The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI | Leaked audio from Accenture says a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentatio…

Further evidence that most CEO's and SLT's are just confident, lucky, and born wealthy; not competent, smarter, or much better than average.

Don't forget NFTs... though I guess that can fall under blockchain.

Folding Phones Sales Continue To Increase since 2019, showing people seem to like them

Cold fusion. Green hydrogen. Hyper loop. Just off the top of my head.

Metaverse - still one of the best jokes around

This one I slightly disagree with. I got my headset on a black friday and it was super cheap, but VR documentaries are friggin' amazing and I hope museums will invest heavily in it in the coming years.

Fully autonomous self driving cars - “Just around the corner” for the past 10 years

Definitely. Makes me feel good for people who make their living driving trucks.

Some of these turned out to be useless, some just haven't been adequately delivered yet.

In 2040 folding phones and autonomous cars might be great, but blockchain will still be a solution in search of a problem.

3D TVs - complete dud

The real issue with 3D TVs had nothing to do with the tech, but 100% to do with lazy implementation on the media side. Everyone was always trying to make things pop out of the screen, which was the complete wrong approach. Nevermind the fact that companies got so lazy to the point of just filming in 2D and then "adding" 3D in post.

No one wanted to put in the effort to do it right (aside from James Cameron). So no wonder no one liked it.

All of these have one thing in common. They are viable technologies for certain use cases but not widespread technologies for everyone and everything.

Fully autonomous self driving cars - "Just around the corner" for the past 10 years

It exists, but they realized that why should they do that, when they can make money by creating taxis without drivers.

There is no benefit for us, ordinary people.

I watch a lot of YouTube about everything nerdy and celebratory to every detail and facet about the global apocalypse. Yesterday for the first time in months, a novel idea got through to me.. dude was talking about the overblown reactionary movement to which I initially ate my own vomit.. yes, I consume this drug, but yes, I am cognisant it's really bad, so don't tell me it's all okay... Something along lines of "everyone thinks it's like the industrial revolution. It's not. It's like the Internet or mobile devices. We just forget how big a change those were now that they're normative, so it sounds psychotic to compare AI to such "small" shifts in society like the Internet or mobile".. and I felt a fuck ton better. Copium or not, it's nice to hear a grounded take (he backed it up), and neither a sycophant or chicken little diatribe that feel respectively like sociopaths with heads in the ground or click bait unsubstantiated drama.

Not undermining what AI is doing to people, society, and the ecology. But now that I type that, thinking what to follow, anyone remember Mary Poppins? How normal it was for little kids covered in soot missing fingers at the dawn of the industrial revolution. We just need regulation which is the actual fundamental shift problem, as demand for political action is no longer democratized now that the Citizens have United.

Am I a douche? Lying to myself?

This post was a fuckin rollercoaster, well said

I'm surrounded by this shit, and it seems to come from all generations. My boss, who is my age, called me because her computer was frozen and she wanted me to fix it. "I was like, turn it off and on again, this is the first, most basic rule of troubleshooting." Meanwhile the boomer next to me is having me do shit like attach files to a fucking email.

I don't know why you think it's a generational thing. There has always technical people that filled in the gaps that the more extroverted management types didn't care about. How do you think things worked when millennials were still in diapers?

What you're saying indicates you're one of those people that don't understand how many gaps other people are filling in for you. You're talking about splitting PDFs, who do you think designed the PDF format? Or the http protocol that you use to open that google doc?

Honestly the issue I see happening lately is that because iPads (and now AI) made things too easy for the young people they don't actually know how things work at the low level, not interested in learning it, and often react with "this is too complicated, make it easier for me!"

I'm a Millennial and work in IT. We aren't magical. There's competent and incompetent people in all age groups. I wouldn't even say we had better starting conditions overall because being good with tech was seen as cringe nerd stuff when I grew up.

I think your theory is mostly right though, just along the lines of competent/incompetent. So many people constantly choose what they believe the path of least resistance with tech, even if it actually isn't. Don't spend one or two minutes to learn how to save to PDF in Word, instead google "word to pdf" and upload whatever sensitive data you have in that DOCX to some shady website.

Ew, webp. Chatgpt, convert that shit for me

The Stock market is literally just vibes. As long as everyone believes, it will somehow be profitable in the future, the line will keep ging up

and building more and more datacenters, replacing AI chips faster and faster, the more people use it, which of course is wasting a ton of money.

