this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/38083497

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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[–] Mikina@programming.dev 29 points 1 day ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (2 children)

Meta was spending ~300 MILLION dollars per MONTH on tokens around a month ago.

I know they are using Claude, so the price estimation of 5$ per 1M tokens is kind of true, more or less.

Tell me how is this sustainable in the long term?

In a 30-day period, total employee usage on the dashboard exceeded 60 trillion tokens, and the highest-ranked individual user averaged 281 billion tokens. Using the least expensive version of Claude Opus 4.6, which costs $5 for every million tokens, that one user alone could have cost Meta more than $1.4 million.

⁨https://fortune.com/2026/04/09/meta-killed-employee-ai-token-dashboard/%E2%81%A9

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 2 points 30 minutes ago

Using the least expensive model of Claude

Meta makes LLMs. They’ve made multiple, some of them are even tailored for coding.

Why are they using Anthropic’s AI instead of their own?

I can only imagine there’s some sort of ouroboros slop machine money laundering cycle going on or something

[–] Canconda@lemmy.ca 16 points 1 day ago

~300 MILLION dollars per MONTH Tell me how is this sustainable in the long term?

Every single rich SOB on earth is pooling their hedged bets together. Since 2022 Meta has been issuing bonds directly to investors. They announced another 30 Billion in bonds at the end of 2025.

People need to realize that the AI bubble will not pop by accident. It will pop as a direct result of the Epstien-Shareholder class cashing out and leaving retail investors hodling the bag.

[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 57 points 1 day ago (4 children)

At least with human labour companies have control. They withhold raises and bat down wages and the people tend to have to take it.

With AI you get suckered in and all of a sudden have a subscription or something similar. Then next year the costs go up. You've already tailored your workflow to use AI, you can't just not pay the higher bill. Next year, costs go up again. What are you going to do? Not pay your bill and lose your entire workforce all at once? Now the company is being held hostage by the AI companies.

[–] Tamo240@programming.dev 8 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Any service you depend on in the modern world, you need to be asking yourself 'what will I do when this enshitifies itself'. And it is a when.

Short termism on all sides is destroying our society.

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 3 points 16 hours ago

Tbf, open source software is significantly more resistant to enchittification

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 11 points 21 hours ago

Tbh, this is just SaaS in general

[–] kuerbiskernoel@feddit.org 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Workers can and should do this too.

[–] ThunderQueen@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

Union strong, babbyyy

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 26 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Of course they are too dumb to expect this outcome, but it's so fucking obvious this would happen. OpenAI is still burning billions each years, just wait and see how much it will cost when they need to make a profit. (They have already cut down on the free version)

I mean, it's the same freaking market strategy that's been used for over a decade in tech and nobody seems to realize they're inside a slowly boiling water..

[–] djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 67 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 4 points 10 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 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 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 24 minutes 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 20 hours 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 56 minutes 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 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 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.

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[–] teslasdisciple@lemmy.ca 131 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Wait until they learn how much it costs to fix the mistakes made by Artificial Idiocy.

[–] HazardousBanjo@lemmy.world 62 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The AI craze among the Epstein class has revealed some indisputable facts in a way more obvious than ever before:

  1. The rich hate the poor and hold a genuine, malicious and sadistic desire to see them suffer and die. Its not just a consequence of their pursuit of money, it's an outright explicit goal
  2. The ruling class is abhorrently incompetent, increadibly lazy, and inconceivably stupid. There is no group of people less qualified to lead the world than the class of people who currently lead the world.
  3. There is no "things will change before they become irreversible". The ONLY answer is to eliminate the Epstein class. They will lead the world to Armageddon with a smile on their dead faces.
  4. Technology under capitalism doesn't become mainstream when it has sufficiently satisfied the problems it promises to solve. It becomes mainstream FAR before it is ready because the Epstein class thinks its magic.

Of course. If they had a grain of empathy they wouldn't be rich, to begin with.

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

AI CEOs might end up doing better, you know?
At least better than the type of human CEOs that decide to go full AI.

[–] Lodespawn@aussie.zone 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Probably not, AI CEOs will be trained on data from how real CEOs work .. so AI CEOs will make all the same problems, with all the same gas lighting that they are doing a great job. Also the AI CEOs will be provided by megacorp models so you just know they will be biased to benefit the owner mega corp over all else.

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[–] k0e3@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

They can't even run coffee shops.

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[–] Juice@midwest.social 48 points 1 day ago (2 children)

My boss is getting annoying with this shit.

I'm stuck on x issue

Have you tried putting x into ai?

Yes I've been doing that for two days.

Really? Huh. It should work.

K well no it doesn't.

Just copy the error and put it into Claude

Yeah...I've been...doing that.

It should just give you the solution

[–] Botzo@lemmy.world 23 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I spent an hour today on a webinar about how to optimize token usage with more than 500 other participants from the company I work for. Because billing is about to have its come-to-Jesus moment.

[–] iocase@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 day ago

Cave man mode. Save much token. Very easy. Get straight to point. Missing semicolon line 182.

[–] teslekova@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

As in "Jesus, it's costing how much??!!?"

[–] BenLeMan@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago

Phase one: Fuck around 🤡
Phase two: Profit! 🤑
Phase three: Find out. 😱

[–] unglueclass23@programming.dev 7 points 1 day ago (5 children)

https://mstdn.social/@hkrn/116589985138352696

A decent article about enterprise depending on AI subscriptions and a discussion on hackernews.

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[–] wpb@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

They'll be fine. Mass layoffs depress wages.

[–] theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Did they seriously not see it coming? Lol.

[–] bizarroland@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

Most management types can't see beyond their next bonus.

That goes double for any publicly traded company.

[–] sorter_plainview@lemmy.today 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Anyone else hate the structure and style of Axios reporting? Those bullet points like structure?

[–] hungrybread@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 17 hours ago

Its very annoying. Seems like the actual article should start any time now and then ads and links to other articles appear (again)

[–] plateee@piefed.social 16 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I think some CEOs are probably okay with it costing more - that's less benefits to pay out, less PTO/sick days to deal with, and less labor concerns when you run your AI slop machine 24/7 instead of those pesky 40 hour work weeks.

AI will have to cost a lot more, or hurt the bottom line other ways (people stop buying your AI shit).

[–] fckreddit@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 day ago

AI is already hurting their bottom line, but they keep fantasizing about the future gains, that actually will not arrive. Ever.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 1 day ago (4 children)

They are being sold on the hype that AGI is possible and that eventually the costs won't matter because somehow the AI brains will scale production massively and allow the already obscenely wealthy privatize the gains of humanity while letting millions of us die as their solution to the climate change caused by AGI. Essentially they have no issues poisoning us and wasting money now as long as they get their supreme digital slaves in place and never need human labor again. Deeply unlikely but nobody said these folks are smart.

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