c/technology · by FoxtrotDeltaTango@sh.itjust.works · 47d

Execs Confused and Horrified by the Huge AI Bills After Thinking They Could Replace Workers for Free

https://futurism.com/future-society/executives-corporations-ai-bills-metered-billing

1.3k points · 211 comments · view on lemmy.world

211 Comments

TachyonTele_Esq@piefed.social · 346 pts · 47d (38 replies)

an astonishing 29 percent of [execs] had no idea where the growing costs associated with AI were coming from.

The headline combined with the quote just make me laugh so much, I love it

Triumph@fedia.io · 229 pts · 47d (32 replies)

This is what happens when the people in charge of everything are entirely separated from reality.

rumba@lemmy.zip · 162 pts · 47d (30 replies)

Those same idiots have been in charge of everything for decades, blindly doing whatever suited them.

They got duped and didn't have the technical competence to see it or trust their staff to negotiate it.

Every IT / Developer out there knew it was a bad idea. The C-Staff was sold by the billionaires that you will go AI or you will be left behind.

My own CEO is simultaneously telling us to use AI for as much as we can and telling us to reduce costs as much as possible.

TachyonTele_Esq@piefed.social · 69 pts · 47d (12 replies)

The "you'll be left behind" nonsense makes me laugh. Left behind from what exactly? Lol

rumba@lemmy.zip · 71 pts · 47d (6 replies)

The sales pitch is:

All your competition is going AI. They're be producing 10x the work with mouth breathing morons at the keys, while you're stuck paying millions to subject matter experts.

They're scared ot death that the tenuous hold they have on their market segment will be severed if their competition outflanks them in this, so FUD wins.

a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world · 46 pts · 47d (5 replies)

This isn't just in industry or tech. I work in the academy. You would be shocked how many people from administrators all the way on down truly believe this. That, without any proof, this technology is going to make everybody a billion times more productive and that any graduates who don't have this is a foundational skill will surely not survive in the future workforce.

TachyonTele_Esq@piefed.social · 13 pts · 47d (2 replies)

"it's technology and science, it must be good!"

a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 46d

Man, you would be shocked how resistant to tech and innovation some of us are unless, I guess, you promise the world with your racist chatbot.

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 5 pts · 46d (1 reply)

[ removed ]

a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 46d

and professors using it to screen out AI themselves, or using it to make lectures. this is for university level,

That is a fine hypothesis, but that has nothing to do with how I run my classes. Or anyone in my department for that matter.

snooggums@piefed.world · 23 pts · 47d (1 reply)

Someone else can output more slop than us!

Squatcher@piefed.social · 13 pts · 47d

And faster slop! Turbo slop even

zarkanian@sh.itjust.works · 16 pts · 46d

Yeah, that isn't how this works. You don't want to be the one using the software while it's still in beta. Wait until the dust settles before committing to anything. Besides which the super-urgent "You have to buy now!" FOMO sales pitch is a classic strategy for scammers.

takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 46d

That's because they bought into the pitch that AI will replace employees (or at least large number of employees) they understand that they will still need to build tooling that would facilitate that and believe that once other companies will say they eliminated employees this way the companies that are "are left behind" will be stuck still needing employees that will catch up to this plan and refuse to help company to get there.

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 46d

on the grift since its basically a rehashed version of crypto.

partofthevoice@lemmy.zip · 54 pts · 47d (8 replies)

I told my boss this:

Right now the AI race has a lot of similarities to the dotcom bubble. The subject is packed with risky loans based on huge debts. Those huge debts are expecting to be paid as AI becomes profitable, but AI companies are largely loosing money.
All those loans and infrastructure create the burden of sunk costs leading to a desperate need to succeed.
The people feeling that desperation are the same people who own the largest marketing, news, and social media networks in the world.
As a result, there’s a lot of hype around AI. A lot of “kool-aid,” and everyone wants you to drink it. If you drink the kool-aid, that means you’re also bought into the problem. You also need it to succeed, thus making their problem into your problem.

I explained to him that mature, professional use of AI is going to wind up following a similar path to data engineering. It’ll start with bullshit standards, “prompt engineers” and the like, but eventually SE disciplines are going to define who makes best use of AI. You’re going to have niche use cases for daemon AIs, local LLMs, and remote models. You’ll have stronger frameworks around session management, context management, agent permissions, …

It’s not going to be like this forever, “dump all your shit into our web upload and let the AI figure everything out in one go.” It’s going to become more fragmented, bounded, dare I say deterministic… orchestratable.

Then I told my boss, it would be better if he could frame his excitement around these future use cases… so we can skip the kool-aid stage and get right into the good stuff.

He agreed, until about a week passed. Then it was AI hype again.

rumba@lemmy.zip · 21 pts · 47d

The 3rd or 4th "industry expert" tells them that things are "moving fast" and things that were impossible months ago are now reality. It's designed to make them distrust their own subject-matter experts. They thing, ohh POTV, they're just not educated and up to speed.

frongt@lemmy.zip · 12 pts · 47d (5 replies)

Yeah. Local LLM stuff is great when you want to shove a huge pile of documentation into a model trainer and make a more intelligent search. Two of my vendors have implemented it, and it's more useful than a traditional indexing search tool, though you do have to verify the results (which is not much more effort since with a search you'd have to skim the document to find the info it matched anyway).

