What is this, Claude for ants?
Alternate headline: C-Suite Execs Come To The Realization That AI Costs Money
And it’s going to cost a whole lot more once the investments dry up and they’re going to have to actually pay for all the data centers under construction.
Prolly not. When the bubble pops these data centers will be sold off for cents on the dollar and a bunch of the companies go bankrupt. There will be a glut of equipment, so prices will fall. People will buy up the scraps and provide compute services cheaper.
Maybe, but that’s temporary. The hardware has to be replaced after failures at minimum, if not sooner to upgrade. Yeah, there will be a period where the hardware may be cheaper, but the prices won’t stay at that floor forever (though they obviously also won’t be at the insane inflated prices of today).
Or one company will buy up all, using many, and ofc trash the others to keep their value high.
Unlikely. They said that during the bitcoin and blockchain bubble too, and that didn’t pop, it just deflated and everything got moved over to AI. AI is starting to deflate, but there will be a new bubble.
The number of AI datacenters that are actually datacenters and not just fields of gravel is low.
We could use a skate park
Nah, they’re getting suckers to build the data centers for them. US companies are getting tons of freebies/discounts/writeoffs from foreign countries to put these data centers in – like Canada just announced Anthropic’s going to have a massive data center in one of its tiny maritime provinces, likely enticed to the region via hand outs from the govt. They’re bending over to accept big tech dick even as the country clings its pearls over sovereignty and the US fucking them over.
Carney’s sorta like the old “lady in the streets, freak in the sheets” thing – he’s Anti-America/Pro-Canada sovereignty in his speeches/public appearances, but he’s slobbing all over Trump, Zuckerberg, Musk and Thiel’s dicks behind closed doors. He’s the ideal “girlfriend” for American imperialism. “Guk guk” yes sir, I can take ANOTHER datacenter!! “guk guk”
Canada just announced Anthropic’s going to have a massive data center in one of its tiny maritime provinces, likely enticed to the region via hand outs from the govt
Nova Scotia, but contrary to the assumption of government hand-outs, it is being hailed as the largest privately funded investment in the province’s history.
It can be the largest privately funded investment, and still get huge provincial incentives. Discounts on utilities / infrastructure improvements, regulatory short cuts / unilateral control of building code items, ignoring zoning concerns, tax free / tax write off options for decades to come.
But even more, Anthropic could throw a giant datacenter into a small community, and it may be the biggest investment in the area ever, but that still doesn’t mean it’s good for the locals. Especially since Anthropic is still an American company, and part of American imperial interests / the tech-fascist class. It’s like if a company out of nazi germany showed up and made a huge investment in building a nazi fortress holding nazi computers / tech, and providing nazi services to your country (mostly as a way to report it back to the motherland) – at a time when nazi germany is threatening to annex your country and funding disinformation campaigns to split your country apart with separatist bullshit. Cheering for that sort of thing is wrong on so many levels.
i saw a post that was something like “youd think the cocaine class would understand why the first hit is free”
Impossible. It would require C-suites:
- having a brain
- realize that they fucked up
- accept it without having a brain aneurysm
- making decisions to prevent that in the future
C-suite still on unlimited Claude plan
There’s no news here. After the initial tryout phase every business I’ve seen introduced cost tracking. Seems like Accenture is doing the same now.
It brings me joy to know that corporations are trusting other corporations to not rip each other off. Wage theft is more lucrative than whatever product or service being sold. As if AI companies exists to help anyone other than themselves . The only way this works is if the largest paying companies work out some kind of kick back, pyramid, price fixing scheme. I really appreciate Claude for how it’s assisted me in fixing things but I know that someday AI will exist solely for the rich.
Wait what? How? But wasn’t AI the thing to make business save tons of money by replacing workers with an almost free “artificial worker”??
Are you telling me that, as everyone and their mothers were saying, this was just a lie? Who could’ve thought?!
Two trillion valuation, where are you going?
If AI makes you twice as productive, and there’s fewer taxes on spending money for tokens than there is for spending money on salaries, the rational amount for a corporation to spend on it is more than a human’s entire salary, per person working with it.
Naively assuming corporations approximate rational actors, and AI does measurably improve productivity, this implies a gain of roughly 2% if these employees are earning federal minimum wage, or well below 1% if they earn average software developer wages.
Maybe their contract deliverables are poorly suited to this use case or something, but if they are given a fixed amount of money to produce some software item, then it makes sense to prioritize productivity per dollar.
How many companies allow their employees to also be employed by their competitors?
