Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI sticker shock hits corporate America

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 154 posts

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#111

Post by xphos »

digdugdirk wrote: post #78
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just hire people and pay then a fair wage and let everyone get richer together ffs When did American capitalism become such a zero sum game

It's always been this way. America has just been able to coast on being the only remaining major economy after WW2, and exploited the rest of the world instead. That exploitation of the rest of the globe has been mostly optimized now, so those shareholder returns are now coming at the expense of the 90% of Americans who aren't sitting at the table.

I think this is quite reductive. America certainly benefited from being one of 2 major powers after ww2. But unlike the USSR it invested in the world heavily. It rebuilt Allied and Axies manufacturing, and do a lot to revitalize the world economy. They got rich in the process but its not like they did nothing. They invented the internet and cure a ton of diseases. Setup a global order of trade that generates real prosperity.

I guess while I agree that American shareholders do reap incredibly benefits coasting is not really something america does. America is more than just shareholders too. You dont grow the world economy by coasting and you dont make up 25% of the world nominal GDP while only making up ~1/25 its population by coasting its inconsistent with reality.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#112

Post by stogot »

forgotaccount3 wrote: post #85
stockresearcher wrote: post #43

We 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…

Interesting. We use Kiro here and looking at the public pricing subscriptions and it's benefit to my workflow, it is clearly a significant productivity increase per dollar spent. And we were told we have a signed a deal that is better than that public pricing. They recently just enabled overages on everyone's account so that people aren't throttled and they are shifting people up/down tiers as required behind the sce…

Do you use Kiro specs? I have been loving using Kiro for the same reasons, and and just starting to use the spec feature.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#113

Post by nijave »

swader999 wrote: post #17

"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?

I imagine some scenarios where you're throwing a big data set at an LLM could add up quickly.

"Check all of Confluence for outdated and conflicting info"

"Review all the legal contracts over the past 10 years"

"Evaluate the source code in all our dependencies for vulnerabilities"

All of those would be fairly straight forward for a single person to kick off without thinking about the data set size. Especially if they have Claude set to Opus 4.7 x high effort for everything.

Even someone saying something like "rewrite the 25 year old Java monolith in rust" as a PoC and leaving it running in the background for a week

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#114

Post by slfnflctd »

spacechild1 wrote: post #57
swader999 wrote: post #17

"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.

Bitcoin doesn't have long conversations with you, including deeply technical ones, in a way that you thought only a human being could just 5 years ago.

They are not the same.

I agree fully with you on the potential for energy waste. We always do that, though, with nearly everything. How many of today's jet plane flights really needed to happen? The question is how much value people feel they're getting. People are having a whole lot more feelings about AI than they ever could about cryptocurrencies, and that train aint stoppin'.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#115

Post by 4hsgf »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #69

"“It’s a real dollar investment,” says Tan, speaking for Claudeholics who go full blast. “You actually have to spend six to seven figures on tokens—I’m on a run rate to do seven figures this year.”" https://www.wired.com/story/how-ai-agents-plunged-tech-world...

Has Wired gone evil now too? Just because some SV programmer circles who excel at marketing switched from Ayahuasca to a new drug does not mean everyone is going to use the new drug.

There are literally no good programmers mentioned in that article. They are all boiler room VC types. Shame on Levy, this article is planted or has has no clue.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#116

Post by rolfen »

Corporation always keep doing this, they hire lousy programmers then they try to make them produce good code by forcing them to use all kinds of hyped cutting edge technologies.

I'm sure there is an explanation for why they keep doing it.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#117

Post by uberduper »

Balinares wrote: post #28

Overheard recently: "Thanks to AI we're producing more code and more MRs, faster than ever, but the milestones aren't getting hit any sooner. Actually the opposite, if anything." I wonder how widespread that phenomenon is. Perhaps it's no wonder the prominent actors are trying to rush to IPO...

My take from working at a Big Corp is that individuals using coding agents can increase velocity substantially and produce good quality work, assuming they are proficient with the tools. But it falls apart quickly when you have a team trying to work together.

imo we either need to centralize the agent and and submit plan, spec, reference doc MRs rather than submitting code changes. Or develop SCM systems/workflows that incorporate plan/spec/reference/prompt metadata with code so intent can be factored into merges.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#118

Post by enraged_camel »

Verdex wrote: post #87
CuriouslyC wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/tech…

Hey, would you mind elaborating a bit on this: > assuming you have a clear idea of what you want to do and how I mean, if I have a sufficiently clear idea of what and how, then surely just coding it manually would work significantly better. Unless maybe I am a painfully slow typer. Without some level of "actually I'm not sure exactly" permitted, then I'm not really sure what LLMs bring to the table.

Even when you have a clear idea of what you want, there are still hundreds of decisions you need to make while building it, both big and small. Everything from what to name your database tables and columns to what data structures are optimal and what the API payloads should look like and what the tech stack should be. Anyone with a sufficient level of experience in this field has made these types of decisions dozens of times and at some point it becomes more practical to have an AI do it for you and for you to quickly skim it.

For example I want to make it so that users receive an email when their password is changed. I can either do it myself, which requires reviewing and remembering code I’ve written five plus years ago and then wiring everything up and obsessing over the wording of the email. Or I can give a two sentence instruction to the AI, work on something more meaningful while it is doing its thing, and then test it in under 60 seconds when it is done.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#119

Post by [deleted] »

SupLockDef wrote: post #8
CuriouslyC wrote: post #4

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…

Are you saying that making a leaderboard of who is spending the most is going to be expensive? They couldn't see that coming, but for sure they can predict how the future will be when it's time to sell their "visions" of the world. Meanwhile, sheep's are going to believe and max their token usage with their own wallet. "You are so be left behind if you're not". It's a mass psychosis. The only winners here are the har…

[deleted]

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#120

Post by aleph_minus_one »

utopiah wrote: post #33
Arodex wrote: 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.

> CEOs are rich so they are successful.

"Successful" in which sense?

The most reasonable definition "Successful in convincing other people to give them money" is rather a tautology. :-)

A very related problem concerning your argument is well-known for decades: the Principal–agent problem:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

It says that the self-interest of an agent (e.g. the CEO) is not identical to the interests of the principal (e.g. the shareholders).

Why do I mention this? The CEO being rich is a measurement of the financial success of the agent, but not of the principal. You are rather interested in measuring the success of the principal.

Post reply on HN