161–170 of 360 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meta does this. Guess what one of the criteria for their recent layoffs was.
Meta tracks token consumption, but has explicitly stated that it is not a primary performance metric. Instead, employees are evaluated on "impact."
What if... we stop for a moment, and then, after thinking for a moment, we stop hammering nails with a microscope, and stop using token usage as a metric of productivity? I know it's sounds stupid, but what if
There is a complete lack of courage in the leadership of tech companies today, and top-down AI mandates are just another manifestation. True visionaries think outside the box, but most tech executives are forcing their employees into black boxes, out of fear of not doing exactly what their competitors are doing. We have lemmings for leaders, and that means that—much like the LLMs that are being shoehorned into everyt…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What will naturally follow is local hosting of all the things when people realize subscription costs for cloud-whatever are absurd. Even acknowledging we don't know exactly what costs would look like in a world without VC money, wouldn't hosting models logically be cheaper to do at scale in a data center? When I compared to the cost of running DeepSeek locally, I meant that we can treat that cost as a price ceiling…
Like how server hosting at scale in a datacenter is cheaper than running your own datacenter? Despite ~every company consistently concluding that hosting their own stuff is several multiples cheaper? No, I think local stuff using also-useful-for-other-things hardware will vastly undercut cloud hosting when the free money pipeline shuts down, and will stay that way for roughly forever. That doesn't mean cloud stuff is…
As soon as tokens stop stop being subsidized, heavy agentic use will become as least as expensive than paying an (entry level) employee. When this happens many companies will trade off havy tolen usage for (maybe a bit slower, bit less accurate) employees again.
DeepSeek is an open weights model. It's possible the hosted versions are subsidized, but we know what it costs to run locally. And it's expensive, but it's also pretty clearly cheaper than an employee. Of course, the latest DeepSeek models are not as good as Claude, but they're not super far off either.
The risk of letting your agent read .env goes far beyond the risk that the agent itself does something you don’t like with the contents.
What if... we stop for a moment, and then, after thinking for a moment, we stop hammering nails with a microscope, and stop using token usage as a metric of productivity? I know it's sounds stupid, but what if
I feel like individually, if you sat down with literally any reasonable person on the planet they would arrive at and/or agree with the tenor here. I'd be curious to hear from people well versed in group psychology/dynamics and/or just a lot of leadership/people experience: what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point. Obviously nobody here is goi…
Game theory! The downside of being brave vastly outweighs the upside. For the C-suite, there is no cost to herdlike-behavior, regardless of the outcome. However, there is a very high personal downside to being a maverick, and your board later discovers you made the wrong choice against the grain. The upside of being maverick and right is very limited.
Once a behavior has become mainstream, hopping on the bandwagon is no longer individually attributable to decision-makers, but is seen (and reported) as a macro-economic phenomenon: Nadella, Zuckerberg and Bezos didn't overhire - the American tech industry overhired.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
DeepSeek is an open weights model. It's possible the hosted versions are subsidized, but we know what it costs to run locally. And it's expensive, but it's also pretty clearly cheaper than an employee. Of course, the latest DeepSeek models are not as good as Claude, but they're not super far off either.
When you use DeepSeek’s first-party API, you are giving them your token stream . This has some training value, but it also has incredible amounts of, well, business intelligence value. When you tell AWS your secrets or your customer data, you can be fairly confident they won’t abuse that knowledge. When you give this data to, say, OpenAI, they more or less promise not to abuse it if you’re on an appropriate business…
I have Opus 4.7 at work at 15x. Burns through tokens like water. It feels like one of these new mega datacenters is just for me. I'd love to know what the bill is, but we're just encouraged to do as much AI as possible.
> Burns through tokens like water. Pretty sure I know what you're saying, but the visual on this one doesn't match the point you're making.
A more nuanced view would be something like:
* AI lets you achieve your roadmap somewhat faster, but:
* You incur tech debt that's similar to if you hired a dev temporarily for the features. You don't necessarily have someone on the team that understands the new code.
* Similarly, you aren't upskilling your junior team members. So you aren't getting skill/wage arbitrage as much as before.
* You will complicate the product. P2 features are P2 for a reason, but AI can cause them to be included and complicate the product for lower marginal gain.Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meta tracks token consumption, but has explicitly stated that it is not a primary performance metric. Instead, employees are evaluated on "impact."
Indeed, they also said that previous time off for ill health wasn't a reason either. but looking at the number of people who had taken leave, it suggests otherwise.