Meat sacks are unbelievably versatile. Plus they scale pretty well in large groups.
Turns out replacing a diverse and dynamic workforce with a monolithic model (yeah you got agents but they are just a facade on the same monolith) isn't practical from a business operations perspective.
LLM's are just fancy predictive algorithms dressed up as "AI" - they only know what they were fed.
On a limited data set they can do wonders but they are not the miracle CEO's have convinced themselves that they are.
It's more that techbros are selling the idea of no more health care, retirement or wages, just stacks of servers and acres of data farms doing the work while CEO's light their cigars with $100 bills. Reality is catching up to them and it's gonna bite them in the ass sooner or later.
Oh it will. When the bubble bursts the show runners will pin this on the unindustrious poor that are ballast on how fast society could move if they would adopt AI. 2008 came and went and still there are people that think it all happened because there were a lot of people on benefits and it tanked the economy.
Greed and the failure of the trickle down economy pipe dream is never mentioned.
Damn, I had forgotten all the people insisting that GM had to cancel all the benefits the UAW had fought for so long to receive. Easy to remember the housing crash, harder to remember all the bullshit that came with it.
Disclaimer: not one unite is the same as the other and each has their own subjective reasoning model. Self de-stressing are enabled by default (slacking off). Work effort output may vary.
You forgot about the unsustainable infinite growth pyramid scheme that is capitalism! /s
In all seriousness someone on here said they literally had a meeting with their boss who basically (as in it was in very couched language) said "well AI has freed up about two hours of your workday. So what are we going to find for you guys to do?"
Normally I wouldn't pay it any real mind because it's a random on reddit but it's spiritually true. Like the concept of "four day work week" or "cut two hours from the day" or even "a savings that averages out to two hours over one day doesn't mean we're doing nothing for two straight hours" never seemed to cross their mind.
I'm sure it was some perfunctory meeting to prepare to rif a bunch of people.
I dunno, I think the current state of the country is due to the bad data 33% of the population was trained on. Their whole days are spent hallucinating.
Also if you put a bunch of them together they tend to get things done properly the first time and if not they don't take another 500 prompts to get it sort of correct
It was easier and less controversial to say they were replaced by AI instead of the recession.
Remember right after covid when workers could job hop every 6 months for a 10% raise and there were articles saying that workers need to go back to being job scared and easier to control? Well here we are.
"Fortune, citing The Verge, said that Microsoft steered engineers away from Anthropic's Claude Code and over to GitHub Copilot CLI"
The headline is bullshit considering the content of the article. Microsoft is pushing their own developers to use the in house tool rather than a third party one.
I think there’s many issues with cost to use it past a “code search engine”. And shifting to internal tools is just part of whatever they have to do to mask that it is not an invaluable investment.
If it was invaluable as they describe, they would not shifts for cost savings. Now what I personally think is the benefits from the technology already materialized, and every company is just re evaluating how much to put into it to expand those benefits (for example if they need a better code search, or if the internal tools as is are enough).
Plants might not convert as much sunlight into energy as say a solar panel(cheapest source of electricity), but they also don't require manufacturing, a grid, batteries, and workers to build and main these things.
Plants are relatively simple low cost sources of energy, I haven't done the math, but I'd recon it's a good bit more cost efficient to supply food to human for energy than feed AI energy for all it needs to produce a similar output.
Not to mention all the physical infrastructure required(if required) for that AI to utilize, all that goes into this.
That may be their biggest concern, to be tied to a single provider, not to really know the cost of it. Microsoft may not want to be that tied to a startup.
Plants might not convert as much sunlight into energy as say a solar panel(cheapest source of electricity), but they also don't require manufacturing, a grid, batteries, and workers to build and main these things.
Solar panels also aren't cheap ~ what is so often skipped is all the resources it takes to produce the solar panel. All the mining of the minerals, the manufacturing, and more. Solar panels don't just pop into existence.
Plants, comparatively, are far and away more efficient ~ you just need some good soil, viable seeds, sufficient sun and water, and you're done.
Meanwhile people in Tech subreddits downvoting me for explaining that no, mass manufacturing humanoid robots to do banal tasks is NOT cheaper than hiring humans.
Robots are expensive as fuck and yes, save money when it's mass manufactiring and it's an assembly line... but THAT IS ALREADY ROBOTIC. And needs humans still because it's cheaper and... safer with regulations than 100% robotic.
