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AI sticker shock hits corporate America

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Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#141

Post by senectus1 »

Sat through a demo of a tool that now has AI shoehorned into it yesterday.

At one point i noticed that the demo had a column that showed how many tokens each AI query was using.. one used 250 THOUSAND (for a single analysis of a single device). I asked the company who is footing the bill for those tokens.. they say they are (*for now). I pointed out the rather high number of tokens being used and does that mean we get a budget or quota or is it all you can eat.

they said it was a good question and they'd have to find out... and then one of the execs said OUT LOUD "Why is that column even there? Why do we show this to the customers"

I lol'd. It wasn't taken very well.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#142

Post by dgellow »

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…

I haven't seen Anthropic pushing tokenmaxxing things. That seems to come mostly from AI consumers, not from the AI labs themselves

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#143

Post by dgellow »

xphos wrote: post #111
digdugdirk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

And pretty much everything you mentioned that made the USA the leading world power has been atrophied over the past decades

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#144

Post by dgellow »

nijave wrote: post #113
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…

But even that doesn't explain it. If you ask claude to read all of Confluence, it will read like 5-10 pages, read an overview of the workspace, grep a few things, then give you an unreliable summary.

You have to fight quite a lot with agents to get them to actually read the fucking files in full

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#145

Post by dgellow »

spacechild1 wrote: post #124
slfnflctd wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

I was specifically talking about needless token maxxing, though. > How many of today's jet plane flights really needed to happen? Many jet plane flights are indeed not necessary and there are people who deliberately avoid such unnecessary flights. > The question is how much value people feel they're getting. It is indeed a question we should keep asking and weight the answers against the energy footprint.

Externalities should be priced in. We desperately need some form of carbon tax

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#146

Post by kombookcha »

treis wrote: post #68
kombookcha wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I had to read a C-suite guy share how he had an epiphany that spending more tokens did not linearly align with more useful features being output by the teams. He was describing it as this breakthrough moment for him, as if it wasn't glaringly obvious that making the KPI "spend more tokens" would result in inefficient token spending, not massive value for the customer. It's baffling how these people have…

This entire narrative is just made up. Managers know not to reward spending. At best you had some tracking to see who was using it and encouragement for those that aren't to start.

The person I am referring to is the CEO of Uber. He called this realization that higher token usage did not proportionally increase useful consumer features a "head-exploding moment". That's in his own words.

If you're thinking "that's bad management" then we are in complete agreement. He should have been able to predict this in advance, but evidently he either did not, or is pretending he did not.

The interview is linked in this article: https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai...

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#148

Post by slfnflctd »

spacechild1 wrote: post #124
slfnflctd wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

I was specifically talking about needless token maxxing, though. > How many of today's jet plane flights really needed to happen? Many jet plane flights are indeed not necessary and there are people who deliberately avoid such unnecessary flights. > The question is how much value people feel they're getting. It is indeed a question we should keep asking and weight the answers against the energy footprint.

I mean, I agree, but good luck with that. Especially in the current environment.

We need to plan for the world we're most likely to be living in in addition to the one we want to live in but probably won't. The latter energy isn't entirely wasted, but it's also not as essential to our immediate survival.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#149

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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...

Was -1

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#150

Post by xphos »

dgellow wrote: post #143
xphos wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

And pretty much everything you mentioned that made the USA the leading world power has been atrophied over the past decades

I don't won't to rant politically but I think you are confusing Donald Trump's America Alone with all previous Republicans and Democrats. The idea of us abandoning all alliances and deals for ???? is relatively novel and stupid. The brand of tax cuts and austerity (which are republican coded in my opinion) are what destroyed the UK economy and greatly damaged the US economy (we were more obstinate to full Austerity than any EU country the EU made bad economic decisions in required balanced budgets with rigidity). But we never did abandon our allies completely and step of the world stage. This is what sets a republican like Reagan apart from Trump. I think they are both terrible on the economy but Trump is just a disaster for US alliances and soft power. If the role were swapped than I think their is an incredible likelyhood we would have lost the Cold War. Its just not the same republican party its far far worse strategy.

I know we also argued that WW2 is what allowed the US to coast but I'd argue that New Deal programs that made demand and things cheap (like electric think TVA). This arguablely fuels American industry as it rushes to fill in the WW2 demand. All this investiment happend before WW2 even started and I think doesn't get nearly enough credit for allowing the US to 1 not become facists and 2 allows the US to step in and support the large demand of ww2 and post war. If we didn't invest in the nation we would not meet post-war demand and be much poorier today.

Finally, I don't want to be nilhistic or depressed if we can observer that we did things better at one point we can still choose a future that is better regardless of what mistakes we make today. We can make better choices albet it limited from today's options that will actually allow the US to raise people higher out of poverty. I don't agree with the idea of betting against Americian ingenuity in the long term it tends to lose.

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