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Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI
- tyleo 3mo agoWe’re at a small startup and we mix models. But mainly just between the major providers. I wouldn’t say it’s as much to avoid spending money as it is to get the maximum benefit out of different capability spectrums.
- 6stringmerc 3mo agoWell, you can say that all day long but realistically would your “small startup” even exist if your firm was charged Enterprise rates or the actual compute costs and denied access to capital to subsidize your users? It’s a fair question. The other, more complex one would be “what benefit” are you talking about? Clearly there are some differences in performance regarding speed and token cost, but industry news indicates not a single one has solved the inherent hallucination problem which makes the reliability akin to an untreated schizophrenic research or coding assistant.
- notfromhere 3mo agoHallucinations are not really a big problem in day to day work
- officialchicken 3mo agoAre you the person paying for the hallucinations, or do you just like the free high?
- notfromhere 3mo agoI’m the person implementing and monitoring output. What high am I supposed to be getting? Please let me know so I can stop buying drugs
- lazide 3mo agoDepends on the work and the customer.
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- VCFundedGenYer 3mo agoAs a sysadmin I disagree mightily. LLMs are very bad at IT troubleshooting, server stuff, etc. Especially microsoft and powershell.
- literalAardvark 3mo agoYours might be. Sol is terrifying.
- tyleo 3mo agoThe old, “it doesn’t matter because AI doesn’t work,” argument. I thought we were past this.
- owebmaster 3mo agoGive me 3 examples of AI succeeding at improving a company/product? All I see is everything getting worse.
- spiderfarmer 3mo agoNever spent more than 40 euros per month on the base plans for Claude and OpenAI. And I’m doing 10x the amount of work I did before. As long as my computer isn’t running at night as well, I’m not upgrading.
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- the__alchemist 3mo agoSame experience. There was a period where Claude was burning through it's limits very quickly (~2 months ago?), but other than that, the $20/month plan is enough to do loads of work+personal coding. I am curious what workflows people are using that requires the expensive plans, and what they're building/maintaining.
- 6stringmerc 3mo agoAre you making 10x more income for yourself?
- spiderfarmer 3mo agoNot yet, but I finished all of my sideprojects in addition to my regular work and can now focus on doing more consultancy jobs again.
- lnfromx 3mo agoWhat are you doing if you might share ? Edit: 10x sounds like a lot so I wonder which work you do to achieve such a multiple with a simple 40€ subscription.
- mbgerring 3mo agoThe only path forward is to get LSD into the water supply at Davos and put on a really scary play about Rokko’s Basilisk for all the money people, or else Sam Altman won’t be able to afford to repair his infinity pool
- philipov 3mo agoCall it "Roko's Modern Life"
- selimthegrim 3mo agoI always think that show peaked with the episode about the garbage dump and City Hall.
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- jordanb 3mo agoThey need a new acronym: AGI -> ASI -> Artificial Mega Intelligence AMI? Maybe go back to AGI but make it mean Artificial Godlike Intelligence? It's too bad Altman already blew his wad with the whole Dyson sphere thing. It's hard to top that. Maybe he can promise them a paperclip universe? That's gotta be worth a few more trillion.
- mdp2021 3mo agoIf some spread the idea that Artificial General Intelligence were achieved, their voice is moot anyway.
- spwa4 3mo agoEver since the 1960's we've had AIs that beat aspects of human intelligence. These days AIs are "godlike intelligence" at boardgames, visual recognition, programming (know any programmer, no matter how good, that can get a fluid dynamics simulation from scratch in 2 minutes?), reading comprehension, understanding humans (both speed and accuracy), ... and so on and so forth), and every few years something gets added to the list (I particularly enjoyed robotic ping pong. And it's "not really" AI (kind of, convnets certainly work best, but yes you can code it by hand if you control the environment). But you're not winning even a single ping pong game, it's just not happening) Every time people find something they're still superior at and declare whatever that is the most important thing in the universe. Perhaps a more useful definition of AGI would be an intelligence good enough that it can go from raw materials to a working AI at least as good as itself ...
- consumer451 3mo agoIf you sell "AI" maybe, if you sell products that happen to use LLMs to provide services previously not possible, the money still exists in my experience. When I first heard of tokenmaxxing, I thought it had to be a joke. But no, it turned out to be a widespread phenomenon. I still cannot believe that was a thing. What I keep saying in internal meetings is: "I am so glad these people are this bad at deploying these tools." It really leaves the door open for folks like us.
