This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm not smart enough for there to be this many people stupider than me.
Picture how stupid the average person is. Now, realize that half the planet is stupider than him.
-- Someone somewhere
Big same
Spending a few pounds a month on AI and sleep an hour longer or do whatever while an agent is doing my job, that doesn't sound like the worst idea to me.
I'm sorry you're like this.
According to the article, they use the gained time to do more work. This doesn't seem like a win to me, they do more work but still are paid the same. In fact, if they pay for AI, then they get even less while providing more value to the corporation.
Reading this, all I can think about is all the confidential information that are probably getting leaked to the AI providers.
I mean, there's right way to do this.
The wrong way to do this is to spend your own money trying to compete with unrealistic efficiency targets.
This is how you make your CISO cry.
I have at least 1 colleague who does this. Has a Claude subscription despite being provided with github copilot.
I dont understand how the microsoft AI is so bad though. I dont use much AI thankfully but any experience I have had it is the worst. Chatgpt is better and from mt understanding it is the basis for it.
Github copilot is a totally different product from Microsoft copilot. Github copilot is just a harness for any model. I can use openai, anthropic, google, etc. models.
I presume you have to subscribe to the model to point github to it? Is that how repos show anthropic or whichever model is used as contributors?
No. They handle that. You get so many credits that get used at different rates depending on the model.
You can burn through your months allowance in 10 minutes using Fable then your employer just gets billed the coverage. I think it's based on the provider's API pricing so just using Claude or codex directly is probably cheaper.
If you have it do the work entirely and make PRs itself then Copilot is listed as the author regardless of model. E.g. you can assign it an issue and it'll go and do it itself. I don't use that though because it's bad at it.
I tend to just prompt it to write snippets as part as whatever I'm working on to save some typing.
These numbers seem somewhat mysterious to me, this would account for like 2-3% of all anthropic+openai's revenue. I'm not sure exactly what that would mean but that can't be good (for those companies) given how much those subscriptions are subsidised.
17% surveyed said they paid for their own AI tools.
Extrapolating that to the size of the UK workforce, that's around 5-6 million people.
That's ~£166-200 per person per year, which is less than the premium ChatGPT or Claude plans, but more than the entry-level paid plans. That passes the sniff test, though I still find it kind of hard to believe.
What I really want to know is how much person-time are these people indirectly wasting with sloppy work? Because I absolutely do not believe that many people can use AI effectively. I've seen too much to believe that. How much of this is just morging?
I wasn't really disputing the numbers per se (although I do actually find it hard to believe 17% of workers pay for AI subscriptions...) but more wondering about, given that their combined revenues are somewhere around 50 billion USD, what the consequences of such a large fraction of that coming from heavily subsidised consumer use would be.
Yeah, the business model is not sustainable. They're playing with funny money for now. There are only a few ways for them to make real money: raise prices a ton, scale back model sizes, and focus on government/military contracts (i.e. steal from taxpayers).
Oh, and enshittify. Enshittify like no one's ever enshittified before.
They're already starting, on all fronts.
OpenAI is raising prices like mad this year, and imposing stricter usage limits. They just basically cut the value of their $200/month plan in half while introducing a new $500/month plan. API costs also doubled for some models back in May.
Recently there was an article saying how AI costs are falling by 13x per year: https://archive.is/U0Fju . So as time goes on, they'll likely be able to offer "similar" levels of performance for drastically lower costs, and just pocket the difference.
Today's smaller models compare favorably with the biggest models from 2-3 years ago. ChatGPT 3.5 was a "big deal" in 2024, and now you can run a model that performs better on a decent laptop or even a high-end smartphone, basically for free. Small open models keep improving at a steady rate.
They're indirectly jacking up prices of electronics so much that consumer-level hardware is basically frozen in time, and in some cases even regressing. Look at Microsoft re-introducing 8GB Surface laptops after spending so much marketing money telling people they had to go up to a minimum of 16GB. If I re-built my PC today with the same specs, it would cost about double what I paid a few years ago. So maybe people actually won't be able to run anything on their own hardware in the near future. Like Uber and AirBNB and Amazon before them, they could start to look comparatively better than the alternatives by destroying the entire fucking market around them. I don't know how long that will hold though. It can't stay like this forever.....right? Right?!?
