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Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

fortune.com

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Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#61

Post by no-name-here »

tomhow wrote: post #52

Active discussion on primary source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238896 (Note article says "Microsoft has reportedly begun canceling most of its direct Claude Code licenses, according to The Verge.")

Yeah this article seems very poorly written.

1. Article does not quote anyone at Microsoft saying AI is more expensive than employees.

2. Article says the nvidia deep learning team spends more on AI than employees, but that makes sense - the goal of that team is deep/heavy AI use, not agentic coding etc.

> But with a token-based pricing system, the work gets more expensive with more use and better efficiency.

Why do they claim costs increase with “better efficiency”?

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#62

Post by no-name-here »

leecommamichael wrote: post #7
scronkfinkle wrote: post #4

The title seems misleading, and reading the article explains the reason more clearly. There's nonsense OKR's and objectives at these companies to burn as many tokens as possible. It turns out that when you make a metric out of token usage, it unsurprisingly ends up becoming extremely expensive. Inference is affordable, and you don't need a SOTA proprietary model to get a lot of use out of this technology. While you l…

I kind of doubt they ever needed the number of humans they have, but I am genuinely open to being wrong about that.

If big tech companies actually offered support to users when the company bans their account or other real issues…

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#63

Post by ChicagoDave »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #35
ChicagoDave wrote: post #17

When you unleash it without a plan or discipline, they are correct. With discipline, it’s an aggregator. https://devarch.ai/

I do hope the quality of your astroturfing is not indicative of the quality of your companies product.

I’m just a guy with 41 years building Fortune 500 software. What do I know, right?

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#64

Post by ian_j_butler »

parineum wrote: post #38
ian_j_butler wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The media is hellbent on torching it, and on propping it up against all reason too, both things can be true. HN is no exception. It's another noisy room problem where the distortion in dialogue is rapidly leading us into a distorted reality. https://thenoisyroom.com/ For people who are actually interested in reality, participation in the mainstream discourse either way is a strategic error. The best thing to do is to…

> listen to the technical heros who are working at the edge Sounds like a great way to get the rose colored view.

Again you're probably thinking of the forum discussion / booster blogs / executive interviews that I'm suggesting you should leave behind. Papers are the only place left where nuance is even allowed and might actually be encouraged. Just try it, you'll be surprised. Depends on the research but.. a lot of it is kind of incentivized to align with AI skeptics actually because it leaves many things open for invention, study, and fixes

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#65

Post by VincePlatt »

andwur wrote: post #8
scronkfinkle wrote: post #4

The title seems misleading, and reading the article explains the reason more clearly. There's nonsense OKR's and objectives at these companies to burn as many tokens as possible. It turns out that when you make a metric out of token usage, it unsurprisingly ends up becoming extremely expensive. Inference is affordable, and you don't need a SOTA proprietary model to get a lot of use out of this technology. While you l…

They may as well have just said: Company institutes an OKR that the IT division must spend over $1000/day/developer (fictious number). Company is surprised when IT division is costing far more than it did before. Company increases this to $1500/day/developer to build a system to identify why this has happened. I feel like vibe coding is less of an issue than vibe leadership at this point, and vibe leadership has noth…

Solution: Replace the leadership mandating AI with AI. I'll bet not even AI would mandate it to the same extent.

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#66

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #63
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do hope the quality of your astroturfing is not indicative of the quality of your companies product.

I’m just a guy with 41 years building Fortune 500 software. What do I know, right?

We don’t care how many companies you’ve worked at.

And you didn’t build them, you worked at them. This isn’t LinkedIn.

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#67

Post by sysguest »

no-name-here wrote: post #59
sysguest wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well datacenters should go near power plants or cool mountain areas for ML training loads, it just doesn't make sense to build them near residential areas for few millisecs

Why mountain areas?

temperature drops on mountain areas...

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#68

Post by ChicagoDave »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #66
ChicagoDave wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just a guy with 41 years building Fortune 500 software. What do I know, right?

We don’t care how many companies you’ve worked at. And you didn’t build them, you worked at them. This isn’t LinkedIn.

Maybe the link was misplaced but the original comment stands.

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#69

Post by no-name-here »

sysguest wrote: post #67
no-name-here wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why mountain areas?

temperature drops on mountain areas...

It drops compared to the immediate vicinity, but mountain areas in the hottest parts of the US can still be very hot, and even non-mountain areas in the coldest parts of the US can still be very cold, so perhaps we should just say the coldest areas.

Re: Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees

#70

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #68
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t care how many companies you’ve worked at. And you didn’t build them, you worked at them. This isn’t LinkedIn.

Maybe the link was misplaced but the original comment stands.

The original comment is nonsensical slop that allowed for an excuse to segue to your product.
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