an astonishing 29 percent of [execs] had no idea where the growing costs associated with AI were coming from.
The headline combined with the quote just make me laugh so much, I love it
This is what happens when the people in charge of everything are entirely separated from reality.
Those same idiots have been in charge of everything for decades, blindly doing whatever suited them.
They got duped and didn’t have the technical competence to see it or trust their staff to negotiate it.
Every IT / Developer out there knew it was a bad idea. The C-Staff was sold by the billionaires that you will go AI or you will be left behind.
My own CEO is simultaneously telling us to use AI for as much as we can and telling us to reduce costs as much as possible.
The “you’ll be left behind” nonsense makes me laugh. Left behind from what exactly? Lol
The sales pitch is:
All your competition is going AI. They’re be producing 10x the work with mouth breathing morons at the keys, while you’re stuck paying millions to subject matter experts.
They’re scared ot death that the tenuous hold they have on their market segment will be severed if their competition outflanks them in this, so FUD wins.
This isn’t just in industry or tech. I work in the academy. You would be shocked how many people from administrators all the way on down truly believe this. That, without any proof, this technology is going to make everybody a billion times more productive and that any graduates who don’t have this is a foundational skill will surely not survive in the future workforce.
“it’s technology and science, it must be good!”
Man, you would be shocked how resistant to tech and innovation some of us are unless, I guess, you promise the world with your racist chatbot.
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and professors using it to screen out AI themselves, or using it to make lectures. this is for university level,
That is a fine hypothesis, but that has nothing to do with how I run my classes. Or anyone in my department for that matter.
Yeah, that isn’t how this works. You don’t want to be the one using the software while it’s still in beta. Wait until the dust settles before committing to anything. Besides which the super-urgent "You have to buy now!" FOMO sales pitch is a classic strategy for scammers.
on the grift since its basically a rehashed version of crypto.
That’s because they bought into the pitch that AI will replace employees (or at least large number of employees) they understand that they will still need to build tooling that would facilitate that and believe that once other companies will say they eliminated employees this way the companies that are “are left behind” will be stuck still needing employees that will catch up to this plan and refuse to help company to get there.
I told my boss this:
- Right now the AI race has a lot of similarities to the dotcom bubble. The subject is packed with risky loans based on huge debts. Those huge debts are expecting to be paid as AI becomes profitable, but AI companies are largely loosing money.
- All those loans and infrastructure create the burden of sunk costs leading to a desperate need to succeed.
- The people feeling that desperation are the same people who own the largest marketing, news, and social media networks in the world.
- As a result, there’s a lot of hype around AI. A lot of “kool-aid,” and everyone wants you to drink it. If you drink the kool-aid, that means you’re also bought into the problem. You also need it to succeed, thus making their problem into your problem.
I explained to him that mature, professional use of AI is going to wind up following a similar path to data engineering. It’ll start with bullshit standards, “prompt engineers” and the like, but eventually SE disciplines are going to define who makes best use of AI. You’re going to have niche use cases for daemon AIs, local LLMs, and remote models. You’ll have stronger frameworks around session management, context management, agent permissions, …
It’s not going to be like this forever, “dump all your shit into our web upload and let the AI figure everything out in one go.” It’s going to become more fragmented, bounded, dare I say deterministic… orchestratable.
Then I told my boss, it would be better if he could frame his excitement around these future use cases… so we can skip the kool-aid stage and get right into the good stuff.
He agreed, until about a week passed. Then it was AI hype again.
The 3rd or 4th “industry expert” tells them that things are “moving fast” and things that were impossible months ago are now reality. It’s designed to make them distrust their own subject-matter experts. They thing, ohh POTV, they’re just not educated and up to speed.
Yeah. Local LLM stuff is great when you want to shove a huge pile of documentation into a model trainer and make a more intelligent search. Two of my vendors have implemented it, and it’s more useful than a traditional indexing search tool, though you do have to verify the results (which is not much more effort since with a search you’d have to skim the document to find the info it matched anyway).
But for general “do everything” tool, yeah no. It can’t read and understand your entire database, codebase, business process, etc.
Honestly, I’ve had a rather interesting experience with AI. I was very adverse to LLM usage at first. Later I sort of figured out that I was more adverse to the energy around AI than I am AI itself.
I knew the models sucked at large tasks. Trying to get an edge on the matter though, I started asking myself, how can I get the model to perform better? I figured I could pass over the AI hate stage and get right into the AI professional stage… at least a head start.
