Speaking during an interview on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" segment earlier this week, CEO of cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks Nikesh Arora implored the tech industry to lower the cost of AI.

During the segment, the chief executive argued that the cost to use large language models (LLMs) has to drop by 20 percent by 2027 — and 90 percent by 2028 — for the tech to be useful to enterprises.

"We need to see the pricing for AI come down," Arora said.

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[–] 112 points 2 months ago (13 children)

Not even once did he think whether it was useful or not. We really need to replace CEOs, managers, and the whole C-suite with LLMs, that would be useful for once! And at $20/month, it's a bargain and you can redistribute the money to people who really work.

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  • [–] 29 points 2 months ago (11 children)

    Nah. Ai also trained on ceo actions, so I'd say it would result in eviler mecha ceo driving the ship drunker than usual

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago (10 children)

    We don't train then on ceo actions. We train them to run a company for the betterment of society, it's people, the employees and its survival.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago

    He sort of did with executive double speak: he said two things by implying the cost wasn't worth it. To justify the poor quality the price has to drop by 90%. That's shareholder speak for "this is not profitable and not worth the debt exposure".

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  • [–] 99 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Just drop the price by 90% in a year and a half while already hemorrhaging money, no biggie. haha.

    If these stupid fucks didn't have the ability to affect my life this would be so, so funny. It's still pretty funny even so.

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  • [–] 87 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (14 children)

    This is so deeply, fundamentally hilarious to me.

    • LLM corp CEOs are getting extremely uncomfortable at the manifestly nonsensical economics of the current “AI” CapEx and recurring infra costs
    • investors in LLM corps (including the absolute fucking cabbages at other tech corps who decided circular financing was a great idea) are getting sketched out at the likely impact on their own finances, as well as the costs of LLM bullshit in general, and its likely trajectory
    • other CEOs are now seeing the very obvious cost issues as well, and are begging to return to the previous (deeply unsustainable) pricing models

    I am genuinely convinced we’re gonna see the bubble pop before the end of the year.

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  • [–] 42 points 2 months ago (10 children)

    Don't forget anyone with 3 functioning brain cells knows you don't replace workers with AI, and even using it as a productivity tool can cause workers to offload their jobs onto their coworkers with AI by outsourcing comprehension and cognition with workslop.

    The "strong" tasks for AI are so limited in scope I don't think it's as world shaking as people think it is. Until they figure out the hallucination thing its just an intern who's a pathological liar. In fact I think it's worse since the intern at least knows what the truth is when they try to hide it with a lie. LLMs have no concept of truth or falsehood they just create a confident most-likely answer with no idea of what's true or false.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    They can't "figure out" the hallucination thing because literally everything that comes out of an LLMbecile is hallucination. It's just that sometimes (and not as many times as people seem to think!) the hallucination happens to match something in reality.

    So why do so many people believe that LLMs "know" things and aren't constantly hallucinating? We're getting our cognition hacked.

    See, we have no way to directly detect intelligence in other beings. What we have are proxies that have, over millions of years of evolution, proved "good enough" a substitute for the actual measurement to be usable as that measurement. And one of the biggest pieces of proxied intellectual detection we have is ... fluency. (You know all those bigoted "Polish jokes" or, from my childhood, "Ukrainian jokes", or such over the years? Yep. Entire ethnic groups were painted with a broad brush as being "stupid" because they couldn't speak English well. Thank you proxied intellect measurement!)

    LLMs are something unprecedented in the entire history of life on this planet: fluency paired with zero intellect. But we've evolved to use fluency as a very strong proxy measure of intellect. LLMs, with their confident wording and their almost supernatural fluency fool us into thinking they're, well, thinking. And because we assume that they're smart, we overlook their errors—often helping them along and prompting them down the right path when they hallucinate incorrectly, but close to correct—and when we give them the answer and they state it with fluency and confidence, we're amazed at how smart they are!

    But the truth is that they cannot ever figure out the hallucination thing. It would take a completely different technology from LLMs to solve that problem. LLMs are a dead end for genuine machine intellect.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago

    also laying off so many tech workers since 2023, they probably see alot of loss productivity and innovation, and profit in other areas, also has a unitended by predictable side effect of eliminating jobs for fresh graduates and entry levels, which causes more problems down the line.

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    [–] 49 points 2 months ago (10 children)

    I really, really hope that within 1 or 2 years there will be a chain of collapses of companies which adopted this shit.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (9 children)

    People in those companies economies (and others globally to a lesser extent) will feel the economic fallout from that in one form or another

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

    Those companies fired the workers and replaced them with AI already, so the benefit they bring to the broader economy is far smaller (might even be negative by now) and them dissapearing is far less likely to cause "economic fallout".

    Even though that's what Neoliberal politicians have preached to us for decades now, companies aren't inherently "good for the Economy" - they might, but then again they might not.