I recently learned of a term "reverse centaur" and found the ideas in that article were very entertaining as a way to explain why CEOs are obsessed with LLMs. The author of the book being interviewed has a few hot takes that I think are pretty relevant here too. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-bubble-strike-at-its-roots/

My employer has this figured out the right way: AI tools in the hands of competent employees can get a lot done. The engineers themselves agree and are long past their initial chilly reaction. They now have their workflows figured out and routinely report that they did something in minutes that would have taken them hours to do manually.

And even under this rosier picture, token budgets are an issue. These guys have agents running agents running agents that use a whole ecosystem of internal MCP servers and skill plugins and on and on. They say they never shut their laptops because they have 6 or 7 things running at all times. The LLM usage is ridiculous.

Once the LLMs cost what they actually cost, there will be a big time reckoning. First companies will crack down, then they will futz with on-premise models, then they will drive for SLMs and other slimmed down stuff. And they will pay the big guys 100x what they are now for 1/100th the usage.

But hey I don’t know why I’m posting in substance about the real world when all we are here to do is say AI is bullshit and CEOs are dumb. Carry on I guess.

Yup. I've had the same thoughts. There are many who still think its insane to have your own equipment. Now there will be those who think its insane to do your own thinking.

"We need cloud computing!!!!"

5 minutes later: "Ok a monolith is good enough"

I already am.

I just debugged a report, found the issue almost right away. A missing number in a GROUP BY clause.

Well if you're measuring what I do through LLM use, the Claude is fixing it instead. Hope that dollar was worth it!

I'll one up you.

Google's "principal evangelist" for Gemini did a 2hr presentation for almost 1,000 people at my company on Google Meet a few weeks ago.

40 mins late due to nobody knowing how to get more than 500 people in a meet.

He then spent 90 minutes showing everyone how to do shit that literally everyone knows how to do with AI nowadays; touch up old photos of your grandparents, make shitty marketing mascots and logos, etc...

Here's an image I took during the presentation. For a laugh, look at the background text:

A C-Suite exec got impatient and asked when we were going to cover how to use agentic tools and he said "oh I've got a little section at the end for that." Ffs

Literally nothing useful happened during this meeting and nearly 1,000 employees were idle for no reason. A complete and utter waste of fucking time. Gemini dude didn't even bother to consider what use cases we might be looking into, he just did a boilerplate ELI5 of AI that would have been outdated in like 2022.

Absolutely insane.

CEOs them to make power points using the already pre built company presentation template then talk about how they couldn't have made it without AI like that's supposed to show how useful AI is and not how incompetent they are

Yeh but the people trained ‘number’ widget went up on their numbers dashboard. Good reason for another self awarded bonus!

"ChatGPT, what time is it?"

Well, if your KPI is how much you use an LLM like in some reports - this is an easy way to get those good indicators. Also, LLMs are super easy to use to parse things, whereas many special programs like IDK grep isn't exactly user friendly. Not to mention not finding patterns really. Though here I'm thinking things like looking at various logs on computers.

Will, that's what happens when employers tell employees that they should "use ai first", track their token use on a dashboard, and tell them they'll get fired if they are too low on the monthly ranking.

Yes but you're in an open office and all you have available in your open office hell are: rocket launcher, your sanity, Debra's snappy attitude.

Nah. The bailouts will only be two or three tomes what they squander.

This is actually very common across businesses. My company actually has our bonuses tied to AI adoption, so we have dashboards showing people's AI usage. Other major companies have done the same, which lead to the practice of "token maxxing" where people were using AI to make more AI calls to boost their numbers up.

The fuck is wrong with people?

That's the corporate hive mind, all afraid of missing out of a great productivity tool. And they think that because media these days just copies what the richest people say and hype it up because the rich these days only speak to yes-men.

and then regret the cost

Reality doesn't need to obey yes-men.

Fuck Accenture, they just abuse low level analysts to make profit.

Especially because a statistical model of language has very limited valid usecases. Many tasks that people use LLM for do not make any sense and cannot be accomplished by a statistical model of language. It can only output a statistical approximate of what a solution to the task might look like, not an actual solution.

I heard about a company that was looking at purchasing machines to run local llms for their developers to use.

If more companies do this, rather than using the massive ai data centers being built…. the RAMpocolypse will get way worse.