But for general "do everything" tool, yeah no. It can't read and understand your entire database, codebase, business process, etc.

partofthevoice@lemmy.zip · 13 pts · 47d (4 replies)

Honestly, I’ve had a rather interesting experience with AI. I was very adverse to LLM usage at first. Later I sort of figured out that I was more adverse to the energy around AI than I am AI itself.

I knew the models sucked at large tasks. Trying to get an edge on the matter though, I started asking myself, how can I get the model to perform better? I figured I could pass over the AI hate stage and get right into the AI professional stage… at least a head start.

So I began experimenting with local LLMs, LLM harnesses, and various governance tools like jai. I decided against Claude Code and Cortex because they’re provider specific — instead using OpenCode so that I can use whichever model I desire. Then I began building out a SKILL.md repository for tightly scoped tasks like change-review, security-analysis, refactor, architecture-review, grill-me, feature-design, …

I’m still thinking through some of the project needs. I want something that lets an agent work, while treating the agent as a kind of helpful adversary. You should be able to configure workloads that designate models, context, available tooling, skills, permissions, session length, inference level, acceptance criteria, and human-review stages. It would also allow for session switching, model switching, agent deliverable handoff to another agent, … not to mention, your VCS should know and respond appropriately if an agent ever pushes code. Don’t trust it by default.

These workloads should be version controllable, benchmarked, …

Anyway, a lot of that is speculative. Just where I’m at now, controlling context and skills manually, I’m already seeing much better results.

And no, I don’t have the AI do everything. I just find smarter ways to decompose “everything” into much smaller tasks that are easier to review and scrutinize.

But also, I push for local model usage in my organization. I don’t want my success to mean success for the AI companies. Fuck the AI companies.

rumba@lemmy.zip · 7 pts · 47d

I was forced to dogfood it. I found that for my specific needs, it made me super productive. I generally make Claude write Ansible jobs, I store all my secrets in a vault that it never gets access to.

It can do tremendous amounts of work at my command in relative safety as long as i provide it protected tools.

Now, that said, I burn a hell of a lot of tokens moving at that speed. When the ass falls out of the market, i'll still have all the ancible stuff I can reuse.

boonhet@sopuli.xyz · 6 pts · 47d (2 replies)

Neither Claude code neither codex is actually vendor specific, they just don't tell you that you can config other providers, including local

However opencode is pretty nice too, so if you like it, use that. I personally find that opencode with GLM 5.2 or Kimi K2.7 isn't actually that great, it'll hallucinate more than Claude code or Codex with their respective first party models. I think it's the models themselves rather than opencode itself though, as when I use GPT for planning and hand it off to deepseek flash to do the actual work, it's more or less fine.

rumba@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 47d

I suspect behind the scenes, the first parties are sending your requests to multiple targets and sending you back quorum.

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 46d

also the environmental damage, noise pollution,,,etc its causing that the dot com dint cause.

borkborkbork@piefed.social · 5 pts · 46d (2 replies)

yep. these mba types have gutted half of id, and are changing id - ID - to unreal engine projects.

fucking hell

teslekova@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 46d (1 reply)

That's sacrilege.

borkborkbork@piefed.social · 2 pts · 45d

true. and you know who has really detailed art of sacrificial altars? id. get the OG's back together!

Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 47d (4 replies)

Except this time they'll have a hard time blaming the devs and other workers.

I mean they'll sneak around it, but maybe just maybe the blame will not be distributed? Lol who am I kidding.

rumba@lemmy.zip · 7 pts · 47d (1 reply)

The're apex predators, they don't blame anyway, just mass layoffs due to non-profitability ()

non-profitability(){  
       if CEO_makes_less_money_than_they_want();  
                return true;  
       return true anyway because fuck the proliariat  
}

Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 46d

if (bankrupt) find_new_ceo_job(parents_network);

MasterBlaster@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 46d

Yeah, I'm glad you woke up there. They will always find a way to blame the developers.

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 46d

they will just lay off more people to stave off the debt, and then to hold the industry to gether outsource, and hire only some senior devs while ignoring entry or juniour level people.

jtrek@startrek.website · 16 pts · 47d

Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about these people. Calls them "Business Idiots"

yggstyle@lemmy.world · 28 pts · 47d (3 replies)

And we hope they go broke, dont pay their bills, cause a panic sell on AI services, which causes private equity to panic sell everything... which pops the bubble... and leads to the literal version of 'its raining men' on wall street as executives and profiteers have their horde of ill gotten gains evaporate in seconds.

... too much?

TachyonTele_Esq@piefed.social · 23 pts · 47d

Damn, I was almost there. Keep going

MasterBlaster@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 46d

I'm thinking the last scene in Fight Club. Yeah, that would be the one you're looking for.

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 46d

everyone will just end using deepseek, assuming they arnt charging.

CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 47d

These execs were the ones we were supposed to replace with AI.

SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world · 208 pts · 47d (21 replies)

Build up reliance on AI, which looks really cheap
You can now replace employees with AI so fire away!
You are now completely dependent on AI and a handful of employees
AI company sees they have you and start jacking up rates. If you could afford paying for people before then you have the $ to pay high rates.
Company now wonders why costs are back to where they were before and the AI isn't working out as expected.

monotremata@lemmy.ca · 156 pts · 47d (10 replies)

It's particularly funny because I'm pretty sure AI companies are still selling the service below cost to try to retain market share (and drive small competitors out of business). They just aren't taking quite as big a loss on every token with the increased prices.

SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world · 27 pts · 47d (1 reply)

Pretty much the model for so many internet services or streaming services.

monotremata@lemmy.ca · 7 pts · 46d

Yeah. It certainly pays off sometimes. Amazon did it. It just, y'know, also crashes and burns sometimes, and I'm not sanguine about the way this is shifting its investment money from venture capitalists to, y'know, passive index fund investors.

LodeMike@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 47d (7 replies)

So, they're earning money on token generation but not overall (including training)?

DeadDigger@lemmy.zip · 31 pts · 47d (5 replies)

Openai had 2025 6billion in revenue and 20 billion costs on compute. So just to run the models to get 6billion they need to pay 20billion r&d and marketing etc get on top of that

Pacattack57@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 47d (4 replies)

I’m sure there’s a term for it but this is like when a company keeps securing funding from investors so they keep growing to try to outpace costs with the illusion that you’re profitable when in reality you’re not. Just like WeWork.

EpeeGnome@feddit.online · 13 pts · 47d

It's just a Ponzi scheme with extra steps.

darvit@lemmy.darvit.nl · 10 pts · 47d (2 replies)

Venture capital

MasterBlaster@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 46d (1 reply)

Private credit. Get ready for the tsunami.

darvit@lemmy.darvit.nl · 1 pts · 43d

Everyone is pulling out of private credit, a non-liquid market (by design); surely nothing can go wrong..

monotremata@lemmy.ca · 9 pts · 46d

No, my understanding is that they're bringing in revenue on token generation, but it's exceeded by the costs of token generation (running data centers, so, electricity and cooling). They definitely want to make a profit on token generation, but they're afraid that raising costs that high too quickly would drive customers to switch to other providers. So they've reduced the amount they're subsidizing token costs, but not switched over to making a profit.

I can't find a good citation for this, though, so it's possible I'm mistaken. They also have huge costs associated with buying new GPUs and building new datacenters, so they're operating at a massive loss either way, and it's a little hard to find articles which tease apart the two aspects.

In any case, operating at a massive loss for the first few years is practically standard operating procedure in silicon valley at this point, and sometimes it eventually leads to a profitable, even wildly profitable, business (e.g. Amazon). But it does require a steady stream of investors and a steadily increasing market valuation. That's...we'll have to see what happens on that front.

deacon@lemmy.world · 32 pts · 47d (3 replies)

Yeah it’s basically the enshitification model

VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 47d (1 reply)

With the quirk that the service was shit to begin with.

deacon@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 47d

Maybe but it’s like crack for CEOs

ilinamorato@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 47d

It's just newsworthy when it happens to companies.

TerdFerguson@lemmy.ca · 19 pts · 46d

AI company hijacks your processes, trade secrets, and market to offer the same thing for cheaper than you can. Raises rates for competitors to cover its own token use and simultaneously drive the others out of business.

Batmorous@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 47d (1 reply)

They see people have gone to new companies thatre private unionized and value customers/employees/etc replacing them as they had done with their employees
The company asks for them to come back to be laughed at as the people watch for them to slowly sink and be replaced with many better alternatives to take their place
That is happening right now and we all can make it happen faster

Pistachio@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 46d

Is this real life, or is it just fantasy?

PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 47d

It’s such a perfect grift

Xerxos@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 46d (1 reply)

Have you heard about "Tokenmaxxing"?

Since many AI companies didn't have a reasonable limit on the number of tokens for the amount of money you paid, companies started telling their employees to use as many tokens as possible. LLMs improve with more tokens (although there are diminishing returns).

So users tried to exploit the 'lure offer', and AI companies had to change the billing. It's still below the real cost, but no longer this insanely expensive option.

SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 46d

Oh it was all over the tech news. Reddit was trying to guess the mystery company that got the massive bill.

BottleBoardBakon@lemmy.ml · 126 pts · 47d

The first hit was free.

NM_Gringo@lemmy.world · 99 pts · 47d (4 replies)

Someone should remind those soggy, arrogant execs that down here in the developer trenches we survived web services, software as a service, outsourcing, and off-shoring. We're still here after all that and we'll still be here after AI.

palordrolap@fedia.io · 27 pts · 47d (3 replies)

Some of these people are so out of touch that they'd have to spend a decade in the trenches before they might even begin to get an inkling that something is up.

