Vibe management
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/26/ai-cost-human-workers Uber's chief technology officer already blew through his full 2026 AI budget due to token costs, according to The Information.
Lol. Lmao even
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Those same managers eleven seconds later when they get an ad for a new startup making the same obviously empty promises as the last startup:
They love those the most because they integrate them and then use it to justify a promotion or move so they can get out of Dodge before the inevitable explosion happens on the next guys watch. The next guy blames the previous guy and then repeats the process.
this better not awaken anything in me
is dhat two things edited together?
You don't remember this iconic scene?
Yeah no shit. You get people dependent on your product, then Jack up the price
Corpo fell for the oldest corpo trick.
"Why did you destroy your company to just inflate your next quarter bonus?"
"It is my nature"
“Lol.” Said the scorpion. “Lmao.”
it in ymmature
It’s funny too because at our company people keep repeatedly asking “what are you gonna do when they predictably jack up the rates?”
And every time “don’t worry about that right now. We’re keeping a close eye on it. “
Uh huh.
And it's from their own playbook
That was always the reason AI was put into everything.
This feels predictable. AI is one of, if not the most invested in yet unprofitable industries in the history of humanity.
The last few years have been the beta and the tech demo. But that is not paying for itself yet. US companies are competing with (and falling behind) Chinese state-sponsored companies. OpenAI in particular, a company whose revenue doesn't even cover half of their operating costs, has extended themselves into owing more than a TRILLION dollars to the entirety of big tech who are building chips and data centers on these IOUs, and will need to be paid sooner or later. The bills will come due.
Other corporations are already paying massive bills for licensing, tokens, training, and infrastructure changes to accommodate this shift to AI while laying off massove chunks of skilled workers on the idea that AI is cheap and will get cheaper over time. But that is simply not the case. This is the "first taste is free" part of this deal. Once they have companies deeply invested in AI and have destroyed the fabric of the labor economy in favor of it, that price is going to skyrocket because OF COURSE IT WILL.
Maybe at some point this will all level out. AI bubble will pop. Prices will sky rocket. Companies will try to backpedal, which will be slow and difficult, they'll end up paying AI companies huge sums while they work to decouple themselves after just forming the bond, they'll also end up paying stupid money to professionals who are suddenly in high demand, and many companies won't survive the chaos. But the ones that do will settle into a new equilibrium.
AI will eventually get cheaper (but probably never this cheap again, at least not in the near future), and it will probably be a permanent fixture in our lives and work to some degree. But it's usefulness and cost effectiveness will be limited in scope, with specialized purposes. It will not ultimately be the great labor replacement companies think/thought it would be, even as stupid and short sighted as that desire is in the first place (if 30% of the global work force is unemployed, how do you think that will effect your revenue, morons!?). But that also is assuming that the coming chaos doesn't turn out so bad that AI is permanently legislated into oblivion after the chaos it's about to cause.
I think there are some Dutch tulip farmers who would like a word with you
Not quite the same. The tulip industry was making money hand over foot. It was the speculators that ended up being shafted. Tulip mania was more comparable to the beanie babies craze, or even NFTs. AI companies, on the whole, are making no profit at all.
It makes more sense if you position Ai companies as the speculators and chip makers as the actual tulip producers.
It would if all the the chip makers weren't making chips on credit from a broke ass industry. Though they'll likely get paid with a bailout including interest, so... they will probably still make out alright regardless
Didn't that last a month (shorter by a factor of 50 so far)?
https://youtu.be/xk_BsNZ2H8Q
hey you leave us out of this!
that was a long time ago, and now approx a 3rd of flowers worldwide come through here in one of the top ten largest open buildings in the world (still) and we invented the Dutch auction..
so suck it
Good stuff. One small note: I'm not sure how useful the distinction of "Chinese state-sponsored companies" is in recent history when comparing to the US, let alone now. The US has retooled much of federal research engine toward promoting US AI. Even fired the NSB (among many other long standing, expert driven advisory boards) to replace it with a bunch of tech baron stooges. States are offering unprecedented payouts to data centers. The AI hyperscalers already have a bailout all but guaranteed when the bubble pops. It's all state-sponsored, just with extra steps.
The Chinese AI companies being state sponsored just means that they can go longer and throw more money at development without turning profit than other investor driven companies.
