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AI sticker shock hits corporate America

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Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#71

Post by cautiouscat »

kombookcha wrote: post #14
SupLockDef wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that making a leaderboard of who is spending the most is going to be expensive? They couldn't see that coming, but for sure they can predict how the future will be when it's time to sell their "visions" of the world. Meanwhile, sheep's are going to believe and max their token usage with their own wallet. "You are so be left behind if you're not". It's a mass psychosis. The only winners here are the har…

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…

I think this is the part that kills me. This is what many grunts, including myself said from the start. More PRs and more code does not equal value for the customer.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#72

Post by ecshafer »

chrisweekly wrote: post #52
ecshafer wrote: post #32

>Corporate leaders are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns. This isn't surprising. Ive recently run into quite a few rabbit holes where AI is bad enough that its much more efficient to do it myself. I wanted to refactor some code, gave it a design pattern to go towards, some specific classes and methods, etc. making it a well described problem. AI just couldn't do it sati…

"AI" is "bad" and "just couldn't do it"? Specifics w model and harness would lend more credence.

This was GPT 5.5 and codex. The specific model and harness isn't that important here. AI could do it. But the issue seems to be that there are some tasks where AI kind of falls over and provides poor results. It was easier, better, and faster for me to just do it myself. I have found a lot of cases where AI is great. If you have a UML diagram already, or translating code from language x to y, fixing unit test failures, generating boiler plate. But I can definitely see if people are using large amounts of AI for writing code, analyzing code, etc. that they are not actually seeing returns.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#73

Post by sigmar »

spjt wrote: post #63

I wish I could do the same thing. Coworkers would be allowed to ask me X number of questions per month, and once they hit that limit I get the rest of the month off.

lol. Solid idea. Going to add an email signature with "Emailing me is billed at the following rates: $20k/M token input, $100k/M token output"

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#74

Post by utopiah »

randusername wrote: post #62
utopiah wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hopefully folks won’t blame me for the mess Lesson #1 from business school : take all credits, put the blame on others, if there no easy scapegoat blame the "economical context" Lesson #2 and beyond : just see lesson #1, it's enough. You've made it and it's ALL thanks to this amazing business school degree you got, now go profits with your new already wealthy peers.

I have a literal ledger tracking the number of times executives have used the phrase "evolving capital markets" It's amazing to me how subtle the difference can be between a business leader that seems to know what they're doing and one that clearly does not. Same words, even, but from one mouth it's compressing a complex thought and from another it's word salad to give the appearance of complex thought.

Regurgitating word salad coming from Harvard Business Review or whatever publication is trendy at the moment.

Indeed the "worst" part is that the initial concept might very well make sense, even be grounded in actual research.

Masters of semblance.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#75

Post by tasuki »

stockresearcher wrote: post #43

We use GH Copilot at work and this week sat for a presentation by GH about optimizing token usage and maximizing ROI on tokens used. Anyone else get this presentation? They didn’t have time for questions because they had to run and give it to the next big enterprise on their list… They basically said that everything is too expensive, you have to watch it like a hawk. It was as if they poured a bucket of cold water on…

> They didn’t have time for questions because they had to run and give it to the next big enterprise on their list…

This is such bullshit. Surely they could have recorded the shared part of the presentation and then spend all their time answering the questions?

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#76

Post by stego-tech »

The AI fever pitch has done a great job at exposing which companies were run with a degree of sanity, versus who bought blindly into the hype train narrative of worker replacement and went all-in.

Look, LLMs thrive when they’re given structured data that’s well annotated, clear direction, and treated as the probabilistic machines they are. Not one of those meshes with the AI narrative of “works on existing stuff, requires minimal guidance, and can behave deterministically.”

I said as much in 2024 when my employer at the time was grading folks on AI usage while my role was entirely deterministic in nature. It didn’t resonate with specific leadership then, it doesn’t seem to be doing so in the larger market now, and unfortunately not one of these dolts will suffer any consequences for their organizational myopia.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#77

Post by rickydroll »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #61
stockresearcher wrote: post #43

We use GH Copilot at work and this week sat for a presentation by GH about optimizing token usage and maximizing ROI on tokens used. Anyone else get this presentation? They didn’t have time for questions because they had to run and give it to the next big enterprise on their list… They basically said that everything is too expensive, you have to watch it like a hawk. It was as if they poured a bucket of cold water on…

Just hire people and pay then a fair wage and let everyone get richer together ffs When did American capitalism become such a zero sum game

When the powers that be decided labor didn't matter and the only thing that mattered was capital.

One will never get rich on wages. The only way to get rich is through asset manipulation and rent-seeking.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#78

Post by digdugdirk »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #61
stockresearcher wrote: post #43

We use GH Copilot at work and this week sat for a presentation by GH about optimizing token usage and maximizing ROI on tokens used. Anyone else get this presentation? They didn’t have time for questions because they had to run and give it to the next big enterprise on their list… They basically said that everything is too expensive, you have to watch it like a hawk. It was as if they poured a bucket of cold water on…

Just hire people and pay then a fair wage and let everyone get richer together ffs When did American capitalism become such a zero sum game

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.

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#79

Post by andai »

These two paragraphs were paywalled for me.

https://archive.ph/crTG8

If I understood correctly, a few months ago Anthropic and OpenAI both started charging per-token billing at API pricing for Enterprise customers? i.e. representing roughly a 10x price increase? That's kinda nuts.

Similar discussion yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296794

Re: AI sticker shock hits corporate America

#80

Post by Arodex »

SkyBelow wrote: post #56
Arodex wrote: post #22

Earlier 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…

>If it was so clearly ineffective, why does it get challenged more often and replaced?

I supposed you meant "why doesn't it get challenged"?

Well, look at how long it took for a democratic/Republican system to appear and survive. The French 1st Republic was immediately at war with all of Europe (I am not talking of Napoleon at all here, it was before that, when the French King was executed).

Nowadays, good luck getting any kind of financing with an "alternative" governance model. The banks and investors will either refuse or edge by pushing higher return rates on you. The whole system is conservative.

The adage "democracy is the worst system, apart from all others" only becomes true long-term. There are plenty of short-lived democracies back to antiquity, in the middle of the middle ages, during the Renaissance, the XIXth century... All stamped down by "more efficient" dictatorial empires... That aren't here anymore. You can expect the same in the even more cutthroat corporate environment, where fitting the system buys you leverage.

And don't get me stated on startups: most of them seek only an exist strategy. Very few challenge any existing behemoth. They are basically externalized R&D.

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