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
This is what happens when the people in charge of everything are entirely separated from reality.
Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about these people. Calls them “Business Idiots”
And we hope they go broke, dont pay their bills, cause a panic sell on AI services, which causes private equity to panic sell everything… which pops the bubble… and leads to the literal version of ‘its raining men’ on wall street as executives and profiteers have their horde of ill gotten gains evaporate in seconds.
… too much?
Damn, I was almost there. Keep going
I’m thinking the last scene in Fight Club. Yeah, that would be the one you’re looking for.
everyone will just end using deepseek, assuming they arnt charging.
These execs were the ones we were supposed to replace with AI.
- 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.
So, they’re earning money on token generation but not overall (including training)?
Openai had 2025 6billion in revenue and 20 billion costs on compute. So just to run the models to get 6billion they need to pay 20billion r&d and marketing etc get on top of that
I’m sure there’s a term for it but this is like when a company keeps securing funding from investors so they keep growing to try to outpace costs with the illusion that you’re profitable when in reality you’re not. Just like WeWork.
It’s just a Ponzi scheme with extra steps.
Venture capital
Private credit. Get ready for the tsunami.
Everyone is pulling out of private credit, a non-liquid market (by design); surely nothing can go wrong…
No, my understanding is that they’re bringing in revenue on token generation, but it’s exceeded by the costs of token generation (running data centers, so, electricity and cooling). They definitely want to make a profit on token generation, but they’re afraid that raising costs that high too quickly would drive customers to switch to other providers. So they’ve reduced the amount they’re subsidizing token costs, but not switched over to making a profit.
I can’t find a good citation for this, though, so it’s possible I’m mistaken. They also have huge costs associated with buying new GPUs and building new datacenters, so they’re operating at a massive loss either way, and it’s a little hard to find articles which tease apart the two aspects.
In any case, operating at a massive loss for the first few years is practically standard operating procedure in silicon valley at this point, and sometimes it eventually leads to a profitable, even wildly profitable, business (e.g. Amazon). But it does require a steady stream of investors and a steadily increasing market valuation. That’s…we’ll have to see what happens on that front.
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.
- 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
Is this real life, or is it just fantasy?
It’s such a perfect grift
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.
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.
to be fair the overviewer effect has been romanticized and played up by people who literally spent their entire life training and competing for the chance at a few hours or days cumulative time in space while pretending for the deciders and teams of doctors that they arent just normal flawed people like the rest of us. astronauts basically have to buy in to the overviewer effect as one of the things that makes all their sacrifices “worth it”, and part of trying to convince themselves is convincing others that its a real thing most people will experience. its more of a placebo effect in reality, though im sure there are people who genuinely felt it. bezos just didnt have to work for it at all so he has no incentive to buy into the hype, total lack of empathy and compassion aside.
Idk, it could still be genuine. maybe I just don’t fly enough, but every time I get the chance I’m amazed that humanity managed to achieve flight.
he literally opened a champagned bottle on a recovering alcoholic(shatner) he pretends to be human.
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.
They’re not selected for intelligence, but for sociopathy.
I think it’s more sociopaths rising by being sociopaths and then promoting gullible idiots they can use and control with no issue, then blame when shit goes wrong
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.
As we’ve seen with Donald Trump and George W. Bush, if you’re wealthy enough or in an aristocratic social group, you fail upwards.
And if you always fail upwards, it’s very easy to not gain the skills to succeed.
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.
Just wait until all the technical debt has to be paid as well.
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.
I’m not sure fixing it will be possible.
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.
And people realize they don’t understand the output anymore or the architecture. AI isn’t creating anything new either.
Anyone who fell for this grift deserves it and much worse.
People, usually who have never done the job, still love to argue that it can compete with software devs and infra engineers.
The sad part they don’t see (or maybe care about) is while it can’t currently (and absolutely not llms) they’re pushing a narrative that we should automate everyone and everything which is dangerous and moronic.
Well, we should automate everything that can be automated - for the benefit of everyone. Last part is something not seen on worldwide scale ever, just yet
I understand the argument for automation being used where appropriate to benefit us and allow us the freedom to focus on other things, however, I’m skeptical due to the social behavior already occurring from the powers that be expressing the desire to enslave us, if not just kill us, using the mere concept of AI as justification.
And funny enough, pushing this hard will only leave a bad taste regarding any mention of artificial intelligence or automation. Whereas if these people just fucked off they might have been able to sell whatever usefulness it has in the correct places.
It happens every couple of decades with AI. Since it’s a broader field than most people think, we have a pretty long cycle of a new development looking exciting, people getting way too excited and optimistic, the development being exactly what it was promised to be, and then people getting disappointed and avoiding anything with the AI label. Then we decide that because we’re used to this new thing, it can be used in stuff as was originally appropriate but it no longer qualifies as AI, because “that’s not AI, it’s just ___”.
Oh yeah. I can sign under every word you wrote
The people who have never done the work love more than anyone else to talk about how the work should be done better and cheaper.
Broadly this sentiment stands for most professions.
And if we had strong labour relationships, we’d make them fucking pay for having attempted to destroy our lives for profit.
deleted by creator
Cuts so clean too I use it for my johnsonville brats
Good for little vienna sausages too
Thought it was a tip clipper for my cigars
This one looks very, very unused…
Looks sad, doesn’t it?
Speak for yourself, I absolutely plan on reclamation for destroying my life
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.
600k is not a lot of money for a software team or for AI though.
You’d think the cocaine-snorting classes would understand that only the first hit’s free.
It’s funny because they do this to other people; they just never thought it’d happen to them. FAFO 🫡
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.
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.
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…
A trillionaire sounds surreal. Imagine having an entire country economy (or a few smaller ones) as your budget.
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.
These days, in many cities, being a millionaire is a prerequisite for owning a house.
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 😁
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.
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.
yup, i live in hcol, cant move out almost everyone has a job that earns them enough over the years to be a millionaire, mostly tech people. they arnt rich, i consider rich if you are making 1+mil/year
MILLIONiares have to at least invest thier time, or money, job to get much. its the 10s-100s millionaires that are born wealthy+ billionaires. most of them, surprise dont really have much of job/or direction, thats where all the influencers(youtube,etc) came from(most of them). even the humble ones can let money get to thier heads.
Aye. If not inherited then it’s basically a fuckton of coincidences paired with incredible luck. Which they, in hindsight, call “hard work”. Which basically was the same work everyone else did, but they weren’t lucky. See YouTube. Millions try hard (for nothing) and a handful make big bucks. So I’m told, never used YouTube, I hate google 😁
But also yes. I rarely met a millionaire that wasn’t some prick loving their own farts and bragging as hard as they could. I don’t know why everyone wants to be so much “better” than everyone else. If you’d see me, my cars or my houses, you’d never ever guess the numbers in my bankaccounts.
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.
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.
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.
