Hmmm. It’s kind of weird that my work pays for every employee for a pro plan at $200/month for 10k credits. I use about 20k credits because I use it for my side projects and work all the time. That only costs the consumer about $600 total (with the $200). I wonder what discount they give the company employees, but also it’s kinda crazy with “how much AI costs” and how much they’re eating to get us hooked. Our company is hooked right now. They’re hoping they can keep this up until people forget how to program and not prompt maybe?
But right now I’m using it as a tool that I’m learning and not replacing my normal flow.
It would be great to not be this expensive.
At some point they will have to monetize and that’s going to be a bad day for everyone.
Imagine having halved your workforce, suddenly you have to pay for compute at what it actually costs.
If they don’t find a new thing to sell to their shareholders they will have to monetize.
And good luck rebuilding all the institutional knowledge that you threw away by firing half your staff, while your former employees are getting rounded up into homeless work camps…
Well, the key word is “right now”. AI companies are gambling that their runway is long enough to reach monetization.
Womp womp
This sounds like the VC money is running out and the subsidies will soon end.
Don’t you worry, the AI companies already gobbled up the entire Internets worth of data, every conversation they could find on their social media networks to train their machine.
And just like Uber, you’ll now have to pay a premium to use their service when it finally works. Don’t worry they’ll still give you the stupid auto complete chat bot and tell you that’s the real AI, The real AI works for the corporate captured government and is figuring out how to get rid of you. Their goal is not enlightenment of the human race, It’s depopulation and control.
This sounds like the VC money is running out
Nah. It sounds like they’re in the dump phase of the pump-and-dump.
And just like Uber, you’ll now have to pay a premium to use their service when it finally works.
But Uber still isn’t any more expensive than contemporary taxi rides (which were already exorbitant thanks to municipal cartelization and bad urban planning). These AI services aren’t a problem as a function of cost (OpenAI and Anthropic are still both giant pits of burning cash) they’re a problem as a function of… function. Like, every agent still needs a professional babysitter or three. The tech debt these features generate often outstrip their real business value. And the tail risks are enormous.
I hail an Uber, I get in the vehicle, I ride to my destination, I pay the fee. That’s no different than a taxi service in any meaningful sense save the interface.
I install an AI agent, I issue a command, <???>, uh… profit? Apparently I can now cancel my Sales Force subscription because now I’ve got eighteen thousand automagically generated Power BI reports blowing up my email using info from databases that got organically spun up on my Amazon account to do god even knows what? Hooray! Optimized!
I’ve been waiting for this to happen. People don’t generally understand datacenters. You have to bring in an unending stream of bare metal in one side to keep them updated and they’re using the fastest, most expensive hardware available, and it’s so cutting edge, it’s obsolete a couple years after they install it. There is no way those measly $200 claude accounts are paying for themselves without VC.
Yeah I don’t see this sentiment enough. It’s not like they’ll buy the graphics cards now and then be done with it, they have to keep buying it over and over again. It’s a rolling expense. Given that the manufacturers can’t keep up with the supposed demand as it is, there’s just no chance it’d ever be sustainable from that perspective alone. Nevermind the massive rolling cost it’d incur.
It was never going to work.
It works if someone corners the market and everyone else gives up. Every single VC thinks they’re the company that is going to do that.
So… why the fuck are you going all-in on AI at the expense of literally everyone and everything else!?
They’re nvidia, they don’t care if the shovels they’re selling won’t dig any gold
They are clearly anti-human. The question is what are they really trying to achieve? I hope it is not Bioshock.
My theory is that they think that, with world-scale financing, testing, and iterating, they can get this thing to do a lot of work that is currently exclusively in the purview of humans today. I believe that some of the wealthiest among us tolerate the rest of us sharing their air because, for now, they must, and the second they can replace us with obedient machines, they will.
If I am right about that, then this entire hype cycle and seemingly endless funding rounds and unabated lending Ouroboros Ponzi schemes makes more sense. They’re not delusional that the product works better than it does, they are desperate for the holy grail of greed: not having to ever share anything with anyone ever again.
profit. the profit must flow.