    Plenty of companies out there add up to a negative to the Economy:

    • Maybe because they have huge Negative Externalities (i.e. for example, emitting lots of Pollution)
    • Maybe because they abuse dominant positions in Markets due to Barriers to Entry in a way that makes things actually worse for most people (reference: enshittification)
    • Maybe because they're mostly extracting wealth from the broader Economy through rentseeking rather than producing wealth (reference: most realestate investors)
    • Maybe because they're actually extrating more from the Economy than they put back in it (for example companies getting billions in subsidies to create literally a handful of jobs, or companies employing people with such low salaries that it's only possible because said people also receive Social Security support)
    • Maybe because almost all the wealth they produce does not end up in that Economy (for example, they're using Tax Havens to avoid taxes and their owners pay tax abroad or even don't pay any tax at all)

    Companies aren't there to benefit the Economy in any way form or shape, they're there to benefit their owners. Some companies might happen to benefit the Economy, often because they have no other option (for example, they're forced to employ people in order to actually operate and make money for the company owners, thus indirectly help the Economy) but almost invariably every single thing that helps the Economy is for a company "losing money" which would go to the company owners instead so they generally fight like crazy to actually reduce it: they try to spend less from suppliers, pay less to workers, pay less or no tax at all.

    Helping the Economy almost always runs counter the one true goal for the existence of a company - maximizing shareholder profits.

    Further, when a company dissapears it doesn't mean that the Market need that they're serving dissapears with them: in almost all the cases the need is still there after they've collapsed (unless they collapsed because the need itself doesn't exist anymore) so existing companies grow or new companies pop-up to serve it.

    It seems to me that companies that have replaced workers with AI are by far the most likely to by now not actually be helping the Economy, not even indirectly, and that their dissapearance might actually improve the Economy if only because their share of the Market might be taken over by companies with better far better and less wasteful management (and hence more efficient) and which employ more people, and hence which bring more benefits to the broader Economy.

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  • [–] 43 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    "YOU lower YOUR profits so I can increase MY profits!"

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  • [–] 42 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Would you like fewer employees? Dumber employees? More expensive employees? Try AI. It will bleed you dry and destroy your business. Available everywhere today!

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    [–] 40 points 2 months ago

    Please please PLEASE help me FIRE my Employees!

    -Billionaires who NEED to NOT be Taxed because they MAKE Jobs!

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  • [–] 34 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    So AI is losing money hand over fist, and the solution is for AI to lose even more money? Thank god our economy is on a sound footing.

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  • [–] 30 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    The irony in this makes me happy.

    1. Replace workers with AI
    2. AI costs money
    3. CEOs demand lower costs for AI, so their decision to replace workers with AI doesn't backfire...
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  • [–] 32 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    Prices for services like this do not ever decrease. By 2028, costs will likely be double what they are now.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    More than that. At the current discount prices, LLM providers bleed money like mad. They will run out of cash soon if they don't raise the prices to profitable levels. Just double won't cover it.

    Which will lead to most customers dropping the LLM services stat. Which in turn will force the LLM providers to up their prices even more...

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago

    When my last employer opened up a publicly available chatbot they asked us not to test it because of how much it costs. It was a sales bot, we had recently had the company decimated by redundancies.

    A common act of protest was to abuse the public chatbot from a non work device.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago

    The last 50 years has shown that the new model is to get a sector of the economy or consumers dependent on a service then once the competition has faded away, jack up the price. Competition either never shows up or collaborates on pricing.

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    [–] 31 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    “We need to see the pricing for AI come down,” Arora said.

    As a CEO, you really should know that prices never come down. Prices only go up. Gotta generate that shareholder value.

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  • [–] 29 points 2 months ago

    He should take a pay-cut to afford more Artificial Unintelligence then!

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  • [–] 25 points 2 months ago

    lol, rofl even

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  • [–] 24 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Ha! Wait until they charge the actual costs and profits! You wish you had not kicked out you most valuable employees...

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    [–] 19 points 2 months ago

    How many CEOs have thought about how difficult it is to strike when workers have a family to feed?

    Now think about how easy it is to scale down AI labour?

    Also, you gave all your corporate secrets away to the psychopathic class. They will use this for insider trading, hostile M&A corporate intelligence for competitors, American empire building and hostile actions against foreign countries.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    😝🤣😂😹

    That's just the dumbest and most disconnected-from-reality take on AI I've heard in a while. Fire your CEO there is no way he's worth his salary.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago

    AI: "The best I can do is offer you a substandard "worker", but it'll cost you more."

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago

    Help a bro out to fire his employees so he can be a billionaire.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    He thinks AI is expensive NOW? We are in the trial period. Wait until the whole thing pops and then tell us how expensive it is.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago

    Yet those prices can only go up. My rough estimate is about 10x higher to be profitable.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago

    "We are dangerously close to needing to consider the idea of near record profits as opposed to record profits... This is like 9/11 + that flood in the bible + when your Wi-Fi doesn't fully go out, but it's on/off again all day and it's like torture, you know?"

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago

    Get fucked. Globalprotect is a shit product that is about as reliable as a 40 year old renault and it being slop coded explains a lot.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    So when is the us gov gonna start subsidizing AI with your tax dollars to keep this bubble just on the solid side of bursting?

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    "The whole point was to increase profits by firing all these disgusting humans around here, not just pay the same money to you."

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    [–] 11 points 2 months ago

    fuck him and not in a good way

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (1 child)
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    [–] 8 points 2 months ago

    Makes my brain hurt.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago

    Aww. CEO doesn't like being exploited. Good.

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