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Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

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31–40 of 94 posts

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#31

If you sell "AI" maybe, if you sell products that happen to use LLMs to provide services previously not possible, the money still exists in my experience. When I first heard of tokenmaxxing, I thought it had to be a joke. But no, it turned out to be a widespread phenomenon. I still cannot believe that was a thing. What I keep saying in internal meetings is: "I am so glad these people are this bad at deploying these t…

There's very little that wasn't possible before LLMs, because, well, you still had humans. There are many things that the models promise to make a lot cheaper, if you're willing to accept trade-offs, but these trade-offs can be quite severe. Many of the most successful applications of LLMs are fields that were already terrible. For example, LLMs are a natural fit for customer support. And somehow , it's also a natura…

> There's very little that wasn't possible before LLMs, because, well, you still had humans.

Agree, but only partially.

When I said "provide services previously not possible," it was just due to the fact that finding and allocating the talent to do analysis on Topic X, would have previously made many products too expensive and non-tech complex to provide.

Even if you just consider LLMs + harnesses to be an improved search tool, there is a lot you can make with a better search tool.

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#32

Never spent more than 40 euros per month on the base plans for Claude and OpenAI. And I’m doing 10x the amount of work I did before. As long as my computer isn’t running at night as well, I’m not upgrading.

Same experience. There was a period where Claude was burning through it's limits very quickly (~2 months ago?), but other than that, the $20/month plan is enough to do loads of work+personal coding. I am curious what workflows people are using that requires the expensive plans, and what they're building/maintaining.

use rtk or other similar tool

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#34
post #8

Yet OpenAI and Anthropic combined are somehow making $100B in revenue...

Enron was doing really well with creative accounting too. Non-GAAP numbers are out of control in 2026. The unwinds are going to be stunning eventually. Also, my small portfolio is worth a billion! In Yen, but it’s still an accurate claim.

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#35
post #2

We’re at a small startup and we mix models. But mainly just between the major providers. I wouldn’t say it’s as much to avoid spending money as it is to get the maximum benefit out of different capability spectrums.

Well, you can say that all day long but realistically would your “small startup” even exist if your firm was charged Enterprise rates or the actual compute costs and denied access to capital to subsidize your users? It’s a fair question. The other, more complex one would be “what benefit” are you talking about? Clearly there are some differences in performance regarding speed and token cost, but industry news indicat…

Hallucinations are not really a big problem in day to day work

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#36
post #6

Nowadays I don't understand why you wouldn't use a (more-or-less) nearby hosted Chinese model. You have the security, you have roughly the same performance, and you have an order of magnitude more bang for your buck. Bonus point : the models aren't censored and won't refuse to answer in the middle of your coding session.

The barriers for me are lower quality (perceived and actual), upfront cost, and more choices to make.

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#37

Never spent more than 40 euros per month on the base plans for Claude and OpenAI. And I’m doing 10x the amount of work I did before. As long as my computer isn’t running at night as well, I’m not upgrading.

Are you making 10x more income for yourself?

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#38
post #6

Nowadays I don't understand why you wouldn't use a (more-or-less) nearby hosted Chinese model. You have the security, you have roughly the same performance, and you have an order of magnitude more bang for your buck. Bonus point : the models aren't censored and won't refuse to answer in the middle of your coding session.

How does it connect to let's say, vscode. I would love to move away from Claude, but it's really easy to set up. Just add a vscode extension

You can use opencode

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=sst-dev....

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#39
post #6

Nowadays I don't understand why you wouldn't use a (more-or-less) nearby hosted Chinese model. You have the security, you have roughly the same performance, and you have an order of magnitude more bang for your buck. Bonus point : the models aren't censored and won't refuse to answer in the middle of your coding session.

China bad. Or if you want to rationalize your xenophobia, you’d say the Chinese models will secretly backdoor your code and kill your grandma.

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#40
post #6

Nowadays I don't understand why you wouldn't use a (more-or-less) nearby hosted Chinese model. You have the security, you have roughly the same performance, and you have an order of magnitude more bang for your buck. Bonus point : the models aren't censored and won't refuse to answer in the middle of your coding session.

> you have roughly the same performance,

From actually using these models, I disagree. The open weight models are nice for lower cost tasks, but having spent time with a lot of models I cannot agree that the open weight models are roughly the same performance.

Most of us use subscription plans for personal work, which makes the price difference to the hosted open weights models smaller or negligible. I’d rather spend a little more if it reduces the time I have to spend reworking or restarting with new prompts.

Kimi K3 might be close, but it’s not actually open weight yet. They’ve just committed to releasing the weights. The only provider you can get it from is Moonshot. I haven’t spent too much time with it, but from what I’ve seen it’s not actually Fable level even though some benchmarks say that.

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