The US is certainly throwing a bloated amount of money at AI too. And a much as it infuriates me, they'll almost certainly absorb the bubble pop with tax another bailout for criminal corporate behavior. But it's not quite been a direct pipeline of openly flowing cash, just yet. They're still paying for discrete contracts which have to be approved in the budget. They've been massive contracts, but they're still making these companies compete e each other for them too. Like with the recent flip from DOJ contracts with Anthropic to OpenAI, for example.
In China, they're buying in supporting the entire industry. They're building infrastructure for AI data centers, giving them grants and subsidies, have direct ownership in the companies, and had made specific carve outs in their laws to give AI development deregulated room to do what it needs. I'm not in favor of either approach. Just pointing out that China's approach does seem to have been an advantage in the AI race, or at least was enough of one that they made up a ton of ground, and maybe passed their US counterparts.
They fired the wrong people. Go higher!
I like how they say “now” like the billionaires won’t keep jacking the fees up.
It’s almost like it was an obvious and stupid pile of lies and shit the entire time. If only literally everyone with a brain had been constantly pointing that out literally the entire time, then we could have done better, right?
Maybe... just maybe... the ones at the top with all the money should not be the ones with the least knowledge and the worst skillsets.
I remember companies doing this with cloud services.
CEO: Get rid of everything on-prem, the cloud sales person said cloud is cheaper!
First year cloud coats are more than 3 year depreciation of on-prem equipment
CEO: Huh...welp it's impossible for me to be wrong, so we're just going to say it was cheaper.
Does AI cost more than humans primarily because of greed (i.e the AI companies demand a high profit margin now) or because of energy costs (i.e AI is so wasteful with energy, so polluting, that it costs more than human workers)
Given the ai companies are running at a loss, it’s fair to assume which of these is likely
It's both.
Precisely. The question then is, which one is the main driver? I think it does fall on energy cost/the ridiculous scale of infrastructure they've decided is required to sustain AI companies.
Conclusion (for a luddite) is that One could cripple AI companies if simply prevented them from finishing their data centre every time. Goodness, it's like a RTS strategy game where you have to build a monument to win the game.
If the other one is the main driver of this, purely an inflated profit margin, it indicates that AI is already collapsing and they're desperately trying to scrape more venture capital off the back of the businesses that haven't clued-in the how ineffective AI usually is.
This is a common myth, inference is not typically run at a loss, despite claims. It’s only a loss if you include staff and ongoing training costs. They could lock in their models now and be profitable if they wanted to.
Edit: I see the comment above has changed (or I misread initially) to say the companies are running at a loss rather than inference running at a loss. Yes, that’s extremely true. Now my comment doesn’t make any sense and is irrelevant so feel free to ignore my pedantry.
Yes, and let’s also not count all the investments in infrastructure because you know… like training and staff it’s not a real cost that’s essential to the business.
Anyways, you wouldn’t happened to have heard that from Anthropic or OpenAI?
Somehow we don’t have any actual indisputable numbers (I wonder why) but it is actually quite controversial and some of those who have done deep research on the subject are saying inference IS run at a loss and it might not get profitable ever.
https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e7d5?syn-25a6b1a6=1
We do have numbers from comparably sized Chinese models.
Yes, every AI company is bleeding money, they’re not healthy in any way. But inference by itself is profitable, based on everything that we know.
Inference + amortizing the training costs is NOT profitable, which is what most people are talking about.
This is easily fixed by not releasing a slightly different version every month.
Those people disagree with me and what I want are therefore wrong
"Inference is not typically run at a loss"
Bro thats called cherry picking
Businesses work on cash in cash out
Right now AI companies make way less cash than they spend overall when you dont include investments
Furthermore, most people use a free version of AI and would stop using it if it cost them anything
Explain how to pivot to profit when the investments dry up, were all waiting
I’m not saying they’re healthy, I’m saying that inference is the one profitable part of their business.
They’re all going to die because training costs dwarf the inference, and training doesn’t generate ANY revenue.
Do rhetorical questions add anything of value, beyond a gotcha moment, to the conversation?
You know that wouldn't happen. Which AI company wants to be the one that says, "we're happy with where the model is at right now" and stops throwing cash into the boiler of the investor hype train and let their competitors exceed them in real or imagined metrics? Clearly firms like Anthropic have to rely on circus marketing tricks like "This model is too dangerous for the general public to see! Ooooh scary! Coming Soon!", and they can't do that without continuous training.