Case in point: Bezos went to space and wasn't humbled by the overviewer effect because his ego is literally larger than the planet he lives on.

applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 16 pts · 46d (1 reply)

to be fair the overviewer effect has been romanticized and played up by people who literally spent their entire life training and competing for the chance at a few hours or days cumulative time in space while pretending for the deciders and teams of doctors that they arent just normal flawed people like the rest of us. astronauts basically have to buy in to the overviewer effect as one of the things that makes all their sacrifices "worth it", and part of trying to convince themselves is convincing others that its a real thing most people will experience. its more of a placebo effect in reality, though im sure there are people who genuinely felt it. bezos just didnt have to work for it at all so he has no incentive to buy into the hype, total lack of empathy and compassion aside.

JayGray91@piefed.social · 1 pts · 46d

Idk, it could still be genuine. maybe I just don't fly enough, but every time I get the chance I'm amazed that humanity managed to achieve flight.

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 46d

he literally opened a champagned bottle on a recovering alcoholic(shatner) he pretends to be human.

FreddiesLantern@leminal.space · 90 pts · 46d

SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org · 77 pts · 47d (6 replies)

I swear, execs are some of the most gullible people on earth. I know some of them, and none of them are very bright, just very greedy.

mcv@lemmy.zip · 51 pts · 46d (2 replies)

They're not selected for intelligence, but for sociopathy.

cmbabul@slrpnk.net · 18 pts · 46d

I think it’s more sociopaths rising by being sociopaths and then promoting gullible idiots they can use and control with no issue, then blame when shit goes wrong

Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 9 pts · 46d

And nepotism.

And cronyism.

Coming from the upper-middle and upper class and having attended the right schools and become mates with the right people is very highly correlated with becoming a top level executive.

Buckshot@programming.dev · 17 pts · 46d

My lesson in this came really early in my career. One of our execs was selling vapourware. Just promising our product, that we hadn't made yet, could do literally anything. Then he insisted we build it on this platform he must have had shares in the way he pushed it, only it was also vapourware and didn't do half the things it said it did.

He found it utterly inconceivable that a company would sell a product that didn't do what it said despite doing the exact same thing himself. He was completely delusional.

uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 13 pts · 46d

As we've seen with Donald Trump and George W. Bush, if you're wealthy enough or in an aristocratic social group, you fail upwards.

And if you always fail upwards, it's very easy to not gain the skills to succeed.

darthelmet@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 46d

Man, if all it takes to be a CEO is to make stupid decisions, they should just hire me. I’m the master at that.

Naich@piefed.world · 69 pts · 47d (11 replies)

Just wait until all the technical debt has to be paid as well.

docus@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 22 pts · 47d (6 replies)

I know what you mean, but the tech debt problem will never get resolved.

ilinamorato@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 47d (1 reply)

The tech debt always gets paid one way or another. Either preemptively, as part of ongoing maintenance; or after a data breach in the subsequent lawsuit and settlement; or in the slow, inexorable trickle of increased infrastructure costs and lost business from slow dependencies and ineffectual bandaid solutions.

Windex007@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 46d

Another payment option is not tackling it at all and just "paying the interest" by having a larger engineering team to wrangle the beast than you would otherwise have needed.

Goodeye8@piefed.social · 7 pts · 47d (3 replies)

Of course but the cost can be mitigated. I've seen an AI built project and the outcome is that you pretty much have to continue using AI to continue development because it's borderline incomprehensible for humans. When AI fails to continue development you scrap the entire project and start from scratch.

I imagine all companies that allowed AI to go wild in their codebase have a lot of components that need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

SabinStargem@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 47d (2 replies)

In theory, completely rewriting legacy software with AI could be a great thing - doing so every 3 or 4 years, allowing newer and better AI to tackle the task, optimizing for every development made in technology or standards.

However, this still requires human minds to define, guide, and verify these projects. AI opens up possibilities for better development, but executives seem determined to fritter away such potential by axing the human element.

It is like a certain story...

Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 47d

You forgot that AI cannot "rewrite legacy software".

Otherwise it's a nice thing to fantasize about 😁

Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it · 3 pts · 46d

I don't know how much AIs can be useful on big ass projects, but it def was useful for me when i had to look at the code of a project i made 1 year ago, i was so much worse at writing code and it was such a mess that ultimately i used an AI agent to rewrite it
Do i feel dirty? Yep
Has it saved time? YES

bagsy@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 47d (2 replies)

I already see lots of boutique consultancies popping up specifically saying they will fix tour slop code bases. Developers and doctors will never run out of work.

wewbull@feddit.uk · 7 pts · 47d (1 reply)

I'm not sure fixing it will be possible.

jaybone@lemmy.zip · 12 pts · 47d

They will have to trash a bunch of it and rewrite entire modules and components from scratch.

I’ve seen as AI keeps iterating over enhancements and bug fixes, the spaghetti code gets worse and worse over time. At some point only the AI understands its own code, as it is too much garbled nonsense for a human to trace through. Eventually that becomes too much garbage for the ai to trace through. And then that’s where you end up.

The idea that this can be some kind of non-deterministic abstraction layer between pseudo code and actual code is absurd.

SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 47d

And people realize they don't understand the output anymore or the architecture. AI isn't creating anything new either.

trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf · 65 pts · 46d (5 replies)

Anyone who fell for this grift deserves it and much worse.

People, usually who have never done the job, still love to argue that it can compete with software devs and infra engineers.

