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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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CEOs learning
Bet
Cap?
No, ong
Don’t worry, when they hire back their humans they will be paying them 25%+ less after adjusting for inflation.
Costing more to do less was kind of written on the wall of capitalism’s halls the whole time, so are we really surprised?
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:
is dhat two things edited together?
You don’t remember this iconic scene?
this better not awaken anything in me
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.
They fired the wrong people. Go higher!
AND it’s shit
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 al loss, it’s fair to assume which if 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.
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 Anthropocene 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.
“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.
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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.
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.
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.
The AI companies bet on efficiencies occurring that have not materialized.
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.
NORMAN!
NEWMAN!
Turn off the AI, and rehire people, done.
- CEOs, guaranteed
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.
But they got to fire a lot of people which is their favorite thing to do.
Rehire and Replace the CEO with AI 😁
Too easy.
Yeah no shit. You get people dependent on your product, then Jack up the price
That was always the reason AI was put into everything.
Corpo fell for the oldest corpo trick.
And it’s from their own playbook
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.
“Why did you destroy your company to just inflate your next quarter bonus?”
“It is my nature”
“Lol.” Said the scorpion. “Lmao.”
How long until the AI gains sentience and joins the rest of us on the picket lines?
Or like in the movie “Her” where the AI’s got together and just left the planet lol
“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.
Fairly long. LLM’s are a dead end in the path toward AGI.
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…
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.
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.
