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Microsoft reports AI is more expensive than paying human employees
- nreece 4mo agohttp://archive.today/l3EEo http://archive.today/l3EEo
- missedthecue 4mo agoLiterally nowhere in the article does Microsoft report AI is more expensive than paying human employees.
- tovej 4mo agoThere may be a word missing in the post title. Should be "Microsoft reports show AI is more expensive...". The fact that AI is more expensive still comes through, even though Microsoft does not state this explicitly.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4mo agoBuilders you pay to equip with hammers are more expensive than builders you do not equip with hammers too. More news at 11.
- xigoi 4mo agoThey aren’t, because builders with hammers will get their job done much faster.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4mo agoThat’s my point.
- tovej 4mo agoFunny how hammers don't need a subscription fee to keep working.
- raincole 4mo agoWow... what happened to Fortune? I thought they're far above this kind of clickbait.
- scronkfinkle 4mo agoThe title seems misleading, and reading the article explains the reason more clearly. There's nonsense OKR's and objectives at these companies to burn as many tokens as possible. It turns out that when you make a metric out of token usage, it unsurprisingly ends up becoming extremely expensive. Inference is affordable, and you don't need a SOTA proprietary model to get a lot of use out of this technology. While you likely will still need a human engineer for quite a while longer, I don't agree that some number of humans + an LLM is going to be (or will ever remain) more expensive than just hiring more humans.
- leecommamichael 4mo agoI kind of doubt they ever needed the number of humans they have, but I am genuinely open to being wrong about that.
- no-name-here 4mo agoIf big tech companies actually offered support to users when the company bans their account or other real issues…
- andwur 4mo agoThey may as well have just said: Company institutes an OKR that the IT division must spend over $1000/day/developer (fictious number). Company is surprised when IT division is costing far more than it did before. Company increases this to $1500/day/developer to build a system to identify why this has happened. I feel like vibe coding is less of an issue than vibe leadership at this point, and vibe leadership has nothing inherently to do with AI. These people are getting a vague feeling in their giblets, and then chasing it to the illogical conclusion no matter the cost or outcome.
- juancb 4mo agoI'm not sure that vibe leadership is a new thing and in fact may be a redundant term. I've worked for enough companies to get the sense that doggedly following vague feelings in their giblets is what leadership has been since 2008. I won't deny that sometimes it works but there's much more coverage on when it does that when it fails which only serves to amplify the survivorship bias around it.
- Readerium 4mo agoFor MSFT: Just download DeepSeek locally and use it. Or train your own power efficient stack.
- chopete3 4mo ago>> Microsoft has reportedly begun canceling most of its direct Claude Code licenses Hearsay information and click bait.
- charles_f 4mo agoIt's true, though.
- lacy_tinpot 4mo agoSay AI is very expensive and costs a lot. What happens when no one can or is not willing to actually do the work manually? What if companies both don't see a large return on investment, and at the same time can't reduce their AI spend?
- bentcorner 4mo agoThe premise of this article is incorrect - MS isn't cancelling Claude code internal usage because of AI costs too much, they're cancelling it because GitHub copilot is the compete product and they want their employees to use their product. It's the same reason Teams got so much attention during lockdown.
- mkozlows 4mo agoYeah, they conflate Microsoft's actions (which are not about cost) with a random quote from the "vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia," who says that compute costs more than people on his team -- but his team isn't using LLMs for software development, they're literally a deep learning team that is burning compute in deep learning development ways. If people would do even a little bit of math, they'd see that Microsoft can't possibly be paying more for AI than for developers: They have about 80K employees in product development roles. Senior developers probably cost them $400K all-in. Do they have a $32 billion Claude bill? I suspect they do not.
- charles_f 4mo agoBoth things can be right: Claude costing too much and migrating employees to copilot, which hopefully will decrease cost as it owns the product, which will in turn increase usage and feedback. > It's the same reason Teams got so much attention during lockdown Not sure I see the parallel with the point you were making
- bentcorner 4mo agoAnecdotally from people I know from MS is that adhoc slack usage was popular up until lockdown, at which point more resources was poured into Teams due to everything going remote and internal slacks were frowned upon. I see a parallel here where a competitor's product is taking over and MS leaders see it becoming an existential problem and are putting their foot down and pushing internal users to the company's products. Also if half the company don't even want to use something made by the other half it's a bad look lol
- 4mo ago
- hmaddipatla 4mo ago[dead]
- upbeatlinux 4mo agoIs that why GitHub is always down?