The sad part they don't see (or maybe care about) is while it can't currently (and absolutely not llms) they're pushing a narrative that we should automate everyone and everything which is dangerous and moronic.

Shanmugha@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 46d (3 replies)

Well, we should automate everything that can be automated - for the benefit of everyone. Last part is something not seen on worldwide scale ever, just yet

trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf · 14 pts · 46d (2 replies)

I understand the argument for automation being used where appropriate to benefit us and allow us the freedom to focus on other things, however, I'm skeptical due to the social behavior already occurring from the powers that be expressing the desire to enslave us, if not just kill us, using the mere concept of AI as justification.

And funny enough, pushing this hard will only leave a bad taste regarding any mention of artificial intelligence or automation. Whereas if these people just fucked off they might have been able to sell whatever usefulness it has in the correct places.

ricecake@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 46d

It happens every couple of decades with AI. Since it's a broader field than most people think, we have a pretty long cycle of a new development looking exciting, people getting way too excited and optimistic, the development being exactly what it was promised to be, and then people getting disappointed and avoiding anything with the AI label. Then we decide that because we're used to this new thing, it can be used in stuff as was originally appropriate but it no longer qualifies as AI, because "that's not AI, it's just ___".

Shanmugha@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 46d

Oh yeah. I can sign under every word you wrote

jj4211@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 46d

The people who have never done the work love more than anyone else to talk about how the work should be done better and cheaper.

Broadly this sentiment stands for most professions.

minorkeys@sh.itjust.works · 64 pts · 47d (8 replies)

And if we had strong labour relationships, we'd make them fucking pay for having attempted to destroy our lives for profit.

sepi@piefed.social · 31 pts · 47d (6 replies)

tristynalxander@mander.xyz · 25 pts · 46d (3 replies)

[ removed ]

BaroqueBobby@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 46d (1 reply)

Cuts so clean too I use it for my johnsonville brats

sepi@piefed.social · 4 pts · 46d

Good for little vienna sausages too

lost_faith@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 46d

Thought it was a tip clipper for my cigars

Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org · 1 pts · 46d (1 reply)

This one looks very, very unused...

sepi@piefed.social · 1 pts · 46d

Looks sad, doesn't it?

trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf · 1 pts · 46d

Speak for yourself, I absolutely plan on reclamation for destroying my life

rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works · 57 pts · 46d (6 replies)

I replaced all my software team with agents which can work 24h a day on the product and now none of the software works and I'm out $600000 waaaaaa

Exec

79WistfulVista@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 46d (4 replies)

The bigger problem might be what it will cost to get things back where they need to be. Probably a lot more than $600k. How many of the knowledgeable developers are willing to come back to clean up the mess? Any of them? And at what salary? Possibly a lot more than they were paid before they were kicked out. If you can't rehire the original developers then you might find others with the required technical skills - but probably not with the domain knowledge. And now costs and times increase further.

stringere@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 45d (2 replies)

TallonMetroid@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 45d (1 reply)

Upvote for Samus. 👍

stringere@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 45d

Better than Drake, fo sho

fxdave@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 45d

Actually they understand the code that they generate very well. But for existing codebases they make a big mess, because they don't see the same abstractions humans would like to see.

HK65@sopuli.xyz · 0 pts · 46d

600k is not a lot of money for a software team or for AI though.

spittingimage@lemmy.world · 56 pts · 47d

You'd think the cocaine-snorting classes would understand that only the first hit's free.

Dagamant@lemmy.world · 48 pts · 46d

Here is how it has gone down for a few companies I have visibillity on:

Investors with enough stock to have influence demand the company use AI and cut staff
remaining ataff struggles to fit AI into their now bloated workload
quality slips and stumbles. a few employees are able to make the transition and cause huge AI bills while attempting to cover the workload
everyone gets upset and nothing gets done well

It looks like investors who have also invested in AI are trying to push its use and it is stumbling all over the place. If a company cant adapt it is basically stripped for parts and sold off to companies that are handling it better.

adhdsergio@lemmy.world · 47 pts · 46d

It's funny because they do this to other people; they just never thought it'd happen to them. FAFO 🫡

Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org · 43 pts · 47d (20 replies)

SMH Did they really think all these investors just wanted to burn 9-figure sums without any serious return?

i am saying this for about a year now: Altman wants to rule the world.

Dyskolos@lemmy.zip · 28 pts · 47d (19 replies)

Who of the billionaire (and now trillionaires, sigh) fucknuggets does not want to rule the world?

What else should one do if one already has everything and can't buy anything else...

aim4harmony@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 47d (16 replies)

A trillionaire sounds surreal. Imagine having an entire country economy (or a few smaller ones) as your budget.

Dyskolos@lemmy.zip · 25 pts · 47d (14 replies)

Indeed. When I was young, a millionaire seemed rich. As I grew older, billionaires seemed rich. And now we're one step further. The average millionaire is further away from musk than the average Joe from said millionaire.

It's absurd and shouldn't be possible. Billionaires also shouldn't. Why would anyone even need hundreds of millions. You can live wonderfully with very few millions or even less than one.

SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 47d (11 replies)

These days, in many cities, being a millionaire is a prerequisite for owning a house.