Your idea of an AI being like an employee only if there’s an AI company that will agree to an exclusive contract or at the very least respect data ownership and respect privacy. Is there an AI company that’s like that?
Data ownership and privacy absolutely, within an enterprise license. They very deliberately make you pay for that.
While it’s hard to prove they’re not just breaching contract and training on it anyway, I don’t think it makes sense to assume they are.
I have a friend that works there. They told me about this, and I was like “per day?”
I was not prepared to learn that the budget was less than a dollar per day. Might as well just stop using AI agents that that point.
Might as well just stop using AI agents that that point.
Wouldn’t that be terrible…
For Accenture? Yes. They are professional bullshit shovellers. AI was a godsend for them.
Might as well just stop using AI agents that that point.
I don’t work at Accenture, but at a group that had a similar journey from adoption to scaling back to only the included tokens and I would say that is precisely the idea: giving up on ‘Agentic’ use of AI, but still have enough for some acceleration.
From what I gather, in our group the findings were:
- Obviously, it was costing a heavy chunk of change and then even more expensive when rates were hiked
- There was no good way for them to even know what productive end the spend went toward, they know which employee expended a bunch of tokens, but no idea what they would have used it on
- Despite a crank of volume of stuff, they weren’t seeing any business value of the stuff. Requests still took about the same time to fulfill, etc
- The most eager AI producers got ahead of their skis, and their stuff was useless because nothing and no one could reliably fix/tweak it after a certain point.
- All the scary ‘AI will ruin IT security’ that the AI companies themselves have been expressing likely didn’t help either.
- Perhaps the most uncomfartable of all, they found out that however good or bad an AI project turns out to be, management can’t tell the diference until it is too late. Being able to ‘manage’ the content has always been flawed, but the AI dials it up to eleven by ‘looking’ just right as a demo to someone that understands neither the customer nor the process of creating the work, but blows up in their faces in delivery. Kind of like how so many technology article writers breathlessly talked about the photoshop clone, despite many of them never having touched the relevant software, then heavy users reporting that it is actually shit, but the people writing about it have no context to know, but felt compelled to talk about it anyway. Those are management in the fields using AI.
Ooh, it’s the : build a prototype story!
Dev, ok here’s the 2 week built prototype, slammed together wildly fast, no architecture, no seatbelts. Don’t push it in a demo.
Manager: this Looks like a finalized project! Except a) and b), fix that, you got a day.
Dev: we should productize it, to make it a solid product, it takes 3 months, then I can add a and b without it starting to smoke when used.
Manager: No, I already shipped it.
Oh wow, in your hypothetical, the DevOps manager is an incompetent moron. AI Agents will never recover from this one.
Yeah it’s basically useless for agentic work. Especially with frontier models.
Nevrr forget, Accenture used to be Arthur Anderson, of Enron infamy. They deserve any financial ruin they get, IMO.
Sheeit thanks for the reminder (and trip down memory lane)
Fuck AA
Why even bother at all? What can you do with those tokens? Ask for the weather twice?
“You must use AI!”
“No, no, no, no….not like that!”
Just trying to shoehorn profit into a system that was never going to deliver one in the first place.
I didn’t realize the business plans were token metered differently from the Pro plan I’ve been on for a while. $20/month, and it has session/weekly limits, but I rarely hit them, and I use it, a lot.
I do wonder if this will encourage businesses to branch out into running local models for simpler tasks.
You can get plans as a business too, but then it’s per user, so if your plan has $200 worth of “usage” per user and one uses $0, that does not mean another can use $400 and you still have to pay for the non-user’s $200, or you can use API pricing to pay for exactly what your users use, which for OpenAI and Anthropic is egregious. You get like 10x more per dollar with the Chinese models. And some of those providers ALSO have plans that make it much cheaper.
In my company some of the top users spend over $3000/m. $29 is maybe 30 mins - 1 hour continuous running for a *medium" sized model like Sonnet. Not sure about cheaper models.
Interesting. Yeah, me and my coworkers spend about $1000 per month—so far. The bill keeps going up. One AI workshop thing they made us do spent $100 just in 1 session.
That’s basically saying that they shouldn’t use Claude at all.
Good.
I’m willing to bet that only a fraction of that spend was work task related.
If my productivity (and therefore my job) were measured not by results but by amount of tokens I use, you can bet I’m gonna burn tokens for absolutely everything during my work shift. Even if it’s just asking the chatbot what time is it every second.
Exactly.
Silly Accenture, that’s not the way to tokenmaxx.
Well duh? I doubt $29 get you anywhere at the moment and that nonsense is only going to get more expensive.