Short term? Drive wages down with the threat of firing people and replacing them with AI. Long term? They’re either delusional enough to believe AI will improve to the point where it actually is cheaper, or else they’re willing to pay more for a workforce that can’t organize and protest and that they don’t have to worry about doing things like being a whistleblower for their latest amoral plan.
Some CEO’s thought they could save a bundle and were eager to replace workers. Other CEO’s saw that, had to do a bunch of layoffs and knew saying “replaced with AI” instead of layoffs keeps stock prices high. Then you have a whole bunch of CEO’s that thought the other guys must be on to something, think they’re missing out and jump into AI both feet first. The laggards are bombarded with news and propaganda by the big players to get them pulled in too. So by now you get everybody messing around with AI in some fashion. That’s the moment the tech giants put the squeeze on everybody.
Control, propaganda, surveillance, tools of war, etc and so forth.
the investors, anyway
Just wait till executives realize they can’t use AI as a scapegoat when they force a bad decision through the company. They’ll have no one to take the fall.
AI businesses are already getting away with their software killing innocent people. I think everyone will work out for the people at the top.
Yup. Capitalism only works in a finite world if there’s a catastrophic economic hardship for 99% of the population every 5 to 10 years just to ensure the working class doesn’t achieve too many gains. Ai causing the economy to crash is bonus feature, not a bug.
I’m pretty sure this is wrong but 400 years of history certainly agrees with you.
Ya if you are counting that amount of time I’d say every 5 to 50 years Capitalism (and over 400 years feudalism as well) needed to shed massive amounts of wealth at the middle and bottom in order to sustain itself. Sadly as tech gets faster so does the speed and frequency. We are experiencing about one ever 6 years currently, even with us exporting a large about of the death and destruction. WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF RUNAWAY! Humanity is doomed soon if we don’t get our shit together. All so a handful of people can have islands to touch little girls. shm
It’s why there’s often a human in the loop who has to check the result of the AI and can be blamed if things go wrong. The poor sap can’t possibly check and correct the volumes of slop produced so they’re just there to work as a scapegoat.
This reminds me of Barney Stinson
Except he was paid well
Please
I’m pretty certain that companies and people have been using the old “computer error” excuse since at least the 1980s.
It’s like that twilight zone episode. They fire everyone then no one is left to help do anything
Gruen tonight was talking about ‘Single Person Billion Dollar Brands’, it was sickening.
Are you sure? So far it seems like they’ve been able to do just that.
At its current pace, AI expenditures may reach $5.2 trillion by 2030
I can’t wait.
They think it is a lottery and sinking more money into it will increase the odds of “winning at everything”.
I love that their moat has been bridged by open models as soon as it was dug. At the current rate, you just have to wait six or nine months and open models will be at opus 4.6 level which is really all you need for most applications. After this I don’t see how the big labs could ever recoup their losses.
So unshocking.
Wow!
Really?!
No way!!!
Its almost like anyone who could do grade school math could have pointed that out 2, 3, 4 years ago!
I wonder if anyone did…
Anyway, uh, chain all these fucking morons into each other, SAW style, tell em they all have to work together and mutually suffer to escape the trap.
That’s not murder, it’s comedy.
Not too mention Über and other new services clearly worked on getting people hooked, then jacking up the price.
SAW style
So, their arms are stuck in a device that allows them to reach a keyboard. If they can get the AI to do a task correctly they’re free, if not the device cuts of the arms.
So, their arms are stuck in a device that allows them to reach a keyboard. If they can get the AI to do a task correctly they’re free, if not the device cuts of the arms.
Hah! That’s very good as well, I was thinking something like… they all have a chain going literally through their shoulders, around/between bones, with lock mechanism inside their bodies.
They each have a key, but the way the… dungeon/trap is set up, they can only unlock the chain if they all simultaneously turn the right key, in the right lock, for the right person, all at the same time.
If any one of them dies of blood loss, well, now they’ll all die.
If they break their collarbones, to pull the chain/lock out… I mean good luck trying, without severing your suprascapular artery.