So I began experimenting with local LLMs, LLM harnesses, and various governance tools like
jai. I decided against Claude Code and Cortex because they’re provider specific — instead using OpenCode so that I can use whichever model I desire. Then I began building out a SKILL.md repository for tightly scoped tasks likechange-review,security-analysis,refactor,architecture-review,grill-me,feature-design, …I’m still thinking through some of the project needs. I want something that lets an agent work, while treating the agent as a kind of helpful adversary. You should be able to configure workloads that designate models, context, available tooling, skills, permissions, session length, inference level, acceptance criteria, and human-review stages. It would also allow for session switching, model switching, agent deliverable handoff to another agent, … not to mention, your VCS should know and respond appropriately if an agent ever pushes code. Don’t trust it by default.
These workloads should be version controllable, benchmarked, …
Anyway, a lot of that is speculative. Just where I’m at now, controlling context and skills manually, I’m already seeing much better results.
And no, I don’t have the AI do everything. I just find smarter ways to decompose “everything” into much smaller tasks that are easier to review and scrutinize.
But also, I push for local model usage in my organization. I don’t want my success to mean success for the AI companies. Fuck the AI companies.
I was forced to dogfood it. I found that for my specific needs, it made me super productive. I generally make Claude write Ansible jobs, I store all my secrets in a vault that it never gets access to.
It can do tremendous amounts of work at my command in relative safety as long as i provide it protected tools.
Now, that said, I burn a hell of a lot of tokens moving at that speed. When the ass falls out of the market, i’ll still have all the ancible stuff I can reuse.
Neither Claude code neither codex is actually vendor specific, they just don’t tell you that you can config other providers, including local
However opencode is pretty nice too, so if you like it, use that. I personally find that opencode with GLM 5.2 or Kimi K2.7 isn’t actually that great, it’ll hallucinate more than Claude code or Codex with their respective first party models. I think it’s the models themselves rather than opencode itself though, as when I use GPT for planning and hand it off to deepseek flash to do the actual work, it’s more or less fine.
I suspect behind the scenes, the first parties are sending your requests to multiple targets and sending you back quorum.
also the environmental damage, noise pollution,etc its causing that the dot com dint cause.
Except this time they’ll have a hard time blaming the devs and other workers.
I mean they’ll sneak around it, but maybe just maybe the blame will not be distributed? Lol who am I kidding.
The’re apex predators, they don’t blame anyway, just mass layoffs due to non-profitability ()
non-profitability(){ if CEO_makes_less_money_than_they_want(); return true; return true anyway because fuck the proliariat }if (bankrupt) find_new_ceo_job(parents_network);
Yeah, I’m glad you woke up there. They will always find a way to blame the developers.
they will just lay off more people to stave off the debt, and then to hold the industry to gether outsource, and hire only some senior devs while ignoring entry or juniour level people.
yep. these mba types have gutted half of id, and are changing id - ID - to unreal engine projects.
fucking hell
That’s sacrilege.
true. and you know who has really detailed art of sacrificial altars? id. get the OG’s back together!
Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about these people. Calls them “Business Idiots”
And we hope they go broke, dont pay their bills, cause a panic sell on AI services, which causes private equity to panic sell everything… which pops the bubble… and leads to the literal version of ‘its raining men’ on wall street as executives and profiteers have their horde of ill gotten gains evaporate in seconds.
… too much?
Damn, I was almost there. Keep going
I’m thinking the last scene in Fight Club. Yeah, that would be the one you’re looking for.
everyone will just end using deepseek, assuming they arnt charging.
These execs were the ones we were supposed to replace with AI.
- Build up reliance on AI, which looks really cheap
- You can now replace employees with AI so fire away!
- You are now completely dependent on AI and a handful of employees
- AI company sees they have you and start jacking up rates. If you could afford paying for people before then you have the $ to pay high rates.
- Company now wonders why costs are back to where they were before and the AI isn’t working out as expected.
It’s particularly funny because I’m pretty sure AI companies are still selling the service below cost to try to retain market share (and drive small competitors out of business). They just aren’t taking quite as big a loss on every token with the increased prices.
Pretty much the model for so many internet services or streaming services.
Yeah. It certainly pays off sometimes. Amazon did it. It just, y’know, also crashes and burns sometimes, and I’m not sanguine about the way this is shifting its investment money from venture capitalists to, y’know, passive index fund investors.
So, they’re earning money on token generation but not overall (including training)?
Openai had 2025 6billion in revenue and 20 billion costs on compute. So just to run the models to get 6billion they need to pay 20billion r&d and marketing etc get on top of that
I’m sure there’s a term for it but this is like when a company keeps securing funding from investors so they keep growing to try to outpace costs with the illusion that you’re profitable when in reality you’re not. Just like WeWork.
No, my understanding is that they’re bringing in revenue on token generation, but it’s exceeded by the costs of token generation (running data centers, so, electricity and cooling). They definitely want to make a profit on token generation, but they’re afraid that raising costs that high too quickly would drive customers to switch to other providers. So they’ve reduced the amount they’re subsidizing token costs, but not switched over to making a profit.
