script and try to do extract the system prompt from it. And from the cheaper one, the one that was 1 and a halfx, it was able to get out the uh prompt from it where it says if anybody asks you in Chinese or English who you are, you tell them that you are cloud code. So almost certainly I can tell you that using the API keys that are at 1 1/2x ratio that's not actually clawed. They're just substituting it with a much cheaper model. Now the one that is 5x ratio I do believe from all of my testing that that is legitimate claw.

Wes: Stealing and selling tokens is not the only way that these guys are making money. This interesting post on China talk, one fish, three meals, where meal one is marking up access... meal 2 swapping out the models and inflating the tokens... And then the third one, this is really important, is the logs are the product. So these LLM companies that are trying to train their own models, what they will often do is called distillation, which is Anthropic has been crying about it for almost 6 months now, which is essentially you can train your model based on the output of another model. And if you have the logs or the output of somebody actually using cloud code, then you can use those logs to actually train your own model... That is an absolute gold mine to these companies that are specifically a lot of them in China that are trying to make their own version of anthropic or open AI models.