May this be the beginning of the end, or at least the end of the beginning. Quite possibly with a bubble burst so we can move on from the era of slop (am I being too optimistic?)
I’m not sure slop will go for good, I’m just hoping for a flood of cheap ram, SSDs and GPUs at “please take us back” prices to build a new machine from scratch
I’ve been shouting this everywhere but I’m pretty sure their plan is to make it so you can never do that, and you have to subscribe to Fire tablet or whatever to participate in society
Patient gamers win again
I’m hoping this insane future booked shortage causes the consumer electronics industry to crash due to lack of parts which in turn should cause the AI industry to crash when no one is buying new tech nor fat AI subscriptions.
It already has to be affecting small to medium businesses significantly when even laptop procurement has tripled in price and you’re spending a ton of money for enterprise AI access.
It already has to be affecting small to medium businesses significantly…
I’d imagine that is a major factor in why it’s so accepted right now. Gotta consolidate the market!
These companies want to own all the hardware so you are forced to rent a computer. To buy a PC that does nothing by itself and requires some remote hardware to function. Amazon is already preparing a “game streaming” service, for example.
Good luck with that to them. Internet reliability is extremely crappy in the US, even on supposedly “tech hubs” in California the best you can do is unreliable Comcast or super slow DSL from AT&T.
I don’t think any of them are terribly concerned with the quality of the service.
Ahh, late to market in a flooded field with at least one law of physics preventing it from ever working acceptably. Good job, Jeff!
I think they’re hoping the result is that we can only afford cheap tablet devices that act as dumb terminals for their cloud services which we have to rent forever due to holding our data hostage so they can manufacture consent and prevent us from developing open solutions to their walled garden proprietary products.
A precarious moment at the edge of a cliff.
I think I’m just getting old, but i hate that “compute” is now a noun
I have thought for a long time that the human brain that has developed through natural selection for millions of years probably is as energy and space efficient as it can possibly get.
The ultimate goal for these technofascists is to create a sentience that can do all the things humans can do but without having any rights. They want digital slaves. But this confirms my suspicion that they will have a really hard time achieving their goals while not going bankrupt.
Once an AI is smart enough to genuinely do all the things a human can do, that AI will a) be too energy costly and b) demand to get rights (e.g. getting paid and having time off).
The best the technofascists can realistically do long-term is create the digital equivalent of an “idiot savant”. And even then, it will probably still cost too much.
I’ll play devil’s advocate and say the brain has to be portable enough for the animal containing it to move, and also has a chunk of itself dedicated to hormones telling us what to do to survive, instead of just working on information. It also won’t ask for payment or time off, because the closest thing to pain for it is giving wrong answers.
On the other hand, since the only motivator is it’s digitial equivalent of dopamine, AGI could just hack itself into getting an infinite supply of it. Which would be funny - the first thing it would do being metaphorically jerking off all day.
Obviously, but think of all the middle management, payroll, HR, etc you can fire/not hire!
I’m not sure who to root for here. Middle Managers can suck eggs.
Their not firing middle managers. Their firing front line coders and lower desk employees and keeping the middle managers while using AI.
That’s not really what’s happening they’ve been trimming a lot of middle manager fat too
They’re *
Theiyr*re
Imagine the horror of having an agentic AI as your manager.
You’re becoming hysterical.
AI manager: No you absolutely right, you definitely deserve a raise, sorry about that
Just imagine where we would be 5-10-15 years from now, if all that AI money would have went into social and environmental projects.
No, I don’t want to be any more depressed.
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is now. We can start on nice things today.
I got ome planted so far thos year. Running out of space on my own property. Time to go guerilla.
That describes my entire life since adolescence… wondering what kind of society we could have had if we werent governed by sociopaths
Psychopathy is the one associated with success not sociopath
If all the resources we spent blowing shit up and killing innocent people had been put to good use instead, we would be in a Star Trek-esque post-scarcity society by now. Possibly on our way to being Kardashev type 1 society.
Well, we still need to survive the war with the Klingons and Vulcans before we form the alliance and implement full-on space communism. But we already know we will, so it’s basically just for show.
