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.
on the grift since its basically a rehashed version of crypto.
Someone else can output more slop than us!
And faster slop! Turbo slop even
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.
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.
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
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.
It’s funny because they do this to other people; they just never thought it’d happen to them. FAFO 🫡
alexa play despacito
Living room lights off
I thought billionaires liked giving money to their billionaire friends? What’s the issue?
/s
Sigh, im sure ceos are sharing these details with a propagandist.
Lol, lmao even
@FoxtrotDeltaTango’s post glosses over something: the token bill is only 60% of the real cost. Infrastructure to handle latency (caching, batching), human review loops for quality, and retraining pipelines when models drift add another 40-50%. A team that thought they’d replace two engineers with an API often ends up hiring a prompt engineer + ML ops person instead. The margin math gets much uglier when you add those in. Broke down the full cost-of-ownership (tokens + ops + people) here https://cxgo.ai/l/IjOzask — helps separate real savings from accounting fiction.
The hugest bills so far
There’s been so much [email protected] content these days
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.
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.
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 think the ones creating AI videos would be the highest costs.
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.
As we’ve seen with Donald Trump and George W. Bush, if you’re wealthy enough or in an aristocratic social group, you fail upwards.
And if you always fail upwards, it’s very easy to not gain the skills to succeed.
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.
They’re not selected for intelligence, but for sociopathy.
