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AI sticker shock hits corporate America

axios.com

31–40 of 154 posts

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#31

"An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees." Like physically, how could this even happen?

This could happen with a large number of integrations or agent swarms working 24/7 with high throughput and long contexts.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#32
>Corporate leaders are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns.

This isn't surprising. Ive recently run into quite a few rabbit holes where AI is bad enough that its much more efficient to do it myself. I wanted to refactor some code, gave it a design pattern to go towards, some specific classes and methods, etc. making it a well described problem. AI just couldn't do it satisfactorily. The code was ugly, overly verbose, and after multiple tries with multiple prompts saying to keep things simple. They still would introduce new classes, useless fields, etc.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#33
post #9

>Corporate leaders are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns. We should start to question whether soaring CEO salary spending is delivering meaningful results.

Ah, that's not how it works : CEOs are rich so they are successful. They are successful so they are rich. Q.E.D.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#34
This is an important inflection point.

When tokens get correctly priced, all of the insane over-investment in capital will need to draw back: buying data centers, semiconductors, and politicians.

Even then, it won't be right-priced with regard to actual costs. The environmental impact should have been priced in from the beginning. There seems to be a parallel with subsidizing fossil fuels, under pricing them which encourages over dependence, ignoring the real costs society will pay later.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#35

> Instead, they should focus on using AI to drive revenue. There is a complete disconnect between wages of employees and company's revenue => Why aren't employees working towards revenue? What a mystery. Children, let's help Elmo solve this mystery. And then random mass layoffs to make numbers for shareholders look great in quarterly reports. Surely this motivates people work to their fullest potential and to care fo…

I found this claim interesting so I looked into it. Everything I can find shows that the intuition is accurate.

Companies with EOSP programs outperform those that do not in the market by about 17%.[0] Companies that perform layoffs, despite short-term stock boosts, underperform on a period of years showing a 14% decline in their Return on Assets (ROA) in the years following the layoffs.[1]

[0] https://www.nceo.org/employee-ownership-blog/new-study-shows... [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277473996_Financial...

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#36
post #9

>Corporate leaders are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns. We should start to question whether soaring CEO salary spending is delivering meaningful results.

We are since at least the 2000s when the world wide web revolution finally made it possible for Google, Apple, Amazon etc... to become the behemoths they are. And maybe even before that.

And the answer is no, because when chief officers succeed it's because of their genius and forward thinking posture, but when they fail it's none of their fault, so they are shielded in an echo chamber that produces such delusions and psychosis.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#37

"An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees." Like physically, how could this even happen?

Maybe the AI consultant gets a cut of that half billion?

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#38
post #13

Playing out in company after company right now: CEOs: “Get me some of that GenAI” CTO: “OK, we have all the GenAI” CEOs: “Employees, it’s AI or bust” Employees: Tokenmax CFO: “Um, this is costing a ton and we’re not seeing savings or efficiency materialize.” CEO: “Are we getting any value out of this?” COO: “Not really, and frankly I’m getting annoyed at all the AI slop turning up all over.” CEO: “OK, well, let’s do…

> Hopefully folks won’t blame me for the mess

Lesson #1 from business school : take all credits, put the blame on others, if there no easy scapegoat blame the "economical context"

Lesson #2 and beyond : just see lesson #1, it's enough. You've made it and it's ALL thanks to this amazing business school degree you got, now go profits with your new already wealthy peers.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#39
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I had to read a C-suite guy share how he had an epiphany that spending more tokens did not linearly align with more useful features being output by the teams. He was describing it as this breakthrough moment for him, as if it wasn't glaringly obvious that making the KPI "spend more tokens" would result in inefficient token spending, not massive value for the customer. It's baffling how these people have…

>It's baffling how these people have entirely shut their ears to all the obvious warnings about this, and are now congratulating themselves for their slightly less psychotic outlook and pivoting to blaming the workers for inefficient usage, after specifically forcing them to tokenmaxx. It's not baffling. They are a caste, wholly insulated from the consequences of their own actions. Almost every company is run in a ba…

> Almost every company is run in a basic dictatorial way. We almost never discuss it, when there is a wide corpus of political Science analysing the pros and cons of governance models that certainly puts it at the bottom.

Is it not wild that in the Freedom Loving West, we all spend the vast majority of our time as adults living inside tiny totalitarian states?

I think this persists largely because the people atop those tiny states are also the ones behind most of our media apparatus, so they can make it look and feel pretty normal. But that may be a little tinfoil hat of me.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#40
post #27

This is almost entirely on Anthropic and the stupid C suite people trying to push TokenMaxxing. GPT5.5 is much more token efficient, other models are much cheaper, and if used in moderation rather than than trying to get everyone to OpenClaw 24/7 with token leaderboards, it's much more economical. Also ironically, a lot of GenZ and young Millenials who were already bitter at their employers have used the tokenmaxxing…

I'm with you that people are insanely hyped about Claude Code in particular when e.g. Codex isn't far behind (and with recent models I actually prefer it). But I'm going to need a citation for this: > a lot of GenZ and young Millenials who were already bitter at their employers have used the tokenmaxxing push to sabotage the AI The 3 people on reddit doing this don't even register on a company budget. What seems more…

Codex is actually significantly better than Claude Code now, assuming you have a clear idea of what you want to do and how. Claude's secret sauce is that it'll run off and do stuff that's mostly right without a lot of prompting, but that also makes it willful/disobedient and causes it to be bad for "finishing" work, since it'll circle around your objective in an opinionated way.

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/nearly...

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