For you and I, the offline models aren't too bad for getting little side projects started, but for major AI firms, the ongoing training cost for the next model and the one after that has become ingrained into the operating model.
I’m aware! I’m not saying they are healthy in any way. I’m just correcting that specific misinformation, because truth is important.
These companies are fucked if they keep operating the way they currently are, and I strongly suspect it’s all going to pop like the dotcom bubble, but worse.
The AI companies bet on efficiencies occurring that have not materialized.
Costs. AI companies have been running at a big loss using investment money trying to scale quickly and conquer the market. That always comes at an end and something closer to the real costs has to be paid.
Here's a third reason AI costs more than humans: for each mistake that AI makes they'll have to hire several people to fix them. Eventually, they'll just have to hire people to watch the AI and try to prevent the mistakes before they happen.
It will be like a much more complicated version of having to babysit your Roomba. Sometimes the Roomba just gets stuck and sometimes the Roomba spreads fecal matter all over the entire house.
By the way, the AI is above us in the hierarchy. So we can just go ahead and have fun with that too.
They just say a number. If nobody pays, it's too high. If everyone pays, it's too low. Aim is for i) highest market share, ii) max ARR, and iii) highest margin.
They're selling the idea that a machine costs less than a human. They're Walmart, humans are mom-and-pop shops. Once the competitors are gone, they charge whatever they want (you pay or you close out). Fuck them.
These companies have been tokenmaxxing i.e. judging employee performance based on how many tokens they use, so employees are incentivized to use up as many tokens as possible, even if it doesn't actually improve productivity (and can actually result in the opposite).
Which happens often when you focus too hard on kpis.
My favourite quote about analytics:
"A measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure."
The fact that piece of algorithm is getting paid more than a human being, who eat, live, love, is outrageous. Humans are the worst.
Just to twist the knife, the algorithm was likely trained on the replaced workers behaviours
And likely does the job worse.
I know I do! Last week I tried to overthrow a country with no oil! Egg on my face I tell ya.
Executives are the worst. There are many, many great people in the world, but for some fucking stupid reason we let executives and politicians run roughshod over everyone and everything...
I for one think it’s pretty bad ass that humans are able to build sophisticated enough tools to replace “brain” jobs. Not sure how AI is a humanity bad moment unless you are someone with a make-believe job being replaced by AI
I'm sure this comment will go down well with Lemmy.
lol it’s crazy how similar this place is to Reddit
It's not about the money, it never was. If it were a matter of costs, subcontractors would have never existed.
They just have wet dreams of businesses that run without having to rely on humans. That's all.
Humans ask for raises, get sick, want vacations or just want to get the fuck out of there and do something else than working. That's communism, in their book: You all not being a bunch of docile slaves.
I don't know who is gonna end up buying the products they sell, anyway...
We've seen that trend for decades already. Neo-liberalism was all about trickling up wealth created by work.
But you see that in all advanced economies: commoners budget are tighter and tighter as cost of life increase faster than wages. That's the expected outcome of neo-liberalism.
Now politicians pretend the housing crisis is an anomaly and car makers wonder why sales are slowing down. AI is bad, but it only accelerates and amplifies what was already happening.
Add to that the fact that hiring and training a new employee usually costs between 5-10 times more than retaining an employee (from hire to fully trained)
Yet they never seem to act like that. They punish you for loyalty.
Not just hiring and training! You also have to start paying state unemployment tax on that new hire. In Florida the first $7,000 is taxed on each new employee. Then there's loss of efficiency, and related items. On top of that, if your turnover is high, your payroll company will up your rates because they're working harder and you're a PITA employer. I've sat meetings where we decided exactly that.
Bet
Cap?
No, ong
But they got to fire a lot of people which is their favorite thing to do.
The fact that it is just a cost comparison, however much humans might still be winning it roght now, is the fundamental problem.
Costing more to do less was kind of written on the wall of capitalism’s halls the whole time, so are we really surprised?
AND it's shit
You would THINK that of all people on the planet, CEOs should understand the enshittification strategy.
...Or the board of directors, or the major investors, etc.
If you outsource the entire value chain of your $million/billion business to the $trillions guys, how do you think that will go? What would YOU do in their place knowing you have all the leverage and none of the risk (re: the smaller companies being bled dry and left to rot)?
It's funny to see it happen to other predatory tech companies like uber though.
