Technology

that came after Uber told employees to use AI as much as possible and Uber’s CTO said the company had blown its entire AI budget in four months

AI is about to join the list of "stupid technologies that people should really wait and see before investing on", which includes

• 3D TVs - complete dud
• Blockchain - useless for real world problems already solved by typical computing
• Metaverse - still one of the best jokes around
• Folding screen phones - overpriced junk
• Fully autonomous self driving cars - "Just around the corner" for the past 10 years

This is 100% the thesis I've been shopping personally... Many Boomers and Xers in executive positions had a "magical millennial" that they quietly kept as a secret "AI" to split/edit PDFs, set up an Airtable base, add columns to a google doc, etc. There was a tacit, silent agreement in this symbiotic relationship for the bulk of the last 20 years - you'll make sure I don't look completely incompetent in tech matters and I'll backchannel on your behalf to senior leaders and people who "matter" to help you advance.

Gen AI essentially allows the laziest input, gives a half competent output that "feels" fine and has the bonus of telling the boomer/Xer that they are actually amazingly capable, and could have done this themselves all along even, but they rightly delegated the task to their magical millennial, and now to the AI of choice.

So they fired all the magical millennials, because they knew too much about the before times. Now that they are fucked without a life raft, costs soar and they will cling for dear life because they will be exposed otherwise.

Edit: through a twist of fate, the iPad kids grew up technically incapable and relied on the magical millenials as well. They could only offer praise and loyalty really, or a boomer, Xer recruited them in and talked the MM up as a "wiz" to seek out. Anyway, now that the MM are gone, the Zoomers and gen Alpha kids only have one strength remaining, the old people have no idea what they are doing or how to quantify their success, outside of "use more AI". So the fragile balance remains for now, with a vulnerable, hollow center where the magical millennials used to live.

• Replace workforce with AI because it's easy to be lazy with AI.
• Remaining workforce uses AI to be lazy.
• SurprisedPikachu.webp

The funny thing is that even with this massive overspending, AI companies aren't profitable. They need these companies to spend 10x the amount per token, and 10x the number of tokens. Probably 10x the number of customers too.

Burning energy, draining water, spending massive cash so they can lose money on a product that doesn't even do its job. How the hell has the bubble not popped yet...

The problem seems to be that it takes competent employees to get anything useful out of an LLM in the first place. However, it is these very employees whom the greedy CEOs want to replace. So the result is that an incredible amount of money is being spent on absolutely nothing.

The logical conclusion, then, should be that it would make more sense to replace these useless CEOs with AI. Since they’re just making idiotic decisions for a lot of money anyway, there could be lots of savings.

Unfortunately, however, that will never happen, because contrary to all that talk of KPIs and such, what really matters in the upper echelons of management is never efficiency, but rather ruthlessness and brown-nosing.

a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentations

I haven't been this happy in over a year.

Reminds me of companies getting their cloud computing bills.

Did they think everyone was gonna be creating return value based products for the company to make a fortune on?

Instead they making posters and having crazy convos.

It’s like someone has just discovered salt and every restaurant has it. Each thinks they are unique and gonna be the GOAT.

If my boss would mandate the use of LLMs I would definitely abuse it to rack up the bill.

Leadership are mostly idiots. They don't know how work gets done. They think like "wow it produced so many lines of code!" and don't know that's not a useful metric.

My job had Microsoft do a four hour copilot demo for the entire team last week. (Surely an immense expense. They won't pay for most people to be full time with benefits). The guy used copilot to make a regex to parse html. A little surprised zalgo didn't show up.

Eat shit you greedy corporate assholes, i hope all of your companies are damaged beyond recovery, you useless fucking tools.

Using an LLM to parse stuff is like using a rocket launcher to kill an ant.

You can accomplish the same thing using a million times fewer resources with a purpose-built program.

These stupid companies are getting everything they deserve and I'm loving it.

And Accenture itself reportedly started requiring senior staff to start using AI or risk losing out on promotions.

Every time companies urge employees to use AI and then regret the cost. The fuck is wrong with people? Why are they pushing it so hard? Does Sam give them hand jobs if they use the most?

I don't understand this need to pressure staff into using something and threatening punishment if not. Are they worried that their employees are not efficient enough? Pay them the token prices on top of their salary and see how stuff changes.

When you tell the people to mash the easy button and then they do exactly what you wanted. They created the monster.

If you just throw every task at it, I can completely imagine that it'll cost you more than any gain in efficiency. To some degree I think this is true of some coding tasks (not all, most are pretty efficient pattern matches, and that's what it does well).

But using LLMs to build tools and pipelines that stand alone (no AU built into it) and enable human productivity seems like a far higher leverage use.

The programming version is building the libraries and abstractions that are robust and well tested, so that regular developers can quickly build and refine the features.

Or building the reporting dashboard. Or whatever.

The cost is only going to go up, and the companies that lock in some non-AI process improvements before the hike will likely be smiling

This is the most profitable consultant in the world, can't they just afford to run a local llm?

Waiting for hackers to break into companies and not do a ransomware attack. Just run some scripts which innocently do shit like turn PDFs into PowerPoints and chew through those tokens.

This dumb bubble can't pop soon enough and wipe away most of the US economy while doing so.

LLMs as a technology are incredibly powerful tools that have so many useful applications. The issue is trying to turn them into this all powerful omnitool that could do everything, and then shoving that product up everyone's ass at every turn.

There was always bound to be a correction to this bubble, because the current model is unsustainable. You can only keep making unreasonable moves for so long before everything starts to crumble and you're forced to scale back.

Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides

Sounds the people they hired to do the shit work don't actually want to do that type of work. I, for one, am shocked. Shocked I tell you!