Dyskolos@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 47d (9 replies)

True. We (Germany) experience that too. In some places you wouldn't get a 1 bedroom tiny apt for a sum you could buy a decent house elsewhere.

But I just wouldn't want to live in such cities or neighborhoods. For what purpose? Why should anyone even know I'm loaded? In real life noone knows I am. If I'd raise a cup on the streets people would probably throw change into it 😁

SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 47d (8 replies)

Nobody has to know you own a house. Don't gad about in a tuxedo wearing a monocle.

The purpose of living in a population-dense area is the culture and amenities, such as healthcare facilities and art communities.

Dyskolos@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 47d

Sure, but those you can have basically everywhere, don't need to pick the rich neighborhoods or generally expensive cities.

I lived in our capital once. It had not one benefit I couldn't find elsewhere. At least none I would've found. And we move every few years to somewhere else in krautland.

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 46d

yup, i live in hcol, cant move out almost everyone has a job that earns them enough over the years to be a millionaire, mostly tech people. they arnt rich, i consider rich if you are making 1+mil/year

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 46d (1 reply)

MILLIONiares have to at least invest thier time, or money, job to get much. its the 10s-100s millionaires that are born wealthy+ billionaires. most of them, surprise dont really have much of job/or direction, thats where all the influencers(youtube,,,,etc) came from(most of them). even the humble ones can let money get to thier heads.

Dyskolos@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 46d

Aye. If not inherited then it's basically a fuckton of coincidences paired with incredible luck. Which they, in hindsight, call "hard work". Which basically was the same work everyone else did, but they weren't lucky. See YouTube. Millions try hard (for nothing) and a handful make big bucks. So I'm told, never used YouTube, I hate google 😁

But also yes. I rarely met a millionaire that wasn't some prick loving their own farts and bragging as hard as they could. I don't know why everyone wants to be so much "better" than everyone else. If you'd see me, my cars or my houses, you'd never ever guess the numbers in my bankaccounts.

KingPorkChop@lemmy.ca · 8 pts · 47d

And think about one Trillionaire - Musk. All that money and he just trips on Ketamine and troll posts on Twitter. He's doing nothing for society.

A regular human would be doing things just for fun like restoring an old building they liked, or saving some dying kid. Maybe going the Dolly Pardon route and giving books to kids.

Not Musk. He's getting dick surgery to try and fix his dick from the last surgery and shitposting.

Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org · 6 pts · 47d (1 reply)

Who of the billionaire (and now trillionaires, sigh) fucknuggets does not want to rule the world?

But most of them have no plan beyond money, money, money.

This one has. He wants first to use his AI beasts to serve him make the rules for every*, and the rest of humanity to serve his bots, or something like that.

Dyskolos@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 47d

No plan we know of...not everyone is a 5yr old attention seeking whore like those everyone knows.

Sounds like conspiracy theories, but we know what she should know and are allowed to know.

Mulligrubs@lemmy.world · 40 pts · 47d (1 reply)

CEO "What, you screwed me over, too? Me?!?"

Jax@sh.itjust.works · 17 pts · 47d

"We're supposed to fuck everyone over together!!"

tonytins@pawb.social · 39 pts · 47d

Ashenlux@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 33 pts · 46d (2 replies)

It's like these assholes have never heard the phrase "too good to be true".

7101334@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 46d (1 reply)

People who get paid exorbitant sums for doing exceptionally little probably try to avoid that concept

Ashenlux@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 46d

They are usually the ones setting up the too good to be true situations, so they probably never thought they would be on the receiving end of one.

Anonymous_Leaker@lemmy.world · 32 pts · 47d (2 replies)

[ removed ]

Palerider@feddit.uk · 44 pts · 47d (1 reply)

I guess this proves that the execs are clueless ~~about AI.~~

Anonymous_Leaker@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 47d

[ removed ]

rimu@piefed.social · 30 pts · 46d (5 replies)

If you've ever spent 10 minutes using an AI agent, you'd know that there's no way to predict how many tokens it's going to use before you give it a task. It can be $0.20 worth sometimes or $20 other times. Or anything, really.

It's only after watching it churn away for a few minutes that you can assume it's gotten stuck and have the option of pulling the plug before the bill gets run up too high. But you need to watch it like a hawk and you need to be the one paying the bill otherwise you're not going to care (e.g. workers using AI at work aren't paying for it, their company is).

Taken in aggregate across a month, that unpredictability might average out or it might explode.

Napster153@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 46d

Bold of you to assume these old people even engage with the business they claim to own.

psx_crab@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 46d (1 reply)

Computerphile demonstrated this using copilot(timestamp 20:50), where he created a screensaver sort of thing with just a few prompt back and forth, and that used up 2 million input tokens and 47k output token. That's about $6 to $10 just to create that screensaver.

Johnmannesca@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 46d

I'd rather buy a used php book from my local bookstore for $10

Bytemeister@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 46d

I asked the "free" copilot one time to make a 6x6 grid of letters where each row and each colum formed a word in English, and none of the words formed were re-used in the grid.

Copilot chewed on that for about 15 minute and finally gave up and told me I could solve it myself.

Easy way to spend a lot of tokens doing nothing.