I can’t find a good citation for this, though, so it’s possible I’m mistaken. They also have huge costs associated with buying new GPUs and building new datacenters, so they’re operating at a massive loss either way, and it’s a little hard to find articles which tease apart the two aspects.
In any case, operating at a massive loss for the first few years is practically standard operating procedure in silicon valley at this point, and sometimes it eventually leads to a profitable, even wildly profitable, business (e.g. Amazon). But it does require a steady stream of investors and a steadily increasing market valuation. That’s…we’ll have to see what happens on that front.
Yeah it’s basically the enshitification model
With the quirk that the service was shit to begin with.
Maybe but it’s like crack for CEOs
It’s just newsworthy when it happens to companies.
- AI company hijacks your processes, trade secrets, and market to offer the same thing for cheaper than you can. Raises rates for competitors to cover its own token use and simultaneously drive the others out of business.
- They see people have gone to new companies thatre private unionized and value customers/employees/etc replacing them as they had done with their employees
- The company asks for them to come back to be laughed at as the people watch for them to slowly sink and be replaced with many better alternatives to take their place
- That is happening right now and we all can make it happen faster
Is this real life, or is it just fantasy?
It’s such a perfect grift
Have you heard about “Tokenmaxxing”?
Since many AI companies didn’t have a reasonable limit on the number of tokens for the amount of money you paid, companies started telling their employees to use as many tokens as possible. LLMs improve with more tokens (although there are diminishing returns).
So users tried to exploit the ‘lure offer’, and AI companies had to change the billing. It’s still below the real cost, but no longer this insanely expensive option.
Oh it was all over the tech news. Reddit was trying to guess the mystery company that got the massive bill.
The first hit was free.
Someone should remind those soggy, arrogant execs that down here in the developer trenches we survived web services, software as a service, outsourcing, and off-shoring. We’re still here after all that and we’ll still be here after AI.
Some of these people are so out of touch that they’d have to spend a decade in the trenches before they might even begin to get an inkling that something is up.
Case in point: Bezos went to space and wasn’t humbled by the overviewer effect because his ego is literally larger than the planet he lives on.
he literally opened a champagned bottle on a recovering alcoholic(shatner) he pretends to be human.
I swear, execs are some of the most gullible people on earth. I know some of them, and none of them are very bright, just very greedy.
They’re not selected for intelligence, but for sociopathy.
And nepotism.
And cronyism.
Coming from the upper-middle and upper class and having attended the right schools and become mates with the right people is very highly correlated with becoming a top level executive.
My lesson in this came really early in my career. One of our execs was selling vapourware. Just promising our product, that we hadn’t made yet, could do literally anything. Then he insisted we build it on this platform he must have had shares in the way he pushed it, only it was also vapourware and didn’t do half the things it said it did.
He found it utterly inconceivable that a company would sell a product that didn’t do what it said despite doing the exact same thing himself. He was completely delusional.
Man, if all it takes to be a CEO is to make stupid decisions, they should just hire me. I’m the master at that.
And if we had strong labour relationships, we’d make them fucking pay for having attempted to destroy our lives for profit.
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Cuts so clean too I use it for my johnsonville brats
Good for little vienna sausages too
Thought it was a tip clipper for my cigars
This one looks very, very unused…
Looks sad, doesn’t it?
I replaced all my software team with agents which can work 24h a day on the product and now none of the software works and I’m out $600000 waaaaaa
- Exec
The bigger problem might be what it will cost to get things back where they need to be. Probably a lot more than $600k. How many of the knowledgeable developers are willing to come back to clean up the mess? Any of them? And at what salary? Possibly a lot more than they were paid before they were kicked out. If you can’t rehire the original developers then you might find others with the required technical skills - but probably not with the domain knowledge. And now costs and times increase further.
Upvote for Samus. 👍
Better than Drake, fo sho
Actually they understand the code that they generate very well. But for existing codebases they make a big mess, because they don’t see the same abstractions humans would like to see.
600k is not a lot of money for a software team or for AI though.
You’d think the cocaine-snorting classes would understand that only the first hit’s free.
It’s funny because they do this to other people; they just never thought it’d happen to them. FAFO 🫡
Here is how it has gone down for a few companies I have visibillity on:
- Investors with enough stock to have influence demand the company use AI and cut staff
- remaining ataff struggles to fit AI into their now bloated workload
- quality slips and stumbles. a few employees are able to make the transition and cause huge AI bills while attempting to cover the workload
- everyone gets upset and nothing gets done well
It looks like investors who have also invested in AI are trying to push its use and it is stumbling all over the place. If a company cant adapt it is basically stripped for parts and sold off to companies that are handling it better.
SMH Did they really think all these investors just wanted to burn 9-figure sums without any serious return?
i am saying this for about a year now: Altman wants to rule the world.