- Spooky23 3mo agoIt’s a forcing function. If you are running a company you need to be in control. Some engineers dngaf or will sandbag everything. We did a 90 day push and identified where we found value and where we didn’t. Our tools teams really upped their game, more than expected, and it would have been unlikely to have been funded if they tried to justify the budget as an individual initiative. There’s a spectrum of people - some folks are building rando apps for fun with LLMs, and many don’t really know what’s possible becuase they don’t or can’t invest in the subscription to really use the tools at home.
- satvikpendem 3mo agoExactly. People misunderstand the point of the tokenmaxxing time period, it was to force people to use AI so as to not have them stuck in their way, as some people are, and then to evaluate how it can help the company.
- consumer451 3mo agoOK, that is an interesting take I had not considered. Thanks to both of you.
- vehemenz 3mo agoThis is a good point. You need to immerse yourself in a Max plan for at least a month, ideally much longer, to understand where the benefits are. If you don't have the flexibility to regularly push your context to 1M, or do elaborate xhigh planning sessions, your opinion won't reflect reality.
- bestouff 3mo agoNowadays I don't understand why you wouldn't use a (more-or-less) nearby hosted Chinese model. You have the security, you have roughly the same performance, and you have an order of magnitude more bang for your buck. Bonus point : the models aren't censored and won't refuse to answer in the middle of your coding session.
- rhyperior 3mo agoIs censorship not an issue with Chinese models?
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- trollbridge 3mo agoFar less than OAI or Anthropic’s censorship. If you really care about it, you can use a completely uncensored edition of Qwen.
- Blackthorn 3mo agoIt's about whether or not their censorship affects you. Their models are censored for the Chinese audience. Meanwhile Anthropic OpenAI etc models are censored for the American audience. So by default you'd be better with one of the Chinese models if you're American.
- vehemenz 3mo agoThe restrictions aren't symmetric at all. Chinese models have government-enforced censorship, while American models have security and legal restrictions.
- throw-the-towel 3mo agoTheir deplorable censorship, our necessary legal restrictions. Potayto, potahto.
- 3mo ago
- paxys 3mo agoYet OpenAI and Anthropic combined are somehow making $100B in revenue...
- gonzalohm 3mo agoWhat's the source for that? I see a combined revenue of ~33B by looking on the Internet. And we should assume that that's after some crazy financial juggling
- preommr 3mo agoYea, that tracks. I just looked it up and AWS made ~130bn. Given how big AI is, and how those two are pretty much the only players (in comparison aws is 1/3 market share), that seems about right. It's a far cry from "nobody's going to be writing any code, and ai will do all the things in 6 months".
- amazingamazing 3mo agoSource?
- 6stringmerc 3mo agoEnron was doing really well with creative accounting too. Non-GAAP numbers are out of control in 2026. The unwinds are going to be stunning eventually. Also, my small portfolio is worth a billion! In Yen, but it’s still an accurate claim.
- Eggpants 3mo agoAnd yet two orders of magnitude from making a profit…
- cr125rider 3mo agoCapx vs. Opx dreams
- larrymcp 3mo agohttps://archive.is/osBJs https://archive.is/osBJs
- spacebacon 3mo ago[dead]
- datakan 3mo ago"Trust me bro" - Wall Street Journal
- ck2 3mo agohow long until the too-big-to-fail bubble bursts so I can buy a hard drive again?
- mdp2021 3mo ago> so I can buy a hard drive again Well, that is unless the burst also brings a general collapse. Some are seeing similarities with 2008.
- claysmithr 3mo ago:(
- chasd00 3mo agoI work in a large corp, I thought it was odd to be encouraged to spend as much money as possible regardless of outcome. Like folks down the ladder a few rungs actually had AI use as part of their KPIs. Didn’t matter what they used AI for they just had to use so many tokens per week or their EOY bonus “could be affected”.
- therealdrag0 3mo agoAgree, though there’s something to be said about many engineers dragging their feet hard on AI, and now very few are. Some of that is forcing them to try and learn how to use it.
- blinded 3mo agoIt does take a bit of tokens and some thought to get a workflow that produces output in a way that works for the user. Simple youtube "ai workflows" and you will be inundated with options.
- tysilva 3mo agoEverytually there needs to be a stronger enforcement of "right model for the task". The landscape currently lends itself to flexibility. And people tend to lean on the more costly options expecting a better end result.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo agoAlternative to archive.is No Javascript, text-only tnftp -4o "|grep -o '<p>.*</p>' \ |tr -d '\134' \ |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8>/'" \ https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA28DBlh > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm #links 1.htm #elinks 1.htm
- NexBDM 3mo ago[flagged]