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 46d

i think the ones creating AI videos would be the highest costs.

IronKrill@lemmy.ca · 29 pts · 46d (4 replies)

I will never understand how is it that such idiots repeatedly make it to the top.

Gsus4@mander.xyz · 12 pts · 45d

MBAs and such are trained in being confident without knowing anything besides different business grifts.

TallonMetroid@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 45d

it's all about the networking at that level. Doesn't matter how much of a blithering idiot you are so long as you know a guy who knows a guy to get you in.

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 5 pts · 45d

csuites and ceos, are all the result of nepotism, there isnt such a thing as working your way up ofr those positions.

Soup@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 45d

It’s partly the fact that hundreds of millions of people the world over, possibly several billion people, believe that they only got there because they were competent and do nothing to stop them.

ceenote@lemmy.world · 29 pts · 47d (1 reply)

And the media will keep on shamelessly calling them "job creators".

Hopefully some day the average voter will see through that shit.

fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net · 4 pts · 47d

Capitalism runs on executive sabotage https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/116840727885067097

ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk · 28 pts · 47d

"The man selling AI lied so that I would buy AI. :("

goatinspace@feddit.org · 26 pts · 47d

bold_atlas@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 46d

Here's a real a cost saving prompt:

"Translate the contents of every single document in our databases into as many languages (including dead and constructed fictional languages) as possible."

Now you can fire the one Hispanic guy you hired because you assumed he could speak Hindi.

fodor@lemmy.zip · 26 pts · 46d (8 replies)

This reporting is basically dishonest. The execs are not confused. They knew this was likely to occur, because we all told them so.

Now, you can argue that they hoped otherwise, that they were being ridiculously optimistic. But to argue that they didn't expect it is simply unbelievable.

DupaCycki@lemmy.world · 28 pts · 46d (1 reply)

I think you're underestimating how clueless and braindead executives can be.

Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 46d

It's the quest for infinite growth and fomo, just needed a good/bad salesman to come along

floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 21 pts · 46d (1 reply)

The KPMG report, initially flagged by the Register, surveyed 2,145 senior execs across 20 countries, finding that an astonishing 29 percent of them had no idea where the growing costs associated with AI were coming from.

They're just dumb assholes

ITGuyLevi@programming.dev · 8 pts · 46d

Dumb assholes that don't read the reports or pay attention in meetings where this is cost is brought up.

BCsven@lemmy.ca · 15 pts · 46d

Well it was cheaper before, till Ai vendors increased prices to cover the real costs

Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 15 pts · 46d

The modern executive who got their post from being mates with the right people, having attended the right schools and relentless self-promotion isn't a highly analitical person who sistematically and in depth researches their options before chosing what to do.

This is unsurprising given that a system were the image one projects is critical to one's career progression rewards almost the opposite: they're supposed to look decisive and confident.

The myth of CxO competence is just that: a myth and the product of confusing the characteristics of the character they're playing with the characteristics of the actor, something we're definitelly egged on to do by the Media.

It's only unbelievable that the execs did not expect this for those who believe the execs are actually competent at management rather than being people born in the right families and whose greatest competence is in playing the right role for the right audience.

jj4211@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 46d

In my experience if there's one thing that executives excel at, it is not managing to hear people saying something inconvenient to their world view.

Azal@pawb.social · 2 pts · 45d

#1 CEO skills: Selective Hearing and Selective Amnesia.

AA5B@lemmy.world · 23 pts · 46d (1 reply)

So they thought it would be free forever, and are surprised by the usage based pricing? I wonder what will happen when ai companies need to be profitable and increase prices accordingly

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 4 pts · 45d

they thought by paying for AI in its current form will lead to less employee overhead , thereby reducing cost. which dint happen.

metermatic26@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 47d

Should post this under \leopardsatemyface

Gsus4@mander.xyz · 21 pts · 46d

This has been the case ever since things that seem great, like google cloud computing...and your little project just bankrupted you because you left a tap open over the weekend.

bitwolf@sh.itjust.works · 21 pts · 46d

Cant wait to see their reaction when AI replaces them

bitjunkie@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 46d

Eh_I@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 46d (1 reply)

alexa play despacito

BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 46d

Living room lights off

Kimika@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 46d (4 replies)

I look at AI usage at work as basically taking on a bad but salvageable employee. For every use case, it needs a manager overseeing all their work and adapting to their strengths and weaknesses while also considering cost. It's a deployment problem created by over promising.

Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 13 pts · 46d

The salvageable employee will actually learn.

The AI doesn't learn.

They're only equivalent for the kind of manager who thinks investing in people is a waste of money.

Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 46d

We gave it a simple task of scan the internet for industry news, put results in a table formatted like x. It goes around 3-4 days before messing up. We have concluded that if it was an actual employee it would have either been sacked or put on performance review.

BionicBeaver3000@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 46d (1 reply)

Yes, when employed properly it can be a helpful tool. But when it's given all the house keys and unlimited leeway, it will burn down your house (and your budget) because it cannot make reasonable choices. It's not sentient (yet), despite all the promises from AI evangelists.

