This is just links to stories that are already being discussed in other threads here OP.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268871
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238896
AI sticker shock hits corporate America
131–140 of 154 posts
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#132This 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…
I’m an “old millenial” and the excessive burning of tokens will continue until working conditions improve.
I prefer "Elder Millennial".
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#133We're at the point now with AI where people are realizing that innovation doesn't happen automatically when you have more resources or the ability to crank out more output. Innovation usually requires real problems to solve, a limitation on resources, and creative people working on problems they find interesting. If you're in a mature industry, chances are, there is little room to innovate with AI. Not because AI isn't a wonderful tool but because your company, and competitors, have put in hundreds of thousands of human hours into solving the problems of your industry. If they haven't come up something innovative in the last 5 to 10 years, AI probably isn't either.
The speed of writing code was never the bottleneck in software. Yes, AI can do it faster, but the parts that are most challenging are finding a market and figuring out how to best serve it. Those are the parts that take the longest and, often, the most resources. In reality, this is the real business of any company, what they produce is just a side effect of finding these two things. AI hasn't shown much promise in this regard. There are some simulated and small real world tries like what Andonlabs[1] is doing but it seems humans are still better at this kind of problem solving.
Companies have been spending ridiculous amounts of money trying to squeeze innovation out of a tool that is designed to produce statistically average results. This leads to mass layoffs because workers, who also produce average results, are seen as redundant. But when average workers come together they can produce extraordinary results through the mere act of working on something long enough and synthesizing ideas. Eventually, someone will say or write something that triggers a thought for someone else and it leads to a breakthrough. AI can't do this, yet.
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#134"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?
Gas Town would do it.
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#135Overheard 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...
Was that at Microsoft by any chance?
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 governmen…
Dictatorial systems are most assuredly good at one thing: consolidating wealth and power.
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#137I’ve said from the beginning that these tools may be helpful but on average will not replace humans and be as revolutionary as how they’re being touted.
However, given government budget deficits and the need to outgrow inflation / the ever increasing annual interest burden the US gov carries, AI kinda HAS to be an insane productivity booster or else everything is kinda effed.
As I understand it, most of us economy / sp 500 growth in the last year or two has been attributed to AI spend and speculation…
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, everything is fine until you don’t want to use AI for something because it sucks at that task and then you end up on a PiP because your token burn is low. Why the f*ck are AI Token Use Leaderboards even a thing. Features that used to take months are now expected in days. Oh you didn’t merge 40 pull requests and deploy to prod 15 times today? Aren’t you using Opus the greatest thing since the invention of the wh…
> on a PiP because your token burn is low Does this happen? I’ve never been at a company that measures employee performance by token burn targets. I suspect most companies don’t do that, but I could be wrong obviously.
I have friends who work at both large and small companies, as well as startups, and more often than not this is the case. Surprisingly, those who work at a YC startup face the PIP quite regularly for not enough token usage.
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#139> Corporate leaders are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns. This is act one the AI bear market. Yes I know everyone screams “bubble”. Let me explain the scenario I have in mind. 1. AI booms because the technology seems to actually have promise of revolutionizing how work gets done. It can do your taxes! It can drive Excel! It can act as a CEO! It can code up full apps an…
8. The credit market tied to the data center buildout implodes. The contagion spreads similar to 2008.
It is ironic that people got laid off due to capitol allocation for compute capacity and people will get laid off when there isn't much ROI and things crash.
Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's exactly what's happening. Many claim they are more productive with AI, but individual rise in productivity just doesn't translate to projects being completed any sooner. And by "projects", I mean corporate ones with big teams involved. Hobby projects actually do get finished much faster.
In the corporate world, writing code was always a small chunk anyway. Iirc something like 30% of employee time. Getting 50% faster there still only gains back 10% of your time. To further complicate matters, you had to spend on AI software and potentially additional on legal/risk/security/compliance to enable that. The smaller the company, the bigger that % of coding is of total time (all the way down to hobby where…
Where I work, I would guess that, out of the amount of person-hours spent on a project, less than 5% of it is the cumulative time spent designing and writing code. There's so much other stuff going on: Requirements gathering, "aligning" with other teams, human reviews, QA, presenting to executives, waiting for approval from executives, reporting status, deploying to staging, internal dogfooding, slow ramp-ups to production... This is how projects that are 50 lines of code take 3 months to deploy. AI is helping reduce the time spent on that 2%.