Who of the billionaire (and now trillionaires, sigh) fucknuggets does not want to rule the world?
What else should one do if one already has everything and can’t buy anything else…
A trillionaire sounds surreal. Imagine having an entire country economy (or a few smaller ones) as your budget.
Indeed. When I was young, a millionaire seemed rich. As I grew older, billionaires seemed rich. And now we’re one step further. The average millionaire is further away from musk than the average Joe from said millionaire.
It’s absurd and shouldn’t be possible. Billionaires also shouldn’t. Why would anyone even need hundreds of millions. You can live wonderfully with very few millions or even less than one.
These days, in many cities, being a millionaire is a prerequisite for owning a house.
True. We (Germany) experience that too. In some places you wouldn’t get a 1 bedroom tiny apt for a sum you could buy a decent house elsewhere.
But I just wouldn’t want to live in such cities or neighborhoods. For what purpose? Why should anyone even know I’m loaded? In real life noone knows I am. If I’d raise a cup on the streets people would probably throw change into it 😁
Nobody has to know you own a house. Don’t gad about in a tuxedo wearing a monocle.
The purpose of living in a population-dense area is the culture and amenities, such as healthcare facilities and art communities.
Sure, but those you can have basically everywhere, don’t need to pick the rich neighborhoods or generally expensive cities.
I lived in our capital once. It had not one benefit I couldn’t find elsewhere. At least none I would’ve found. And we move every few years to somewhere else in krautland.
yup, i live in hcol, cant move out almost everyone has a job that earns them enough over the years to be a millionaire, mostly tech people. they arnt rich, i consider rich if you are making 1+mil/year
MILLIONiares have to at least invest thier time, or money, job to get much. its the 10s-100s millionaires that are born wealthy+ billionaires. most of them, surprise dont really have much of job/or direction, thats where all the influencers(youtube,etc) came from(most of them). even the humble ones can let money get to thier heads.
Aye. If not inherited then it’s basically a fuckton of coincidences paired with incredible luck. Which they, in hindsight, call “hard work”. Which basically was the same work everyone else did, but they weren’t lucky. See YouTube. Millions try hard (for nothing) and a handful make big bucks. So I’m told, never used YouTube, I hate google 😁
But also yes. I rarely met a millionaire that wasn’t some prick loving their own farts and bragging as hard as they could. I don’t know why everyone wants to be so much “better” than everyone else. If you’d see me, my cars or my houses, you’d never ever guess the numbers in my bankaccounts.
And think about one Trillionaire - Musk. All that money and he just trips on Ketamine and troll posts on Twitter. He’s doing nothing for society.
A regular human would be doing things just for fun like restoring an old building they liked, or saving some dying kid. Maybe going the Dolly Pardon route and giving books to kids.
Not Musk. He’s getting dick surgery to try and fix his dick from the last surgery and shitposting.
Who of the billionaire (and now trillionaires, sigh) fucknuggets does not want to rule the world?
But most of them have no plan beyond money, money, money.
This one has. He wants first to use his AI beasts to serve him make the rules for every*, and the rest of humanity to serve his bots, or something like that.
No plan we know of…not everyone is a 5yr old attention seeking whore like those everyone knows.
Sounds like conspiracy theories, but we know what she should know and are allowed to know.
CEO “What, you screwed me over, too? Me?!?”
“We’re supposed to fuck everyone over together!!”
I guess this proves that the execs are clueless about AI.
I guess this proves that the execs are clueless
about AI.Good note.
If you’ve ever spent 10 minutes using an AI agent, you’d know that there’s no way to predict how many tokens it’s going to use before you give it a task. It can be $0.20 worth sometimes or $20 other times. Or anything, really.
It’s only after watching it churn away for a few minutes that you can assume it’s gotten stuck and have the option of pulling the plug before the bill gets run up too high. But you need to watch it like a hawk and you need to be the one paying the bill otherwise you’re not going to care (e.g. workers using AI at work aren’t paying for it, their company is).
Taken in aggregate across a month, that unpredictability might average out or it might explode.
Bold of you to assume these old people even engage with the business they claim to own.
Computerphile demonstrated this using copilot(timestamp 20:50), where he created a screensaver sort of thing with just a few prompt back and forth, and that used up 2 million input tokens and 47k output token. That’s about $6 to $10 just to create that screensaver.
I’d rather buy a used php book from my local bookstore for $10
I asked the “free” copilot one time to make a 6x6 grid of letters where each row and each colum formed a word in English, and none of the words formed were re-used in the grid.
Copilot chewed on that for about 15 minute and finally gave up and told me I could solve it myself.
Easy way to spend a lot of tokens doing nothing.
i think the ones creating AI videos would be the highest costs.
“The man selling AI lied so that I would buy AI. :(”