"Of course it can't happen to me! It only happens to my idiot users, and I am not an idiot!" [expense blows out of control] "We're going to have to let go more people for budget reasons. You see people use tokens, and tokens are expensive! We'll have less people who will use more AI to replace them, I was told the last version improves further productivity!"
Pretty sure the point was to drive down the price of labour?
Not the only point. No one to complain or so you when you say to do something immoral ,unethical, illegal, hateful, or just plain old evil.
Not having to worry about hire/fire cycles, can just turn off and on as needed. Can make AI work 24 hours a day everyday assuming you have lobbied to get unfair access/cost to/on the energy
And you can have it tell you anything you want it to when you have board meeting
I'm not sure how you don't think that all translates into labour value. These are expenses and the fake narrative that this technology is even capable of labour is itself oriented around making human labour less valuable. It's always been about reaping even more from the only resource they have difficulty owning completely.
Rule: if something looks too good to be true, then without any further evidence, it's likely too good to be true.
Don't worry, when they hire back their humans they will be paying them 25%+ less after adjusting for inflation.
This is what happens when you reward people based on token usage. People no joke can just put in before every PR "review every detail, be very thorough, make sure it fits into everything, check for every possible undefined behavior etc." while giving the model a massive doc with list of all files in the project.
Not even sure if they check the prompts because "review formatting of the entire codebase" is also super heavy in a large repo but if prompts get checked it's an obvious token sink.
The model will just ransack the whole project every time through the whole stack when you could enforce a contract with a couple of tests with strict input validation.
Uber has the dumbest AI policy in the industry.
Hahahahaha their greed knows no bounds and they couldn't help but reach and reach and reach further in until they ruined the one actual selling point they had of AI "replace the slaves cheaper!!" They cried waving their arms around "This is the new thing!!" "You won't have to pay people anymore! Think of the profits!!"
And then they went and fucked it up because of how obscenely and unapologetically greedy they are in every single thing that they do. Hahahahahaha oh god, the irony is almost tangible enough you could put it on a plate and eat it.
Good for us, the actual workers of the world. But wow, they are so greedy they couldn't even replace us all with robots effectively because they just want more and more and more and more and more and...
Edit: actually its a more than that. See the below comment.
Most LLM setups were running at about a 95% loss. That's unprecedentedly humongous.
Subscriptions were going to need to go up 20-fold just to break even.
Rehire and Replace the CEO with AI 😁
Too easy.
They don't care, they don't want to be in the writing software business or in the human resources business. Cloud is more expensive but they didn't care because they didn't want to be in the data center business.
Perhaps it is my bias as someone who studied AI at the university, but I never believe it when someone claims to loose job due to AI. AI never fired you, AI never managed to replace you. Your manager is just bad at making business decisions, as most managers are nowadays. Current rich world of big successful companies was built on competent managers, those people are now either dead or too old to work and their replacements will drive us back to the medieval times while pretending they know best.
There are good, valid, profitable uses for AI. They are not pushed by big companies, rather utilized by small actors who fly under radar.
If your new work colleague Gerald introduces himself by knocking you over the head with a frozen chicken, it's as correct to say "ow, I've been hit with a chicken!" as it is to say "ow, I've been hit by Gerald!"
If your boss says "I've hired this guy Gerald to do your job instead of you because I can pay him in frozen chickens, you're fired!" you can say "damn, I've lost my job due to Gerald!" just as much as you can say "damn, I've been fired by my boss!"
So, losing your job because your management has made the shitty decision to use AI instead of employing you can be accurately described as "losing your job due to AI."
Anyway, fuck the boss and fuck Gerald.
So few people seem to have an innate understanding that two things can suck simultaneously
That sounds just like an excuse to hate one more person...
You're smart. The market needs a major correction and everyone knows its coming. But now with the advent of AI, you can fire people and pretend it's a good thing and keep your stock price high!
The tech sector had been over hiring for a decade. The cutbacks were inevitable in any course. Whats funny about it is that by using AI as a standover they are enshittifying their product faster and costing themselves more in the process than if they had just started firing people.
Nonpaywalled version of that article: https://archive.is/HolQ7
"Overhiring" has the same ethos as "overvalued" - completely made up and dependent on random people's opinions.
