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Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets

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Re: Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets

#41

Post by Ethee »

nixpulvis wrote: post #37

I'm so frustrated by both the zealous AI bulls and the blind AI opposition. There's a lot of issues, ranging over technical, cultural, environmental, and moral problems. But there's also obvious value. To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools. It's one thing to get an AI google response and feel like it's dubious, it's another thing to know what you want and have an LLM find the…

Nuance has been completely lost on our society. If it doesn't spark immediate outrage or joy it has no place in our attention economy. I really wish this wasn't the case and I'm not sure how we can reverse it. Most people just aren't interested in the 'balanced takes' because it's just not exciting enough it seems sadly.

Re: Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets

#42

Post by afavour »

sroerick wrote: post #4

I genuinely have no idea how some of these companies got so far over their skis on AI. It simply does not make sense to me.

Simple answer is that these execs live in a big bubble and goad each other into bigger and bigger investments via groupthink.

Re: Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets

#43

Post by nixpulvis »

Ethee wrote: post #41
nixpulvis wrote: post #37

I'm so frustrated by both the zealous AI bulls and the blind AI opposition. There's a lot of issues, ranging over technical, cultural, environmental, and moral problems. But there's also obvious value. To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools. It's one thing to get an AI google response and feel like it's dubious, it's another thing to know what you want and have an LLM find the…

Nuance has been completely lost on our society. If it doesn't spark immediate outrage or joy it has no place in our attention economy. I really wish this wasn't the case and I'm not sure how we can reverse it. Most people just aren't interested in the 'balanced takes' because it's just not exciting enough it seems sadly.

I recently learned the term "thought-terminating cliché" and it's so incredibly prevalent in society these days. Always has been I'm sure, but short form text based anonymous communication must be making it worse.

Re: Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets

#44

Post by BoredPositron »

nixpulvis wrote: post #37

I'm so frustrated by both the zealous AI bulls and the blind AI opposition. There's a lot of issues, ranging over technical, cultural, environmental, and moral problems. But there's also obvious value. To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools. It's one thing to get an AI google response and feel like it's dubious, it's another thing to know what you want and have an LLM find the…

No, we can't all be friends. Never happened, never will be.

Re: Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets

#45

Post by Jtarii »

simonw wrote: post #22
josefritzishere wrote: post #2

Companies are learning that even with mass layoffs, AI isn't worth what it costs for most use cases. This is an important inflection point because none of the AI companies are profitable, i.e. they're all still charging substantially less than what it costs to actually deliver the service. With things in that intermediate state, it's hard to know what a future stable state will be like.

If AI isn't worth what it costs why are some of these companies allowing $1,000+/employee/month?

Mass hysteria

Re: Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets

#46

Post by thewebguyd »

throwaway85825 wrote: post #10

Corporate AI will likely go on prem where costs can be fixed.

I would imagine this is the route it will go too, once (if) hardware supply chains catch up and costs can start coming down.

It's too useful to ignore, but too expensive to pay-as-you-go at current pricing for frontier models. Smaller, less capitalized companies will use the subscriptions (if they still exist by then), and larger firms will just build out their own compute for their dev teams.

Re: Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets

#47

Post by ofjcihen »

simonw wrote: post #28
ofjcihen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this probably has more to do with companies switching to API pricing for enterprises, no? Regardless, the C-suite wouldn’t be performing due diligence if they weren’t at least attempting to perform the calculus of “what are we getting out of this spend?” and what we’re seeing now is them looking for the justification. Didn’t Uber mention that they’re having a hard time tying all of that spend to any new or im…

I think it's both. Last year even the most AI-hungry companies had employees who were primarily using ChatGPT and Claude. It's really hard to burn a noticeable number of tokens with those tools. The moment you have Claude Code or Codex running in a loop - or in multiple streams (something that people don't really do with chat because it returns fast enough there's no point running them in parallel) your token usage g…

That’s fair. I mean like any other service it’s going to need some cost analysis.

I figure we’ll go from over usage to a shock leading to under usage and then land somewhere in the middle when companies decide what works for them.

Re: Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets

#48

Post by thewebguyd »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #16

I remember back when ChatGPT first came out, there was an article on HN about this AI researcher who worked for one of the big companies (I think Google) who came to believe the model was truly intelligent and that it was being abused by being locked in the machine. We all laughed as the guy had clearly lost his mind to AI psychosis. What we didn’t realize is he may have been patient zero. This is the delusion that w…

> what breaks the spell?

If throwing more compute at the problem keeps only resulting in incremental gains, I think that should do it. It goes one of 2 ways, really. Either we can throw enough compute at pre-training that results in infinitely more capable models to the point that the cost is now justified [1], or, we hit a scaling wall, get stuck with what we have now (or at that time) and the valuations crash knowing that "this is it" for the foreseeable future without a big breakthrough.

The labs go bankrupt or get acquired by the typical giants (Google, Microsoft, Amazon), the models get rolled into GCP, Azure, and AWS as a service, and that's it. It becomes another dev tool, much like a new IDE.

[1] cost being justified I'd rank as "your average non technical PM can now end to end develop robust, production software free of most serious vulnerabilities." model & tool capabilities that would allow you to hire a small team of non-techincal roles, for half the salary, that can produce the output of a large engineering org. If that doesn't happen, I don't see how the current buildout is sustainable.

Re: Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets

#49

Post by torben-friis »

nixpulvis wrote: post #37

I'm so frustrated by both the zealous AI bulls and the blind AI opposition. There's a lot of issues, ranging over technical, cultural, environmental, and moral problems. But there's also obvious value. To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools. It's one thing to get an AI google response and feel like it's dubious, it's another thing to know what you want and have an LLM find the…

It is good to remember that the discourse is not fully real.

There are fake accounts pushing AI everywhere, and people burned out by the marketing that react positioning too aggressively in the opposite direction (particularly when it's their boss who bought into the marketing and makes unreasonable demands).

Re: Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets

#50

Post by antonvs »

nixpulvis wrote: post #37

I'm so frustrated by both the zealous AI bulls and the blind AI opposition. There's a lot of issues, ranging over technical, cultural, environmental, and moral problems. But there's also obvious value. To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools. It's one thing to get an AI google response and feel like it's dubious, it's another thing to know what you want and have an LLM find the…

> To say otherwise tells me you haven't actually tried to make use of these tools.

There's also a lot of ideological opposition, which often tries to claim that the tech is useless etc.

> Am I missing out on the work involved in learning things I would be forced to otherwise, also yes.

Yes, but many of those things are things you might not really care about learning about. And if you want to learn about them, AI can be a big help, if you use it appropriately.

The "mixed bag" comes from the way people use it, mostly not from the tech itself.

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