this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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[–] orioler25@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

Unions probably would have gone a long way during all this.

[–] ozoned@piefed.social 75 points 4 days ago (12 children)

Literally was in a presentation at work the other day where they said someone used 2 million tokens and the next person used 1 million and they were so excited by it.

I didn't get it. I asked went 2 million was better than 1 million. The VP basically said it's not, just costs us more money.

So why the hell is the presentation acting like it's a fucking victory?

[–] rainwall@piefed.social 44 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

Because they believe that AI will replace payroll, which is generally a businesses highest expense. The more AI usage, the more likely they can eliminate jobs and give themselves bonuses.

They are excited the way a farmer is excited when his pigs are gorging themselves on grain and are getting really, really fat. The farmer is glad to pay for grain because its much cheaper than the money he makes from selling them for meat.

They are giddy because its almost time for payday.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 13 points 3 days ago (8 children)

payroll, which is generally a businesses highest expense

This is something that changed in the industry; it was a investment back then.

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[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 15 points 3 days ago (28 children)

I wonder at what point government will tax AI use by companies similarly to payroll taxes and incomes taxes.

If they pay an AI company $150,000 a month to replace $50,000 in salaries, the government then loses all that income tax from the previous employees as well as the payroll tax on $600k a year.

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[–] RamenJunkie@midwest.social 12 points 3 days ago

Because AI use is up! The FUTURE!

[–] shuffle3765@sh.itjust.works 11 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Because it's a proxy metric for adoption. Currently you generally want your engineers to be using it as much as you can afford to so that they all learn and improve and adapt existing processes etc

[–] deeves@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days ago

Also, I've been noticing more and more APIs are adopting a policy where they get rid of any unused credits that you've paid for at the end of the month, creating a 'use it or lose it' FOMO mentality.

All very normal and sane.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Which is a stupid mindset.

"Go forth and burn tokens and your performance will be measured on that"

Looks like I'm going to make a for to ask for a for every word in /usr/share/dict/words. Look at all the tokens I burned.

It doesn't reflect upon business value, performance, or education.

It's even worse than the disastrous lines of code metric.

Their problem is they have no idea what to expect, so to signal affinity to hype, they just measure tokens.

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[–] RagingRobot@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago (3 children)

But why force adoption? If it's really good people would adopt it naturally like we do with every other tool. Why for this really expensive one, do we now flip the whole system on its head?

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[–] VinegarChunks@lemmus.org 8 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Engineers under such incentives should ask AI how to most easily and speedily consume as many credits as possible, I bet it knows a great way

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[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 110 points 4 days ago (2 children)

At least some times Rohan gets it right, and they get it more right over time.

[–] Rooster326@programming.dev 56 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Besides do you have any idea how many Rohan(s) we can afford at $150,000/month?

🔄

[–] _lilith@lemmy.world 39 points 4 days ago (4 children)
[–] xtr0n@sh.itjust.works 22 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Total cost of employment is something like 140-160% of salary for a software dev. So my super handwavy half pulled out of my ass math puts it closer to 20 jr. engineers.

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[–] megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 3 days ago

They’re all moving to tokens based billing to stop the bleeding. The markets aren’t as willing to let them burn infinite cash on operating expenses anymore. A lot of the private investors see the writing on the walls, that these AI companies are not worth anywhere near the valuations, and propping them up to ensure further datacenter build out to keep Nvidia shares high is costing more than it’s worth.

A lot of the model providers are lining up for ipos to cash out their initial investors and dump the responsibility of the mess on the public markets. They have to jack their prices to pretty up their books if they want to cash out with an IPO though. The unlimited access for a flat monthly cost shtick was obviously never a viable business model. They’ve all been spending massively more on inference than they’ve been taking in subscriptions, and even with the changes to token based billing, they still will be.

Anthropic is claiming that they will have their first “profitable” month soon, but that’s actually just a magic trick of book keeping. They’re deferring some cost of compute for a few months, and accepting a bunch of pre payments from customersr. Basically pretending to have high revenue and lower cost by shifting when the payments are made. And then on top of that they’re jacking up prices and thus decreasing their demand with the shift to tokens.

Everyone is running around rearranging deck chairs on the datacenter titanic hoping they can keep their feet dry a little longer.

[–] laz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 35 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Dude my nephew was telling me this an AI company galytix is literally running on Indian grads and claiming to be ai what a scam

[–] Nighed@feddit.uk 58 points 3 days ago

AI: Actually Indians

[–] VinegarChunks@lemmus.org 11 points 3 days ago (5 children)

I really wonder to what degree “Self Driving Vehicles” are being completely or partially supervised and controlled by an overseas desk worker.

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[–] zewm@lemmy.world 54 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Is the face AI morphed or something? It looks uncanny valley weird.

[–] titty_wizard@lemmy.world 45 points 4 days ago

Jim halpert looksmaxxing in 2026

Dasgustin

[–] bert_macklin_fbi@lemmy.world 28 points 4 days ago

I don't think it registered until I read your comment. Maybe compression artifacts or something? Either way, I don't like it.

[–] ech@lemmy.ca 18 points 4 days ago (5 children)
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[–] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 36 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I don't understand the AI remake of Jim's face.

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[–] raman_klogius@ani.social 6 points 3 days ago

Palantir calls for aid! Would Rohan answer?

[–] Maultasche@lemmy.world 24 points 4 days ago

And Rohan will answer!

[–] Kaligalis@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

You can't even properly review the result of burning 4.5k in tokens with just a single senior dev.
The real limit still is how much high-skilled natural neural compute you got to make sure that the AI output is actually any good.

[–] Formfiller@lemmy.world 14 points 3 days ago

Is this AI jim?

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