Related: https://github.com/cyberpapiii/chipotlai-max

"Turn this PDF into a powerpoint, and then summarize it with a haiku"

True except the 80% of people who will suffer further because of it, and the 20% that will gleefully be laughing to the bank and buy up everything at a discounted price. Few of us should be cheering for the failure or success of AI.

Yeah AGI is a mistake. Maybe someday, but what we need know is token efficient LLMs that are designed for for more specific tasks.

There's a lot of data that it could be helpful for analyzing, but if there's customer data in there that you can't share with a third party? Can't use any of these tools. An appliance in your company's server room with a bunch of GPUs that's optimized for data analysis, that's something I'd be interested in. But with the price of GPUs right now, that's unlikely to happen.

So the bubble needs to burst before LLMs are truly useful.

Seriously. A human workforce could never dream of being capable of the same insatiable greed as the gigacorps trying to sell AI.

That wouldn't fix the issue though. The problem seems to be that most people only put out a PDF file when sharing slides, and never end up sharing the source file (the .pptx or .tex file).

I'll take typst any day over latex lol

Or the 'modern workflow' version of tell the AI you want to convert the PDF, so it burns a bunch of tokens installing pandoc and converting it for you!

Unless mandated by the corporation (which are the same people forced to use AI for absolutely everything now)

Have you used Opus 4.8 at API costs? Without using agents, I can burn $20 an hour no problem. I use Kimi K2.6 and GLM 5.2 these days.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/c6DSo

Nvidias pocket maybe. CEOs? Billionares?

Various designing firms.

After the bubble bursts, law firms, because everyone starts suing everyone to get back money they didn't necessarily have, but still spent, because somebody will soon sue them.

To build new data centers

Trump and his cronies, probably

PDFs are so shitty to work with, it's like translating them, it's impossible without using a tool like Google translate.

I fucking hate PDFs as much as I hate Adobe.

OCR is nothing like creating a presentation. Pulling text out is nothing like generating an on screen show with that information. This is something i see a lot of in my company. People trying to use it to generate fancy powerpoints from random groupings of metrics. So they dont have to actually know what it is theyre presenting. They just press next, read the screen and if anyone asks questions say theyll 'take that offline' and ask someone else to look into it.

Its kind of funny in a way. If you know exactly what to ask for amd can interpret results and do investigations its incredibly helpful. But without that its a big noise machine. And its really showing out those who are capable of identifying exactly what it is they need and are capable of breaking it down into actionble paths vs those who need to constantly take things offline.

Tokenmaxing

If I'm going to get a $20,000 bonus at the end of the year if I don't use any AI, I'm not going to use AI.

That's a big problem with this tech... how do you price it? I think companies would purchase an allotment of tokens that can be used or banked by employees. Problem is they'd always be cutting the token budget.

Where I work I have to have a meeting and justify a $100 license for software. So I don't know how this will work long term.

Think like a manager:

• Offer employees an AI token budget that’s use or lose. Don’t make any promises on reimbursement and stay vague about how high users can obtain more tokens. You don’t want wasted token usage. More on that later
• Increase workloads/KPI/widget production quota by how much change you can find around some vending machines. Sneak in monitoring of employee user behavior and interactions with systems and programs if you don’t already have something in place
• Link AI assistance to the higher requirements by saying things like “We’re investing in our workforce by providing productivity tools”
• Fire those at/below new requirements while praising those who are left behind
• Throw a pizza party and pocket some of the savings from firing a third of your team. Invest in a mini fridge for the top performer.
• Train new AI on the user behavior analytics you’ve been secretly been collecting and use it to replace the next lower performing third of the team. Keep on the higher performers and give them a small raise so they speak positively about the company and so you have somebody to fix the inevitable problems
• Profit

I think the first time I heard "slide deck" was within the last few years. It was always a (PowerPoint) presentation. I heard "deck" on its own without context (something like "I'm making a deck") within probably the last 6-12 months and had no idea at the time what that person was talking about.

DRR DRR This shithole was made for me!

fuck off clanker

rough writeup at if you're curious how other dev teams are approaching it.

Ah thank you, I will read " " and tell my peers and colleagues how we're closing the evaluation gap.

The fix isn't to write your own five sentence response, it's to let an LLM write your response for you and post without any proofreading.

One has to wonder what the ROI is on having AI bots astroturfing about AI, especially when the output is this clearly artificial.

Aren't you always out posing as a leftist? And now you're saying workers should have to pay for the tooling that their employers force them to use?

You're no friend of the working class.