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
They'll be fine. Mass layoffs depress wages.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
Anyone else hate the structure and style of Axios reporting? Those bullet points like structure?
Phase one: Fuck around 🤡
Phase two: Profit! 🤑
Phase three: Find out. 😱
Did they seriously not see it coming? Lol.
Most management types can't see beyond their next bonus.
That goes double for any publicly traded company.
Wait until they learn how much it costs to fix the mistakes made by Artificial Idiocy.
The AI craze among the Epstein class has revealed some indisputable facts in a way more obvious than ever before:
AI CEOs might end up doing better, you know?
At least better than the type of human CEOs that decide to go full AI.
It's been tried just to see off it could, like putting it in charge of a coffee shop. It's not going well.
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.
But they won't be trained on just human CEO data and that means they will easily be better. I think we should guillotine all CEOs and replace them with AI for a trial run for science and all that.
Sure, why not? We should probably do shareholders at the same time, they seem to be the ones forcing the CEOs to make such great decisions ..
The trouble with that, I feel, may lie in the subtle differences between
the CEO kind of psychopath: batshit unplugged for sure, no contest; just enough to make fucktons of money for far too few people, but not too cracked that they blow everything up, instead...
and, any given bot's penchant for going off the fucking' rails in record time, every time —which, unless you short the whole thing, makes the opposite of money.
🤭
They knew. They always knew. But you gotta bonus yourself amirite?
Utterly delicious.
It's management who fucked up, but let's blame it on software because what we really care about is hating the software.
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).
The 25% more figure includes all of these things. How else do you think they would make the comparison?
AI is already hurting their bottom line, but they keep fantasizing about the future gains, that actually will not arrive. Ever.
Yea, and less control over your spending. The AI provider has the business by the balls and can change prices any time. And they will, by a lot, as soon as they secure enough market share.
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.
Considering that consciousness and intelligence arise out of complexity… it should be “possible.”
But we’re not really anywhere near that reality yet. These dumb ass ai are just really good at glazing their users while speaking confidently so everyone buys what they say.
Possible in the sense that biological brains and human brains aren’t special. But no one will ever convince me that large language models (I’m talking about the actual math and programming that they use today for “AI”) will ever be actually intelligent.
The only thing that worries me is that we don't actually know how the human brain works. There's an entire school of psychological theory and practice - really its oldest truly scientific branch, that holds that human intelligence actually does work a lot like an LLM. The hard core behaviorists believed that literally all human behavior was just a really complex version of Pavlov's dogs. It sounds absurd, but they had good arguments. In principle even very complex behaviors can be the result of reinforcement and conditioning.
Right, definitely not impossible, but highly improbable to be based off of LLMs. The focus on LLMs is actually limiting other types of AI research.
LMFAO
I expect exactly this level of competence from Uber.
And get it blatantly wrong.. not that a human wont also, but just like the computer, humans can be conditioned to defend the exploitative conditions of their own existence.
AI will always be more wrong than a trained professional.
Trained professionals are the 0% loss target. Infinite training has been proven to never approach 5% loss by OpenAI in 2020 and Deepmind in 2023.
Spend a lot of time developing machine learning models there @FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ?
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