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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[–] 137 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 64 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    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.
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  • [–] 21 points 3 months ago* (8 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.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

    🤭

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  • [–] 70 points 3 months 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.

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  • [–] 38 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    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...

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months 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.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months 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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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (3 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).

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  • [–] 61 points 3 months ago (5 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.

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  • [–] 27 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    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)

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    [–] 48 points 3 months 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

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  • [–] 33 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 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

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months 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.

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    [–] 24 points 3 months 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.

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    [–] 24 points 3 months ago

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

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  • [–] 18 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Did they seriously not see it coming? Lol.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months 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).

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  • [–] 18 points 3 months 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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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago*

    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.

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    [–] 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago

    It's management who fucked up, but let's blame it on software because what we really care about is hating the software.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago

    LMFAO

    I expect exactly this level of competence from Uber.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago

    Utterly delicious.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (1 child)

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

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    [–] 8 points 3 months ago

    They'll be fine. Mass layoffs depress wages.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months 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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    [+] 6 points 3 months ago
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