6 ms·
I'm the "IT guy" at our 30 person startup. My 2024 stance is "buy every AI add-on and decide whether to keep it next year" So our team has access to Enterpris
by cj 2y ago
I'm the "IT guy" at our 30 person startup.
My 2024 stance is "buy every AI add-on and decide whether to keep it next year"
So our team has access to Enterprise ChatGPT, Gemini, Notion AI, Slack AI, and basically every AI add-on in every SaaS platform that offers it as an upsell (Github Copilot, ReadMe AI, etc).
2024 is the year of "I don't know what the hell these AI tools are going to be useful for, so let's buy them all"
2025 will be the year of "Ok, we spent $xxx on all these AI tools last year, is anyone actually using them?"
I predict we'll be canceling a lot of those subscriptions. Which all in cost us over $100/mo per employee.
- seattleeng 2y agoThis is exactly how Ive seen things occur. It makes a lot of sense, given some tools are great new additions (coding especially), but others fall flat (IMO, search)
- fsndz 2y agothat's a nice strategy for a 39 person startup ! using the tools is indeed the only way to see what works and what doesn't.
- rollinDyno 2y agoThis makes sense for the current add-on wave but expect the launch of independent AI platforms to increase in the coming year.
- threeseed 2y agoI don't think this will happen whilst GPUs are so expensive and constrained. You need to be extremely well capitalised and have a good answer about how to compete against the cloud providers as well as OpenAI, Anthropic etc.
- danpalmer 2y agoThat's a nice idea but it sounds like you must be spending far above $100/m. Back of the envelope suggests you might be spending the equivalent of an additional salary, and in many companies that's a hard thing to justify without any proven value.
- bfdm 2y ago100/mo per employee, it says. Roughly 3k/mo, or 36k annualized.
- danpalmer 2y agoIt says "over $100/m", but these addons are all $10-20 USD each, and it implies more than the list. With just a few of the common ones it's easy to reach $125/m and the approach seems to be to get all of them. Up to $200 is quite likely. That would be 72k USD which is a salary. Admittedly not a software engineer salary, but a significantly above average US salary. Selling the idea of getting another employee is a big deal for most businesses of 30 people.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bdangubic 2y agoI think most 30-person businesses would spend $72k in “R&D” if the promise of such investment is deemed worthy
- red-iron-pine 2y ago36k in a small company is a non-trivial operating expense, esp. for hype-based tools that won't live there tomorrow. like, it's a rounding error as IT budgets go, but throwing a bunch of money at something that's already considered dubious is silly. That's 36k in bonuses for Juniors, or a X-Mas party, licenses for software that you'll actually use.
- djbusby 2y agoExactly their point. 2024 is the experiment (which costs money) 2025 is the pick the winners and drop the losers. And use money for a different experiment.
- danpalmer 2y agoYes, and my point is that this is an expensive process that is not accessible to many 30 person companies because it's close to hiring another person, for the benefit of maybe 1-2 tool choices in a year's time.
- generic92034 2y agoSomeone in the company also might start to ask where the productivity explosion is.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bongodongobob 2y agoThat sounds great. Where I work, the CIO has blocked access to all AI for "security reasons". Any advice on how to counter that claim? I don't even know how to approach it. It feels like a freight company refusing to use the new "train" for shipping because they are loud and big and scary.
- adastra22 2y agoWhy? That seems like a sensible take tbh. You don’t want some other company having chat logs with all your internal code and strategic documents inside.
- bongodongobob 2y agoWell we already use all sorts of third parties that have all of our data. Do you think Microsoft should be trusted more than OpenAI? Honest question.
- adastra22 2y agoOpenAI by default includes transcripts in its training data. You have to explicitly opt out (and trust that the op out actually does anything). I wouldn’t trust that everyone correctly opts out. If they don’t, the X months from now “tell me about Foo company’s strategic plans” could regurgitate their internal docs.
- bongodongobob 2y agoEven if we don't opt out, it's not plaintext data right? Further, I feel like it's likely to be the tokenized version right? And as far as strategic plans, I don't think it regurgitates novel, one source information does it? Isn't the regurgitation more like boilerplate, seen many times type stuff? Has anyone actually been able to prompt a password out of an LLM? That kind of thing should be ignored because it's high entropy and rare afaik. For example, my name is bongodongobob and my password=hunter17. Do you really think someone will be able to pull this fact out of an LLM at some point? That doesn't seem to be the way they work as I understand it.