- 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.
Pretty much the model for so many internet services or streaming services.
Yeah. It certainly pays off sometimes. Amazon did it. It just, y’know, also crashes and burns sometimes, and I’m not sanguine about the way this is shifting its investment money from venture capitalists to, y’know, passive index fund investors.
Yeah it’s basically the enshitification model
With the quirk that the service was shit to begin with.
Maybe but it’s like crack for CEOs
It’s just newsworthy when it happens to companies.
- AI company hijacks your processes, trade secrets, and market to offer the same thing for cheaper than you can. Raises rates for competitors to cover its own token use and simultaneously drive the others out of business.
It’s such a perfect grift
- They see people have gone to new companies thatre private unionized and value customers/employees/etc replacing them as they had done with their employees
- The company asks for them to come back to be laughed at as the people watch for them to slowly sink and be replaced with many better alternatives to take their place
- That is happening right now and we all can make it happen faster
Have you heard about “Tokenmaxxing”?
Since many AI companies didn’t have a reasonable limit on the number of tokens for the amount of money you paid, companies started telling their employees to use as many tokens as possible. LLMs improve with more tokens (although there are diminishing returns).
So users tried to exploit the ‘lure offer’, and AI companies had to change the billing. It’s still below the real cost, but no longer this insanely expensive option.
Oh it was all over the tech news. Reddit was trying to guess the mystery company that got the massive bill.
The first hit was free.
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.
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.
My lesson in this came really early in my career. One of our execs was selling vapourware. Just promising our product, that we hadn’t made yet, could do literally anything. Then he insisted we build it on this platform he must have had shares in the way he pushed it, only it was also vapourware and didn’t do half the things it said it did.
He found it utterly inconceivable that a company would sell a product that didn’t do what it said despite doing the exact same thing himself. He was completely delusional.
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.
And if we had strong labour relationships, we’d make them fucking pay for having attempted to destroy our lives for profit.
I replaced all my software team with agents which can work 24h a day on the product and now none of the software works and I’m out $600000 waaaaaa
- Exec
The bigger problem might be what it will cost to get things back where they need to be. Probably a lot more than $600k. How many of the knowledgeable developers are willing to come back to clean up the mess? Any of them? And at what salary? Possibly a lot more than they were paid before they were kicked out. If you can’t rehire the original developers then you might find others with the required technical skills - but probably not with the domain knowledge. And now costs and times increase further.
Upvote for Samus. 👍
Better than Drake, fo sho
Actually they understand the code that they generate very well. But for existing codebases they make a big mess, because they don’t see the same abstractions humans would like to see.
It’s funny because they do this to other people; they just never thought it’d happen to them. FAFO 🫡
You’d think the cocaine-snorting classes would understand that only the first hit’s free.
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.
Here is how it has gone down for a few companies I have visibillity on:
- Investors with enough stock to have influence demand the company use AI and cut staff
- remaining ataff struggles to fit AI into their now bloated workload
- quality slips and stumbles. a few employees are able to make the transition and cause huge AI bills while attempting to cover the workload
- everyone gets upset and nothing gets done well
It looks like investors who have also invested in AI are trying to push its use and it is stumbling all over the place. If a company cant adapt it is basically stripped for parts and sold off to companies that are handling it better.
CEO “What, you screwed me over, too? Me?!?”
“We’re supposed to fuck everyone over together!!”
deleted by creator
I will never understand how is it that such idiots repeatedly make it to the top.
it’s all about the networking at that level. Doesn’t matter how much of a blithering idiot you are so long as you know a guy who knows a guy to get you in.
It’s partly the fact that hundreds of millions of people the world over, possibly several billion people, believe that they only got there because they were competent and do nothing to stop them.
Here’s a real a cost saving prompt:
“Translate the contents of every single document in our databases into as many languages (including dead and constructed fictional languages) as possible.”
Now you can fire the one Hispanic guy you hired because you assumed he could speak Hindi.
I look at AI usage at work as basically taking on a bad but salvageable employee. For every use case, it needs a manager overseeing all their work and adapting to their strengths and weaknesses while also considering cost. It’s a deployment problem created by over promising.
We gave it a simple task of scan the internet for industry news, put results in a table formatted like x. It goes around 3-4 days before messing up. We have concluded that if it was an actual employee it would have either been sacked or put on performance review.
Yes, when employed properly it can be a helpful tool. But when it’s given all the house keys and unlimited leeway, it will burn down your house (and your budget) because it cannot make reasonable choices. It’s not sentient (yet), despite all the promises from AI evangelists.
It’s quite far from sentience, let alone sapience.
