Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by baron816 » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:32 AM UTC

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…

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.

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

#12

Post by bentcorner » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:33 AM UTC

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.

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

#13

Post by hmaddipatla » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:34 AM UTC

[dead]

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

#14

Post by upbeatlinux » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:34 AM UTC

Is that why GitHub is always down?

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

#15

Post by nullbio » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:39 AM UTC

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.

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

#16

Post by henry2023 » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:41 AM UTC

AI is not more expensive than paying a human employee. AI is not capable of replacing a human employee yet so the premise of the title is wrong.

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

#17

Post by ChicagoDave » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:43 AM UTC

When you unleash it without a plan or discipline, they are correct.

With discipline, it’s an aggregator.

https://devarch.ai/

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

#18

Post by baigy » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:44 AM UTC

The 'tokenmaxxing' trend is probably the more inane ideas emanating out of this whole AI wave. It goes in the opposite direction of efficiency and productivity maximization. Yet, it has wide acceptance.

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

#19

Post by Shitty-kitty » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:48 AM UTC

Burning tokens is as easy as throwing dollars in a furnace. Token usage is not a good measure of productivity. Problem is nobody has really been able to figure out how to gauge productive AI engagement. Are your developers maximizing productivity or are they burning tokens or resisting change.

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

#20

Post by alexwwang » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:48 AM UTC

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…

I am afraid that the TL would be uncomfortable if they have no human team members but only agents, which means they have no space to pass the bulk and have to take responsibilities for the business results.