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AI sticker shock hits corporate America
51–60 of 154 posts
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#52>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 sati…
"AI" is "bad" and "just couldn't do it"? Specifics w model and harness would lend more credence.
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#53I really can't tell what is going on with AI these days. I hear AI labs claiming theyre profitable or close to it. I hear companies say they're dubious the juice is worth the squeeze. I've seen anecdotal claims of a measurable increase in productivity of 2x in PRs created and merged coming in at cost 20% of engineering employee budget. Others say they're still getting no value (which I doubt). Simon Willison's recent post went into debunking the AI sticker shock claims somewhat. Either way this seesawing between new golden era and the greatest VC money furnace is becoming exhausting.
I'd like to see real numbers at this point, and this article is just a few bullet points that link to other articles. Talk is far cheaper than tokens and I'd like to have a workflow that I can rely on being there in six months.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/#th...
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excessive token burning as a tactic to annoy your employer probably does the opposite - it probably makes your employer money. The more tokens you burn, the more demand for hardware there will be. More demand for hardware means higher stock prices -> more money in your employer's pocket. The only question is how long that can last. If taken to an extreme, the output of the AI will get worse over time, and if it gets…
> The more tokens you burn, the more demand for hardware there will be. More demand for hardware means higher stock prices -> more money in your employer's pocket. If you work for NVIDIA, sure, but otherwise, this makes no sense to me.
I'm guessing you aren't invested in any of these stocks. I'm also guessing, to take the perspective of a tokenamxxing GenZ employee, that their bosses are.
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 tho…
Is it too late to scratch your final sentence?
FWIW I don't think it's tinfoil hat at all but when you say things like that on here you get a lot of late-stage-McCarthyists screaming about you being a Communist.
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#56Earlier 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…
If it was so clearly ineffective, why does it get challenged more often and replaced? Existing corporations aren't likely to change, but new startups and work owned coops exist, so why don't they compete?
Maybe ranking it on a scale of best to worse is too simplistic a view, and there are reasons this develops. Maybe it is the best option when there is a good leader, thus such structures dominate, much as a government ran by philosopher kings are better. But this only lasts as long as a wise rule is in charge, and it reverts back to a norm, and eventually, due to pure time and chance, enough bad leaders come on board that slowly dismantle the giants, but this happens at a time scale we don't particularly notice due to how much inertia large corporations can have (before we even get into the less pleasant issues like regulatory capture).
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#57"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?
Let's not forget about the environmental impacts. It's crazy that people are willfully burning so much energy for almost no return. And we thought bitcoin was bad... This is just completely irresponsible, if not sociopathic behavior.
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#58Just wait until companies are dependent on on it. When their employees can't think without it. When their AI generated codebase is such a mess they'd need a rewrite to understand it without AI. When they've got AI embedded in all their internal processes and tools. Then massive price hikes will come because they've been bent over a barrel and they'll have no alternative that isn't at least as painful in the short-ter…
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Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#59I’m also detecting a vibe shift in AI content
The mood has gone quickly from “this is cool” to “screw AI and any business that wants to use it”
This is particularly clear among the taste making class
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#60We use GH Copilot at work and this week sat for a presentation by GH about optimizing token usage and maximizing ROI on tokens used. Anyone else get this presentation? They didn’t have time for questions because they had to run and give it to the next big enterprise on their list… They basically said that everything is too expensive, you have to watch it like a hawk. It was as if they poured a bucket of cold water on…
Did you have any good tips for optimizing usage?
The ones I’ve stumbled upon seem to be: switch models based on task complexity, use tooling like ASTs and compression, disable unused MCPs, compact often, be verbose with input to give clear guidance…