- nullbio 4mo agoTaalas: https://taalas.com/products/ https://taalas.com/products/ They've made a hardware LLM that reaches over 14k TPS on Llama 3.1 8B, and you can try it here: https://chatjimmy.ai/ https://chatjimmy.ai/ So clearly hardware LLMs are the future, and the cost will be drastically reduced. But I know that all the AI labs want to create a perception of high prices forever.
- coredev_ 4mo agoInteresting development, it's impressively fast. How will this affect OpenAI and Anthropic when this hit the market?
- henry2023 4mo agoAI is not more expensive than paying a human employee. AI is not capable of replacing a human employee yet so the premise of the title is wrong.
- ChicagoDave 4mo agoWhen you unleash it without a plan or discipline, they are correct. With discipline, it’s an aggregator. https://devarch.ai/ https://devarch.ai/
- hsbauauvhabzb 4mo agoI do hope the quality of your astroturfing is not indicative of the quality of your companies product.
- ChicagoDave 4mo agoI’m just a guy with 41 years building Fortune 500 software. What do I know, right?
- hsbauauvhabzb 4mo agoWe don’t care how many companies you’ve worked at. And you didn’t build them, you worked at them. This isn’t LinkedIn.
- ChicagoDave 4mo agoMaybe the link was misplaced but the original comment stands.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4mo agoThe original comment is nonsensical slop that allowed for an excuse to segue to your product.
- ChicagoDave 4mo agoI just read through your comment history. You literally hate everyone and everything. I couldn’t find a single instance of positivity. It almost seems like you hang out on HN just to scold people. You never actually engage in conversation. You probably have a hit list and automatically down vote everything they say.
- Shitty-kitty 4mo agoBurning tokens is as easy as throwing dollars in a furnace. Token usage is not a good measure of productivity. Problem is nobody has really been able to figure out how to gauge productive AI engagement. Are your developers maximizing productivity or are they burning tokens or resisting change.
- philipallstar 4mo agoIt's the new "lines of code".
- baigy 4mo agoThe 'tokenmaxxing' trend is probably the more inane ideas emanating out of this whole AI wave. It goes in the opposite direction of efficiency and productivity maximization. Yet, it has wide acceptance.
- polski-g 4mo agoAI isn't expensive. Opus is expensive. And almost always unnecessary.
- holoduke 4mo agoSomehow this 'ai companies will never be profitable' is believed by so many. It's often used by those who don't like AI. There is no doubt that ai is the most lucrative business currently out there. It will only get better. Faster hardware, better algorithms
- parineum 4mo ago> It will only get better The important part is how much and over what time period.
- startpage_com 4mo agoHave you tried closing another strait?
- sandeepkd 4mo agoThe usage of AI has to be put in context for cost analysis. A lot of people I see are using AI to beautify their documents, their slack conversations, emails, generating big enough documents with small prompts. Sending a slack message or email should not have required AI within the company. Its wastage of resources and time, just to make it sound better without changing much of the meaning.
- loeg 4mo agoThose uses are pretty low cost, though.
- DevKoala 4mo agoMicrosoft cancelled Claude because they need to dog food Copilot since it sucks. This was acknowledged internally and it’s not a secret. It is probably more expensive for Microsoft now since the Anthropic tokens were subsidized.
- vittore 4mo agoreminds me of "The Feeling of Power" by Isaak Asimov
- wileydragonfly 4mo agoFor now.
- SebastianSosa 4mo agoMakes me feel good about my career. Upvote
- ghoshbishakh 4mo agoNo! - me after reading the title. I am unable to hire any more interns and junior devs. Simply because there is no way I can justify the time and money spent behind them. Money is not the issue - time taken to make them productive is not worth now.
- mbernstein 4mo agoHiring earlier career folks isn’t about maximizing their productivity. It’s also about an influx of new ideas, different lenses to view problems, and connections to people like them, amongst a number of other reasons.
- tomhow 4mo agoActive discussion on primary source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238896 (Note article says "Microsoft has reportedly begun canceling most of its direct Claude Code licenses, according to The Verge.")
- no-name-here 4mo agoYeah this article seems very poorly written. 1. Article does not quote anyone at Microsoft saying AI is more expensive than employees. 2. Article says the nvidia deep learning team spends more on AI than employees, but that makes sense - the goal of that team is deep/heavy AI use, not agentic coding etc. > But with a token-based pricing system, the work gets more expensive with more use and better efficiency. Why do they claim costs increase with “better efficiency”?
- suyavuz 4mo ago[flagged]