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Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

fortune.com

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Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#51

Post by juancb »

andwur wrote: post #8
scronkfinkle wrote: post #4

The title seems misleading, and reading the article explains the reason more clearly. There's nonsense OKR's and objectives at these companies to burn as many tokens as possible. It turns out that when you make a metric out of token usage, it unsurprisingly ends up becoming extremely expensive. Inference is affordable, and you don't need a SOTA proprietary model to get a lot of use out of this technology. While you l…

They may as well have just said: Company institutes an OKR that the IT division must spend over $1000/day/developer (fictious number). Company is surprised when IT division is costing far more than it did before. Company increases this to $1500/day/developer to build a system to identify why this has happened. I feel like vibe coding is less of an issue than vibe leadership at this point, and vibe leadership has noth…

I'm not sure that vibe leadership is a new thing and in fact may be a redundant term. I've worked for enough companies to get the sense that doggedly following vague feelings in their giblets is what leadership has been since 2008.

I won't deny that sometimes it works but there's much more coverage on when it does that when it fails which only serves to amplify the survivorship bias around it.

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#53

Post by mbernstein »

ghoshbishakh wrote: post #50

No! - me after reading the title. I am unable to hire any more interns and junior devs. Simply because there is no way I can justify the time and money spent behind them. Money is not the issue - time taken to make them productive is not worth now.

Hiring earlier career folks isn’t about maximizing their productivity.

It’s also about an influx of new ideas, different lenses to view problems, and connections to people like them, amongst a number of other reasons.

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#54

Post by bentcorner »

charles_f wrote: post #46
bentcorner wrote: post #12

The premise of this article is incorrect - MS isn't cancelling Claude code internal usage because of AI costs too much, they're cancelling it because GitHub copilot is the compete product and they want their employees to use their product. It's the same reason Teams got so much attention during lockdown.

Both things can be right: Claude costing too much and migrating employees to copilot, which hopefully will decrease cost as it owns the product, which will in turn increase usage and feedback. > It's the same reason Teams got so much attention during lockdown Not sure I see the parallel with the point you were making

Anecdotally from people I know from MS is that adhoc slack usage was popular up until lockdown, at which point more resources was poured into Teams due to everything going remote and internal slacks were frowned upon.

I see a parallel here where a competitor's product is taking over and MS leaders see it becoming an existential problem and are putting their foot down and pushing internal users to the company's products.

Also if half the company don't even want to use something made by the other half it's a bad look lol

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#55

Post by Paradigma11 »

repeekad wrote: post #23
scronkfinkle wrote: post #4

The title seems misleading, and reading the article explains the reason more clearly. There's nonsense OKR's and objectives at these companies to burn as many tokens as possible. It turns out that when you make a metric out of token usage, it unsurprisingly ends up becoming extremely expensive. Inference is affordable, and you don't need a SOTA proprietary model to get a lot of use out of this technology. While you l…

But aren’t the revenue numbers that have investors foaming at the teeth based on that “tokens as a metric” world? It can’t be both an explosive growth business and also only ROI with more disciplined spend.

Why can't it be both?

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#56

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #49
baron816 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The media seems hellbent on torching AI. My news feeds are nothing but stories about the evils of data centers, how useless AI is, and how much everyone hates it.

From AI companies’ perspective, it’s free press… why would they even think about stopping people talking about it! This about it like this - if you were a CEO of a company that ONLY made garden gnomes, would you rather a) nobody ever talk about garden gnomes, or b) garden gnomes be in the news every day, people protesting because they’re losing their jobs because of garden gnomes, companies making billions and collec…

Seems like a strategy that could backfire, if Congress passes legislation outlawing the manufacture, sale, distribution, possession, and admiration for garden gnomes. PT Barnum only thought there was not such thing as bad publicity because he was pulling up the stakes and leaving town before anyone woke up.

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#58

Post by coredev_ »

nullbio wrote: post #15

Taalas: https://taalas.com/products/ They've made a hardware LLM that reaches over 14k TPS on Llama 3.1 8B, and you can try it here: https://chatjimmy.ai/ So clearly hardware LLMs are the future, and the cost will be drastically reduced. But I know that all the AI labs want to create a perception of high prices forever.

Interesting development, it's impressively fast. How will this affect OpenAI and Anthropic when this hit the market?

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#59

Post by no-name-here »

sysguest wrote: post #27
baron816 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The media seems hellbent on torching AI. My news feeds are nothing but stories about the evils of data centers, how useless AI is, and how much everyone hates it.

well datacenters should go near power plants or cool mountain areas for ML training loads, it just doesn't make sense to build them near residential areas for few millisecs

Why mountain areas?

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#60

Post by charles_f »

bentcorner wrote: post #54
charles_f wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both things can be right: Claude costing too much and migrating employees to copilot, which hopefully will decrease cost as it owns the product, which will in turn increase usage and feedback. > It's the same reason Teams got so much attention during lockdown Not sure I see the parallel with the point you were making

Anecdotally from people I know from MS is that adhoc slack usage was popular up until lockdown, at which point more resources was poured into Teams due to everything going remote and internal slacks were frowned upon. I see a parallel here where a competitor's product is taking over and MS leaders see it becoming an existential problem and are putting their foot down and pushing internal users to the company's produc…

I see, thanks for clarifying (I also know people who used to use slack internally to MS).
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