It’s not about the money, it never was. If it were a matter of costs, subcontractors would have never existed.

They just have wet dreams of businesses that run without having to rely on humans. That’s all.

Humans ask for raises, get sick, want vacations or just want to get the fuck out of there and do something else than working. That’s communism, in their book: You all not being a bunch of docile slaves.

I don’t know who is gonna end up buying the products they sell, anyway…

This is what happens when you reward people based on token usage. People no joke can just put in before every PR “review every detail, be very thorough, make sure it fits into everything, check for every possible undefined behavior etc.” while giving the model a massive doc with list of all files in the project.

Not even sure if they check the prompts because “review formatting of the entire codebase” is also super heavy in a large repo but if prompts get checked it’s an obvious token sink.

The model will just ransack the whole project every time through the whole stack when you could enforce a contract with a couple of tests with strict input validation.

Uber has the dumbest AI policy in the industry.

But… it’ll NEVER cost less!

This is such a weird take because we are comparing apple and oranges, again. It’s like saying a ruler is more precise than using your own thumbs. Sure, that’s technically correct, but you still need people to use that ruler to measure stuff.

We ALWAYS use better tools. Even in mass production we automatize the heck out of everything… and yet you still need staff to maintain it, design improvements, etc.

So… I don’t get this kind of comparisons.

I remember companies doing this with cloud services.

CEO: Get rid of everything on-prem, the cloud sales person said cloud is cheaper!

First year cloud coats are more than 3 year depreciation of on-prem equipment

CEO: Huh…welp it’s impossible for me to be wrong, so we’re just going to say it was cheaper.

Costing more to do less was kind of written on the wall of capitalism’s halls the whole time, so are we really surprised?

CEOs learning

Bet

I like how they say “now” like the billionaires won’t keep jacking the fees up.

Maybe… just maybe… the ones at the top with all the money should not be the ones with the least knowledge and the worst skillsets.

These companies have been tokenmaxxing i.e. judging employee performance based on how many tokens they use, so employees are incentivized to use up as many tokens as possible, even if it doesn’t actually improve productivity (and can actually result in the opposite).

It’s almost like it was an obvious and stupid pile of lies and shit the entire time. If only literally everyone with a brain had been constantly pointing that out literally the entire time, then we could have done better, right?

This feels predictable. AI is one of, if not the most invested in yet unprofitable industries in the history of humanity.

The last few years have been the beta and the tech demo. But that is not paying for itself yet. US companies are competing with (and falling behind) Chinese state-sponsored companies. OpenAI in particular, a company whose revenue doesn’t even cover half of their operating costs, has extended themselves into owing more than a TRILLION dollars to the entirety of big tech who are building chips and data centers on these IOUs, and will need to be paid sooner or later. The bills will come due.

Other corporations are already paying massive bills for licensing, tokens, training, and infrastructure changes to accommodate this shift to AI while laying off massove chunks of skilled workers on the idea that AI is cheap and will get cheaper over time. But that is simply not the case. This is the “first taste is free” part of this deal. Once they have companies deeply invested in AI and have destroyed the fabric of the labor economy in favor of it, that price is going to skyrocket because OF COURSE IT WILL.

Maybe at some point this will all level out. AI bubble will pop. Prices will sky rocket. Companies will try to backpedal, which will be slow and difficult, they’ll end up paying AI companies huge sums while they work to decouple themselves after just forming the bond, they’ll also end up paying stupid money to professionals who are suddenly in high demand, and many companies won’t survive the chaos. But the ones that do will settle into a new equilibrium.

AI will eventually get cheaper (but probably never this cheap again, at least not in the near future), and it will probably be a permanent fixture in our lives and work to some degree. But it’s usefulness and cost effectiveness will be limited in scope, with specialized purposes. It will not ultimately be the great labor replacement companies think/thought it would be, even as stupid and short sighted as that desire is in the first place (if 30% of the global work force is unemployed, how do you think that will effect your revenue, morons!?). But that also is assuming that the coming chaos doesn’t turn out so bad that AI is permanently legislated into oblivion after the chaos it’s about to cause.

Those same managers eleven seconds later when they get an ad for a new startup making the same obviously empty promises as the last startup:

Yeah no shit. You get people dependent on your product, then Jack up the price

Rule: if something looks too good to be true, then without any further evidence, it’s likely too good to be true.

Add to that the fact that hiring and training a new employee usually costs between 5-10 times more than retaining an employee (from hire to fully trained)