Nearly one-third of corporate executives surveyed did not understand how their operating costs relate to AI deployment.
  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    50 minutes
    1. Build up reliance on AI, which looks really cheap
    2. You can now replace employees with AI so fire away!
    3. You are now completely dependent on AI and a handful of employees
    4. 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.
    5. Company now wonders why costs are back to where they were before and the AI isn’t working out as expected.
    • monotremata@lemmy.caEnglish
      30 minutes

      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.

  • minorkeys@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    40 minutes

    And if we had strong labour relationships, we’d make them fucking pay for having attempted to destroy our lives for profit.

  • SalmonTractor@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    9 minutes

    You’d think they would have learned that from the cloud or any SaaS provider multiple times over already.

  • 深夜量化室@lemmy.1095.meEnglish
    2 hours

    @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.

  • Zahille7@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21 minutes

    I thought billionaires liked giving money to their billionaire friends? What’s the issue?

    /s

  • Naich@piefed.worldEnglish
    3 hours

    Just wait until all the technical debt has to be paid as well.

    • bagsy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 hour

      I already see lots of boutique consultancies popping up specifically saying they will fix tour slop code bases. Developers and doctors will never run out of work.

        • jaybone@lemmy.zipEnglish
          15 minutes

          They will have to trash a bunch of it and rewrite entire modules and components from scratch.

          I’ve seen as AI keeps iterating over enhancements and bug fixes, the spaghetti code gets worse and worse over time. At some point only the AI understands its own code, as it is too much garbled nonsense for a human to trace through. Eventually that becomes too much garbage for the ai to trace through. And then that’s where you end up.

          The idea that this can be some kind of non-deterministic abstraction layer between pseudo code and actual code is absurd.

    • docus@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2 hours

      I know what you mean, but the tech debt problem will never get resolved.

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.worldEnglish
      49 minutes

      And people realize they don’t understand the output anymore or the architecture. AI isn’t creating anything new either.

  • TachyonTele_Esq@piefed.socialEnglish
    4 hours

    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

    • Triumph@fedia.io
      3 hours

      This is what happens when the people in charge of everything are entirely separated from reality.

      • jtrek@startrek.websiteEnglish
        12 minutes

        Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about these people. Calls them “Business Idiots”

      • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
        3 hours

        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.

        • partofthevoice@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2 hours

          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.

          • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
            48 minutes

            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.

          • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
            1 hour

            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.

            • partofthevoice@lemmy.zipEnglish
              55 minutes

              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 like change-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.

              • boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                32 minutes

                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.

          • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
            2 hours

            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.

            • a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2 hours

              This isn’t Justin 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.

  • NM_Gringo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4 hours

    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.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      44 minutes

      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.

  • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.orgEnglish
    4 hours

    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.

    • Dyskolos@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4 hours

      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…

      • aim4harmony@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3 hours

        A trillionaire sounds surreal. Imagine having an entire country economy (or a few smaller ones) as your budget.

        • Dyskolos@lemmy.zipEnglish
          3 hours

          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.

          • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3 hours

            These days, in many cities, being a millionaire is a prerequisite for owning a house.

            • Dyskolos@lemmy.zipEnglish
              3 hours

              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 😁

              • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3 hours

                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.

                • Dyskolos@lemmy.zipEnglish
                  3 hours

                  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.

        • KingPorkChop@lemmy.caEnglish
          2 hours

          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.

      • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.orgEnglish
        3 hours

        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.

        • Dyskolos@lemmy.zipEnglish
          3 hours

          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.