By now, it’s clear that the only way the tech industry can justify the cost of AI is if it replaces vast swaths of the human workforce with machines that run 24/7.
The bad news is that this situation has created a world-historic financial market that, by some metrics, is looking worse than the run-up to the Great Depression. The good news is that this future of an AI takeover is looking increasingly unlikely, at least at the industry’s current pace, a fact which is now dawning on some of the biggest rubes and dupes in the corporate world.
According to a new survey from “Big Four” accounting firm KPMG, a significant number of corporate executives are reeling from sticker shock over new usage-based AI pricing schemes. Though enterprises could once count on AI companies to subsidize the price of large language models via flat-rate contracts, that’s no longer a given, as the rising cost of computational power forces the entire tech sector into a defensive posture.
OMFG. AI costs money to use, and you cannot remove the human points of accountability in a workflow. People who can’t understand these basic concepts shouldn’t be in charge of anything.
Gee…
Who would have guessed that the techbros would start charging a shit ton more money once they had captured market share…
I’m honestly surprised how long it took, I figured the second companies fired humans for AI, they’d jack up the rates
I think that hasn’t even happened yet, the companies just assumed it would be cheaper
Then you disagree with both the article, the survey it references, and reality…
As usage-based pricing models become more common, many organizations are still building the capabilities required to forecast, monitor, and manage AI spending effectively,” the report authors write. Translation: one third of execs had no plan for how to actually use AI productively, a fact which is becoming increasingly clear now that the meter is running.
The finding underscores what many workers forced to use AI tools on the job have come to suspect: that an alarming number of corporate leaders treat AI as a plug-and-play solution for lowering overheard without understanding the how of it all, a kind of magical thinking entirely divorced from practical reality.
They drove adoption with flat fees, pay $X and get all you can slop for a month
Now it’s token based, that kid you hired to be good at computers now eats $1k a day on AI to produce work a human needs to redo anyways.
It was treated as a flat monthly expense which made it cheaper than humans.
So companies pivoted to AI and fired humans.
Now they charge by usage and AI is more expensive than humans.
How the actual fuck do you not think that’s happened yet?
All the brilliant people jacking each other off and sitting on each others boards probably didn’t have time between all the self-congratulatory bullshit about their collective “leadership” to even read the executive summary of the thesis around enshittification, I guess.
I have to love it when lots of people just mindlessly doing what they think “everyone else” is doing is called “leadership”. Sorry, that’s called behaving like a herd animal.
FFS, you could replace a lot of the asshats in corporate boardrooms and on mahogany row with bash scripts and not even use AI and probably save a metric shit-ton of money, but that would give up the whole game, I guess. Imagine spreading that wealth to all of the people actually doing all the thinking and the goddamned work, even in spite of really shitty management.
I’d love to see some “KPIs” applied to the douchebags that do all this kind of stuff, while trying to stack-rank all of their employees and monitor all their communication with AI and so on…
how do you agree to the payment scheme and accept the work and then gauff at the bill. this is some serious idiotocracy type of shit.
It sounds like companies started using these systems with flat rate billing ($10000/mo.) and later the ai companies moved clients to usage based billing ($10/1k tokens).
I think this is the kpmg report? https://kpmg.com/xx/en/our-insights/ai-and-technology/ai-pulse.html
Which paints an extremely rosy picture of AI compared to this futurism article. I’m in no way a fan of AI, but I dunno if this kind of cherry-picking helps…