Krompus@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 46d

It's quite far from sentience, let alone sapience.

amberlantern33542@lemmy.1095.me · 19 pts · 47d (1 reply)

@FoxtrotDeltaTango's post glosses over something: the token bill is only 60% of the real cost. Infrastructure to handle latency (caching, batching), human review loops for quality, and retraining pipelines when models drift add another 40-50%. A team that thought they'd replace two engineers with an API often ends up hiring a prompt engineer + ML ops person instead. The margin math gets much uglier when you add those in. Broke down the full cost-of-ownership (tokens + ops + people) here https://cxgo.ai/l/IjOzask — helps separate real savings from accounting fiction.

SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 47d

Musical expenses. Just shifting costs around.

grte@lemmy.ca · 17 pts · 47d

We are ruled by privileged idiots.

the_armchair_potato@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 47d (1 reply)

Can't wait for this AI shit to crash and burn itself to dust!!

MasterBlaster@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 46d

Yes, but it's too bad for people like me who were shunted out of the workforce and are now retired because the alternative was eating a shotgun barrel to put an end to the agony of the Endless humiliations of the new job search process.

Taleya@aussie.zone · 16 pts · 46d

May they get utterly Forded

SalmonTractor@discuss.tchncs.de · 14 pts · 47d (2 replies)

You'd think they would have learned that from the cloud or any SaaS provider multiple times over already.

Jeffool@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 47d

Don't even get me started on Facebook's "everyone's pivoting to Facebook video! Don't be left behind!"... "Oh, we lied about your views repeatedly. Sorry."

SpikesOtherDog@ani.social · 4 pts · 47d

Except there is always a parade of individuals in middle management trying to make a name for themselves, which is usually by pushing the latest fad.

db2@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 47d

At this rate the leopards are going to have to start going on a restricted diet. Maybe the panthers are hungry too though.

I mean exactly what you think I mean.

DandomRude@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 47d

That makes it pretty clear that most executives are the worst possible people to run a company. Well, that’s just how it is when ruthlessness and greed are the only criteria used to select top executives.

But hey, even if they were to lose their jobs because they’re burning through so much money, things will go on as usual: Anyone who’s ever held a top management position will always be hired for the same role somewhere else, because competence is definitely not the deciding factor here. Never was, never will be.

Fmstrat@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 46d

On the same token, it’s important ...

We see what you did there.

TomMasz@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 47d (1 reply)

Nearly one-third of corporate executives are dumber than an box of rocks.

GreenBeard@lemmy.ca · 6 pts · 47d

4/5 actually, if statistics are anything to go by. The remaining 20% are just slightly above median stupidity, with a vanishingly small sliver actually approaching competent.

fyzzlefry@retrolemmy.com · 9 pts · 46d (1 reply)

I use AI in my job and I give it the business. Its gonna be spendy.

LittleBorat3@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 46d

Many people I know spend the equivalent of 500 usd a day in tokens if these were priced correctly. Wishing employers good luck once these tokens need to actually make a profit for the AI companies.

GenericUsername@thelemmy.club · 9 pts · 46d (1 reply)

Big tech will suck dry everyone, even their own rich friends.

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 45d

nividia is sucking dry the big tech companies, so to speak they got thier money upfront for just leasing out the chips years ahead.

pastermil@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 46d

There's no free lunch. These people said it themselves.

ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 8 pts · 46d

There's been so much !nottheonion@lemmy.world content these days

DudeWhoYapsTooMuch@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 46d

It was a matter of time honestly, anyone with the basic metrics of usage of an service was gonna get screwed over. With people you can actually say hey labor's too high and lay people off and have a shitty excuse. This is just you're stupid.

Zahille7@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 47d

I thought billionaires liked giving money to their billionaire friends? What's the issue?

MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 46d

Dumb donkeys.

ashenone@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 47d

Lol, lmao even

Jaysyn@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 46d

They should have listened to Ed.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/

dreamless_day@feddit.org · 5 pts · 46d

One would expect they kind of think stuff through before acting on it

Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 47d

Have they tried threatening to unsubscribe and go to a competitor? It works well whenever my ISP starts hiking prices after the introductory year.

Nomorereddit@lemmy.today · 5 pts · 47d

Sigh, im sure ceos are sharing these details with a propagandist.

BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 5 pts · 47d

They intended to use AI to rape their employees and the American public, only to find out that the real money is in the AI companies raping THEM!

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 5 pts · 46d

its not like its obscure though, since the signs were all there that NVIDIA, The main AI companies were looking for sucks to hold the bag.

whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 47d

The hugest bills so far

RoddyStiggs@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 46d

SabinStargem@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 47d (1 reply)

I think AI is cool and useful, but it doesn't obsolete people. AI doesn't have hands, nor does it have social circles of experts to rely upon, or lived experience.

zarkanian@sh.itjust.works · 9 pts · 46d

There is no "AI". Calling it that was a big marketing coup to make people think that they were buying intelligence. As of 2026, no computer is intelligent; you still need humans for that.

LLMs can be cool and useful in certain applications.

EmilieEasie@fedinsfw.app · 2 pts · 47d

Obviously I like this article, but in general I've seen Futurism pop up a few times and enjoyed their articles. I wonder if I should subscribe