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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[–] djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 69 points 1 day ago (5 children)

this is the part that really baffles me, though I guess I can't expect much from the class that seems to be literally incapable of foresight.

Like say AI actually does get there. Some company is able to crack human consciousness and we get truly intelligent AI, good enough to replace your workforce with... that AI isn't going to be free. It's going to be a monthly fee for your business. and then when you're fully reliant on AI, when skilled labor is simply too difficult to cultivate any further, it's going to inevitably enshittify. These corpos will end up slaves to the AI company.

It's like they fundamentally cannot see that they are giving up control. They're so fucking stupid.

[–] sobchak@programming.dev 6 points 16 hours ago

If it was good, the AI companies wouldn't sell its use. They'd be using it to write all kinds of new cool software, dominate financial markets, etc.

[–] isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone 37 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Eh. It's par for the course. 20 years ago, at the height of the frenzy of outsourcing things to China, I remember saying that this will just result in US companies creating their own competition. Anyone with a brain could see that Chinese companies weren't going to be willing to serve as second-fiddle to their US masters. The idea that you could keep design and management, while sending production overseas, and that you can keep that arrangement stable long-term? Pure fantasy. Of course a country isn't going to be content just doing the grunt work. They want the highly paying design and management jobs, not just the menial labor ones.

[–] teslekova@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 day ago

Well, it's a good thing China doesn't make cheap LLMs that you can run on local hardware...

[–] Rakonat@lemmy.world 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A lot of AI contracts and services were priced assuming literally everyone was going to adopt it so the MLMs all tried to undercut each other to get market share.

Turns out, not everyone wants it and they undercharged significantly so the snake oil salesmen are jacking up their prices to try and stay viable. Leaving a companies that early shrunk their workforce holding the bag paying more in expenses and lower productivity because they bought in to the bubble without even checking how factual claims were.

[–] T156@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The cost has also shot up because a lot of the new frameworks are much more token heavy than the old ones.

So the original free plan might have made sense when people were only typing little questions into it, and using a handful of tokens, but is no longer cost-effective with things like modern agent pipelines constantly throwing tens of thousands of tokens at the service.

I tried running a little locally hosted agent thing on my computer the other day, and it was feeding a hundred thousand tokens at the model every few minutes, because it was keeping all the files in context. Sure, it hit the cache a lot, and so the effective cost would be less, but it's still a lot more token usage than me poking the model with inane questions.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 4 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

I've been kind of forced to use AI for my work, and since I had an unlimited access to whatever model I needed, I figured "why not try". I was able to find my workflow that works, use it to explain the architecture of the code surrounding my bugfix/feature (I work in gamedev, on a project I'm only a contractor for, so I don't know the codebase too well), make me a documentation, then draft a plan how to implement it. Implement it, then I just look through it for ideas, combine it with my domain knowlege to see if it missed any obvious things or solutions (which it usually does in a larger projects), and then build my own solution from scratch based on what I know, and what it suggested.

The part where it explains the architecture and data/systems flow is invaluable and it does make ot faster than I could have parsed through unknown code, while being verifiable enough to be trustworthy. It's a good kickstarting process. Do I need it? Not really, but it would take me longer.

But. It eats tokens like hell. My average monthly token usage is around 800m tokens.

I've been told I'm not using the AI enough in my workflow, because I write my PR comments and don't use AI for code reviews.

I'm seriously considering just leaving IT altogether. It's just eroding my reverse engineering / codebase orientation skill, while I'm replacing it with something that costs the same amount as my sallary for doing it slightly faster/more easier, and the price will only get a lot worse. I don't get it. How can't they see it?? How can they look at "Oh, he's costing us 2000$ a month in AI use [at current prices], but solves 3 instead of 2 tasks a week, while slowly loosing vital skills", and say "that's worth it! But he could use it more."

I hate it. Fuck managment.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is what happens when mfkers don't read any Marx.

American capitalism would be doing way better at profit maximizing if people in positions of power across the private sector had studied Marxian economics. Giving away your means of production as a software business would be an obvious no-no.

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago

This is the shit that always blows my mind, to be honest.

You want to maximize profits? Train your workers, put them through school, invest in your workforce.

All the companies that just hire bodies and forget the most important part that sets a human apart from the rest of the animal kingdom astonish me. You get more value per person if you work towards increasing each person’s value instead of increasing the value of persons.

[–] Mucki@feddit.org 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The whole AI scam has always been the techbro CEOs snatching the money from the non-techbro CEOs. Me or you as a private person was never the direct aim. . . . General artificial intelligence will not come. We don't even have artificial intelligence yet. The terms artificial and intelligence contradict themselves. It's an oxymoron. It's still just machines that learn shit without body and soul...

[–] isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 1 day ago (3 children)

IDK. I get really uneasy about claims that a computer or AI can never be intelligent or self-aware. Sure, it's "just" circuits, but your brain is "just" cells passing information between each other. An individual cell is no more intelligent or self-aware than an individual transistor is. It's deeply unscientific to believe there is some magic voodoo involved in biology that can't be reproduced in a machine.

[–] expr@piefed.social 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have never argued that it is never possible, just like time travel or teleportation is technically possible given a radical breakthrough in our understanding of how the universe works. But as of right now, AGI/true intelligence/etc. is still purely science fiction and LLMs are not even remotely close (and are a complete deadend towards that goal).

[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Except it's not comparable because we literally have general/true intelligence right now.. it's just not artificial. There is no radical breakthrough needed. We know it's possible. We just don't know how.

Teleportation is not possible as far as we know, and backwards time travel isn't either. That's not comparable to true intelligence, which already exists, just not artificially.

[–] expr@piefed.social 1 points 6 hours ago

We are far from knowing that true intelligence is possible with the computing paradigm as we know it, and indeed, if it's even possible to do outside of biological systems. So it does require a revolutionary breakthrough in computer science and/or computer engineering.

[–] isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Exactly. We are beings of atoms and matter. If you want to believe in some immaterial soul, fine. But if you're a materialist, then everything we are is atoms. We know atoms in one configuration can produce true intelligence. And there are likely many possible arrangements of atoms that can reproduce this effect. And since artificial minds are not subject to most of the constraints of biological minds, an artificial superhuman intelligence should be possible. Hell, even if biology was the only way to make it possible, you could always build an artificial biological brain and just make it a lot bigger than a human one. Even if human neurology really is the limit of what this universe allows for in terms of intelligence, we could best it by just making a bigger one.

[–] vanillama@programming.dev 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I think at some point we might get better and better at simulating intelligence, and maybe even building actual intelligence in machines, but we can agree that LLMs is closer to your phone suggesting the next word than it is to your brain. If we ever get general AI it can't be based off LLMs so the current wave of speculation is little more than hype to drive profits up and distract from the problems that already arose.

[–] Mucki@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago

Not going to fight about it. Sorry gotta go, to replace some transistors in the back of my head.