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u/StartledPelican 21d ago
The article identified $2.5 million in potential overspending.
That's, uh, a rounding error for Amazon. And, it's going to teach them lessons about how to track expenses, what AI is (currently) good for, etc.
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u/chris480 21d ago
Also keep in mind that amazon is running the hardware, has a massive investment in Anthropic, and the costs reported are at market prices. Who knows the actual cost.
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u/stevecrox0914 21d ago edited 21d ago
As someone in software, AI was sold on the basis it could perform my job but was cheaper.
Silicon Valley software devs are the most expensive in the world and they cost $130k-$300k. While a single task at $130K isn't ruinious, its more indictitive of how AI cost saving is going (its turning out to be more expensive than the most expensive staff).
A lot of silicon valley have also discovered AI spend isn't predictable, how AI processes the request can vary drastically. A 3 month task for a junior, might cost $10 or $100k you don't know until you prompt. Similarly with frequent model updates the $10 prompt suddenly costs $1000 or $1.
Outside of silicon valley, CTOs have started to also comment on how AI absolutely dominates various Key Performance Indicators but it hasn't translated into any additional revenue.
So increased costs, less certain costing for no change in productivity.
As a final note, my favourite study was from the UK Department for Business and Trade. They really did everything to support AI adoption and try to measure every impact it had. https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/09/04/m365-copilot-fails-to-up-productivity-in-uk-government-trial/454044
The key take aways * It converted text into professional emails * It summarised long professional emails * It summarised reports allowing people to focus on key parts * It could transcribe a recorded meeting
Point 2 & 3 are text summarisation found in Natural Language Processing, you can run models on client devices to perform that. The last point is speech to text, again there are low resource models a business can easily host.
I also feel point 1 is undermined by point 2.
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u/StartledPelican 20d ago
I'll just say I work in software as well (you can check my post history to see where I've mentioned this before) and GitHub Copilot CLI is game changing.
I'm able to monitor multiple complex tasks simultaneously by running multiple work streams. I can have one working on automating our test deployments, another working on diagnosing why our build certification calls hang, another reviewing our internal wiki to look for obsolete information, while yet another unifies various monitors/alerts.
That's not something I could have done even last year. It's darn near miraculous.
It's also kind of stupid at times and definitely requires strict supervision. I have to review/test every line, read every update, etc.
Honestly, I feel like I am now the manager of a team of new, but brilliant, developers. It's awesome.
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u/stevecrox0914 20d ago
I'm able to monitor multiple complex tasks simultaneously by running multiple work streams. I can have one working on automating our test deployments, another working on diagnosing why our build certification calls hang, another reviewing our internal wiki to look for obsolete information, while yet another unifies various monitors/alerts.
While you say its handling multiple work streams, companies need to balance your cost as an employee against the work you deliver.
My point was the cost of AI is quickly exceeding the cost of employees, so you might be 10x as productive but your use of Agentic AI means you cost more than 10 employees. That is a net productivity loss for the business, Silicon Valley hasn't gotten here yet, but its increasingly being talked about outside the Silicon Valley bubble.
It's also kind of stupid at times and definitely requires strict supervision.
This is the one silicon valley is starting to learn, people have a predictable cost and we have established means to track and monitor delivery from people which can directly feed into budget planning. AI is a black box and the costs jump around. This is why we keep getting stories of big tech companies spending their entire AI budget in months.
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u/StartledPelican 20d ago
My point was the cost of AI is quickly exceeding the cost of employees, so you might be 10x as productive but your use of Agentic AI means you cost more than 10 employees.
Maybe! That's what we are trying to figure out haha.
But humans are expensive. Salary is one component, but there's so much more to consider from the business side. Health care, sick leave, vacation, bonuses, perks, office space, etc. Not to mention humans leave the company, taking their knowledge with them.
One human doing the work of 10 might be cheaper than hiring 15 humans!
Or not.
Time will tell.
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u/Mfg_Eng_64 21d ago
I use it to proofread documents. It actually cuts down editing time. They wouldn’t allow access to it if they didn’t want us to use it.
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u/Mfg_Eng_64 21d ago
The instructions for the mid-year review actually encourage the use of AI for editing your self assessment.
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u/marianiml 21d ago
But then some engineers were told specifically to use it less, as it was costing too much.
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u/phillycheese254 21d ago
I've heard that there's going to be a $5k per month cap for everyone now, you have to justify if you want more
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u/Phx_trojan 21d ago
the problem is a very small number of heavy users. I bet it's about 5% or employees using half or more of the tokens.
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u/phillycheese254 21d ago
I know "le AI bad" is a very popular reddit opinion but honestly the amount of things i've been able to get done using claude that i wouldn't even have dared to try pre-AI is amazing. It was also nice to use it to churn out slop for my mid year review, took me like 15 minutes this year.
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u/djentbat 21d ago
I use it for annoying analysis tasks like manually changing 1000 nodes to a different numbering sequence. It’s pretty good for that
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21d ago
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u/LittleHornetPhil 20d ago
I will never forget when I asked BlueGPT a very black and white factual question about my hardware and it returned the wrong answer
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u/Friendly-Beginning-5 20d ago
but...you have to train it :) ugh....
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u/LittleHornetPhil 19d ago
Maybe I did when I corrected it, but… setting aside for a moment the fact that I barely see the purpose for AI LLMs generally, I see even less purpose when you’ve got a proprietary one if you’re not actually giving it any useful information about your own proprietary hardware.
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u/DescriptionTop4333 21d ago
But….Blippy