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AI's Affordability Crisis

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Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#351

Post by sdesol »

wookmaster wrote: post #345
burningChrome wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK nobody was collecting analytics. The one team I was working on had put out a goal of "30% more efficient" using AI tools. Its about as subject as you can get. We never got around to what exactly that meant before everything got shut down. Myself and several other devs were laughing about the whole thing. The company was so amped about what AI could do they never even bothered collecting any analytics that would…

This is all still going on at my company but they’ve been trying to create dashboards to measure us as good or bad with our output unsuccessfully but they keep shoving it through anyways. It’s demoralized a lot of people.

> It’s demoralized a lot of people

Isn't this a good thing? Doesn't it mean your company doesn't want employees to treat LLMs like a slot machines?

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#352

Post by 2ffss »

burningChrome wrote: post #176
steveBK123 wrote: post #44

I think the biggest problem is not necessarily the cost to develop & serve the models, but how quickly user behavior changed with token based pricing. I know a lot of people at companies where the marching orders changed on a dime end of Q1/start of Q2. These are shops that were fully on the "use AI or die (because we will fire you)" train. Now there's monitoring, reporting, alerting not just on overall cost but on "…

I can give you some additional anecdotal evidence to support your comment. I work at a Fortune 200 company. At first, it was the Wild West. Need an LLM? You got it. Need to or want to build an army of agents? Done and done. We literally had everything at the tips of fingers for about 3 months. Teams were building their own internal tools, the team I work on canceled contracts with several software vendors because tea…

[flagged]

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#353

Post by steve-atx-7600 »

qurren wrote: post #289
steveBK123 wrote: post #44

I think the biggest problem is not necessarily the cost to develop & serve the models, but how quickly user behavior changed with token based pricing. I know a lot of people at companies where the marching orders changed on a dime end of Q1/start of Q2. These are shops that were fully on the "use AI or die (because we will fire you)" train. Now there's monitoring, reporting, alerting not just on overall cost but on "…

What I don't understand is why some companies are so stingy on AI token usage. If you're paying an engineer $X and they're getting 3x the amount of work done you should be happy paying up to $2X in AI tool usage. In reality many companies start complaining at their employees when they hit $0.1*X or less.

Especially if the company could simply reimburse $200/month Claude or codex. Those are a steal. Hard to exhaust those limits.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#354

Post by ignoramous »

trollbridge wrote: post #212
junior44660 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our monthly total spend is around $180 with a team of 6, about half technical; our biggest line items are for American models or subscriptions which we probably will be planning to get rid of.) Please tell more :). Do you pay per token from bedrock / openrouter / somewhere else? How many tokens you use over the month, and how many for each task? Which harnesses?

Pay for DeepSeek directly. One developer insists on having his own account and in theory expenses it, but he forgets to turn in $10 expense reports. (Total spend in last two months = about $45.) Pay for OpenAI Pro directly, but I’m the only guy that uses Codex. $100 a month. My nontechnical partner likes to talk to ChatGPT 5.5 Pro for image related tasks (think generating interior decorating pics). The nontechnical s…

> Pay for MiMo directly. We use it during Chinese off peak hours though. Total spend so far $25 in last month.

Team size, if you don't mind?

> We're having discussions about how to pull in GLM-5.2 cost effectively

Are you evaluating Alibaba's token plan ($50/mo) which includes Qwen3, MiniMax M2, Kimi K2, and GLM5 series.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#355

Post by wwind123 »

We used to say genius is 1% inspiration + 99% perspiration. Now we say genius is 1% inspiration + 99% tokens.

I was able to enjoy the subsidy from these AI companies to build some projects quickly. Even my wife (non-techie) is able to get a lot of data analysis and processing done once I taught her how to use Codex. We'll just keep enjoying it while it lasts.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#356

Post by christophilus »

luke5441 wrote: post #290
burningChrome wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can give you some additional anecdotal evidence to support your comment. I work at a Fortune 200 company. At first, it was the Wild West. Need an LLM? You got it. Need to or want to build an army of agents? Done and done. We literally had everything at the tips of fingers for about 3 months. Teams were building their own internal tools, the team I work on canceled contracts with several software vendors because tea…

Maybe it was your company with the 500 million Claude bill.

Woah. I missed that one. Had to look it up. That’s one hell of a surprise bill.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#357

Post by christophilus »

pchristensen wrote: post #339
bluefirebrand wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10% of a developer's cost is something like $4000/month What company pays developers $40000/month and are they hiring?

A company's fully loaded cost (payroll taxes, insurance, fixed company costs, infra, real estate, etc) is usually about double the employee's salary. Half of $40k is 20k/mo, which is ~$250k/hr. That's a lot but very in-bounds for software engineering salaries.

Hm. I’ve been way, way underselling myself this whole time.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#358

Post by chillfox »

gizzlon wrote: post #140

> Sales and Marketing: $5.73 billion .. That is, OpenAI spent 44% of their revenue on sales and marketing! Anyone know what they are spending this on? Can't remember seeing one OpenAI ad.. Is it just pr and influencers? Ads in the US?

Bribes and subsidies is my guess

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#359

Post by daemonologist »

dranudin wrote: post #113
steveBK123 wrote: post #44

I think the biggest problem is not necessarily the cost to develop & serve the models, but how quickly user behavior changed with token based pricing. I know a lot of people at companies where the marching orders changed on a dime end of Q1/start of Q2. These are shops that were fully on the "use AI or die (because we will fire you)" train. Now there's monitoring, reporting, alerting not just on overall cost but on "…

I can second this. Our company and department was all-in on AI. And since the token-based pricing came in, we got an email from IT that tried to explain that most developers don't know how to choose models and that the cheap models should be good enough for most of our work ..

Ha, developers know perfectly well how to choose models - they know that the company is footing the bill and Opus will give them the best result and/or require the least clean-up work.

(We've received similar guidance. Even better is that our provider, GitHub Copilot, does not provide usage information to individual users if there is no per-user budget configured. So we just fire our requests into the black box and at the end of the month when IT gets the bill we maybe get a talking-to if it's excessive.)

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#360

Post by aryehof »

qurren wrote: post #289
steveBK123 wrote: post #44

I think the biggest problem is not necessarily the cost to develop & serve the models, but how quickly user behavior changed with token based pricing. I know a lot of people at companies where the marching orders changed on a dime end of Q1/start of Q2. These are shops that were fully on the "use AI or die (because we will fire you)" train. Now there's monitoring, reporting, alerting not just on overall cost but on "…

What I don't understand is why some companies are so stingy on AI token usage. If you're paying an engineer $X and they're getting 3x the amount of work done you should be happy paying up to $2X in AI tool usage. In reality many companies start complaining at their employees when they hit $0.1*X or less.

They may be getting 3 times the work done, but what work? Quality effective code that meets requirements? Or something else?
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