There is a degree of subjectivity to it, but at some point you pass a threshold where it should become obvious to most people. When I was in college, a CS degree was the one degree everyone knew would land you a well paying job right from graduation. It had been like that before I got there, and it was like that after I left. That isn't the case anymore, and you can't blame it all on AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tLEszJs7hc
This is a good video that shows how the industry has been changing.
I think the biggest piece of evidence that AI isn’t actually causing the layoffs is that it doesn't actually fucking work and everyone knows it.
Oh boy, wait till he learns about Chinese models. American AI companies and their investors are in deep trouble 🥳
AI + UBI
A great pairing.
Who doesn't like a great pair?
Funny thing is that replacing the workforce is pretty much like vibe coding, until everything goes wrong.
If you fire a worker every they know that you don't know is gone then as you replace workforce with so you'll eventually lose more and more critical knowledge.
Also I guess you'll have to have a group of people to review the mistakes it made and feed in the data of broken industrial equipment that the ai broke
But... it'll NEVER cost less!
This is such a weird take because we are comparing apple and oranges, again. It's like saying a ruler is more precise than using your own thumbs. Sure, that's technically correct, but you still need people to use that ruler to measure stuff.
We ALWAYS use better tools. Even in mass production we automatize the heck out of everything... and yet you still need staff to maintain it, design improvements, etc.
So... I don't get this kind of comparisons.
How long until the AI gains sentience and joins the rest of us on the picket lines?
Fairly long. LLM's are a dead end in the path toward AGI.
"AI" currently abused for LLM. That one won't gain any sentience.
AI will never gain sentience, not with current tech and not until we figure out how consciousness actually works.
Eh...
With current tech? No. LLMs are kind of a dead end and will probably never become truly sentient. The LLM will probably end up being just part of a true AGI someday in the future -- the speech center of the AI's brain. Right now, we're chatting with the speech center only, without the rest of the brain, which is why it sucks.
But I don't think figuring out how consciousness actually works is a prerequisite. As we move beyond LLMs and make different permutations of more complex systems, I expect consciousness will spontaneously develop in one, taking us by surprise. Maybe, if we're lucky, seeing that happen will give us new insights into how consciousness works. (Though given how a lot of AI development is already a 'black box', I'm doubting it.) But I really do think we'll accidentally make something with consciousness before we ever understand how consciousness works. Heck, an advanced enough AI might be the first one that actually cracks the consciousness code and is able to describe how it works.
(And, at any rate, I think 'consciousness' is more of a philosophical topic than a scientific one. Is it even possible to develop a scientific 'consciousness test' that could reliably differentiate between a truly conscious being and one that's only pretending to be conscious?)
When the times comes how do you know that the ai is consciousness and not just the perfect mimic?
How do you know that I have consciousness, and I'm not just a perfect mimic?
It really is more of a philosophical problem than a technological/scientific one.
Or like in the movie "Her" where the AI's got together and just left the planet lol
They'll ask AI what propaganda to tweet when to sow disunion amongst the picketers
Gee, would've been a shame if those workers decide to go on strike. Seriously!
Turn off the AI, and rehire people, done.
It's actually crazy how incredibly wrong that is.
What is the CEOs job? To make profit? To select winning products? To chart a long term course?
Nope.
Nope Nope Nope.
Thier job is to increase the value of their outstanding stock. That's it.
Now, given the fact that the stock market is a fucking casino... sure. Making profit is A way to TRY and increase your stock price. Making wise product decisions is A way to do that. This is a Warren Buffet type of CEO.
You also need to "read the room" (the room being investors) understand what they want to hear, and start saying it. No matter how stupid it is. No matter if you know full well it's stupid.
You're bringing an incredible product to market, but the markets are demanding headcount reductions? You start firing people that you desperately need to keep. You're an office supply company and the market is rewarding IT investment? You hire 100 devs to build an app that a team of 5 people could have made and nobody will ever use anyways. It's like that meme of the dude on the assembly line saying "guess we doing X now".
If the whims of investors are convinced using AI is what is valuable, they will spend more on AI than humans for as long as it's the case that the market will reward them for doing so... despite it being objectively inefficient.
You gotta remember that company stock is like a currency they can print at will. As nice as it is to have a profitable business... it's even nicer to have the luxury of being able to just print money.
NORMAN!
NEWMAN!
Lol ffs ...
"Greedy pos CEO of ShitCo. thinks they're the only greedy pos CEO. Greedy pos CEO of AIslopCo. drains their accounts."