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"An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses
by swader999 5mo ago
"An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees."
Like physically, how could this even happen?
- pjc50 5mo agoAgents. An agent is a system for spinning up processes that use tokens, talking to other processes that use tokens. I wonder how many megawatts that waste represented. Just one guy, worse than a small air force of private jets.
- layer8 5mo agoThis could happen with a large number of integrations or agent swarms working 24/7 with high throughput and long contexts.
- ludicrousdispla 5mo agoMaybe the AI consultant gets a cut of that half billion?
- spacechild1 5mo agoLet's not forget about the environmental impacts. It's crazy that people are willfully burning so much energy for almost no return. And we thought bitcoin was bad... This is just completely irresponsible, if not sociopathic behavior.
- slfnflctd 5mo agoBitcoin doesn't have long conversations with you, including deeply technical ones, in a way that you thought only a human being could just 5 years ago. They are not the same. I agree fully with you on the potential for energy waste. We always do that, though, with nearly everything. How many of today's jet plane flights really needed to happen? The question is how much value people feel they're getting. People are having a whole lot more feelings about AI than they ever could about cryptocurrencies, and that train aint stoppin'.
- spacechild1 5mo agoI was specifically talking about needless token maxxing, though. > How many of today's jet plane flights really needed to happen? Many jet plane flights are indeed not necessary and there are people who deliberately avoid such unnecessary flights. > The question is how much value people feel they're getting. It is indeed a question we should keep asking and weight the answers against the energy footprint.
- dgellow 5mo agoExternalities should be priced in. We desperately need some form of carbon tax
- slfnflctd 5mo agoI mean, I agree, but good luck with that. Especially in the current environment. We need to plan for the world we're most likely to be living in in addition to the one we want to live in but probably won't. The latter energy isn't entirely wasted, but it's also not as essential to our immediate survival.
- frangonf 5mo agoNow I understand the rumors of Anthropic starting to get profitable... by ralph looping fortune 500
- nijave 5mo agoI imagine some scenarios where you're throwing a big data set at an LLM could add up quickly. "Check all of Confluence for outdated and conflicting info" "Review all the legal contracts over the past 10 years" "Evaluate the source code in all our dependencies for vulnerabilities" All of those would be fairly straight forward for a single person to kick off without thinking about the data set size. Especially if they have Claude set to Opus 4.7 x high effort for everything. Even someone saying something like "rewrite the 25 year old Java monolith in rust" as a PoC and leaving it running in the background for a week
- dgellow 5mo agoBut even that doesn't explain it. If you ask claude to read all of Confluence, it will read like 5-10 pages, read an overview of the workspace, grep a few things, then give you an unreliable summary. You have to fight quite a lot with agents to get them to actually read the fucking files in full
- nunez 5mo agoGas Town would do it.