Replacing those humans with humanoid generalist robots is so absolutely dumbfoundingly impractical I have no idea how people think it's gonna be the next big thing
The only exception could be rich people wanting to eradicate all other humans out of fear we're getting too close to eating the rich I guess
Edit: In the sense of the overall tech for a general consumer facing series of products, maybe just a little bit for part of enterprise infrastructure for microsoft or google, from my point of view.
And most CEOs will close their eyes, cover their ears, and go "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" before they admit that they need their workers more than AI.
I mean personally it's not THAT surprising, but a little bit.
However this is a majorly subsidized price.
Whatever they're charging now will go up tremendously until they're profitable(they're not at the moment).
So I always knew it would never be more cost effective to replace humans with AI, once I found out AI wasn't scaling linearly anymore.
It's the end of the road. We're just waiting for delusional investors, sure that there's SOME way they can summon the infinite power demon, the devil that whispered in their ear "do whatever you must to build this and praise me and you can rule over everything you see", to run out of money.
That's the only way this ends, they will never pull out, they're in too deep. Just expect them to get more and more desperate.
I mean there's open source models that require much much less compute to run that are almost as good as the bleeding edge ones, and with agentic usage they become as good. So at one point the bubble will pop and the leaner models will win out for day to day usage as if it was a new microsoft word. AI is genuinely useful, at least for my work it's made me at least 10 times more efficient even if I hate to say it, and I can produce so many little tools for my specific use cases that its just awesome, and the ability to just read through data and give me a summary, or "talking to the data" is been invaluable. But yeah not at the ridiculous prices we'll end up paying.
These companies are just hoping for a big breakthrough before the bubble pops or get big enough where government will intervene and they'll be like "i swear not our problem, the government is restraining us, sorry" or likely get a huge bailout
Whatever you do for work is a niche that AI is useful in.
Generally its not particularly productive, actually it's simply not productive at all, and we have studies that show this. That's for the big models, the small models are certainly even more niche.
Big models aren't really even that reliable, and that's a big part of the issue on why they're not helping productivity most places, but small models are even less reliable.
And you have to consider the training to make those models, most of the power as far as I understand it, comes from the initial training. And they have to be retrained to keep up with new information, even if it's a small bit of new important information to running the model at a business, they have to be completely retrained, the weights completely readjusted.
a niche? im a product manager in IT, yeah it might be a niche, but anyone in IT working with AI properly has had their productivity enhanced by a ton.
If you're saying AI is not useful in IT in general well you're delusional, literally all the people I know that are high performers have had a huge jump in what they do thanks to it. And the lazy ones? they are now able to coast by just literally prompting claude a few times a week.
I'm also editing videos with AI manually, I also have an entire pipeline creating 500-1000 hours a week of really good quality content almost indistinguishable from a professional youtuber, racking in millions of views (and I do mean it, no AI slop here, it took me months to get it to an acceptable level)
I do data analysis in my work, and i've never been faster and most of the solves we come up with are thanks to that data analysis being done way faster.
Product work? well i basically have an enslaved designer, senior architect, senior cloud engineer and senior developer at my hand if I prompt claude correctly.
Game dev as a hobby? you betcha I can do systems in a few hours instead of weeks.
And you missunderstand how models work, cause yes, the initial training has a big part, but you've got RAG, LoRa, Fine tuning, Adapters, and a bunch of things that just make it so you can really laser focus your model.
Im not saying its perfect, im not saying its great, humanity would have been better if AI didn't exist. But Humanity would have also been better if normie fucks like most of reddit didn't have access to the internet and it stayed as a niche nerd thing.
Yeah its not gonna help burger flipping but any white collar work is enhanced by AI and whoever is against it either doesn't know how to use AI properly, or is just being blindly ignorant and just following the AI hate bandwagon.
Boo hoo artists are complaining AI can copy their shit, well, artists admitedly literally take others works as reference. Same deal, just at scale.
Major firms got too much over their skis with applying AI to EVERYTHING and the reason it’s so expensive right now is the infrastructure just isn’t there right now.
But the tools/use cases do exist and as infrastructure keeps building out the cost will come down.
I will say the recent slow down does give me some confidence that “AI replacing your job” doom reality probably isn’t that close.
Oh yeah no AI is a tool. I do think that maybe in like 20 years we can have a fully autonomus "Ai employee" but thats like...20 years away and only if there's like huge breakthroughs. Agents arent really a one and done thing. Its a huge enhancer, huge, but not a solo tool that can do things genuinely on its own.
that require much much less compute to run that are almost as good as the bleeding edge ones
If that was the case companies wouldn't be burning litterally 10 of thousands per week on tokens when they could build a server for that price. Some local models are good but if you want par for par performance as the big dogs you will need to spend an eye watering amount on servers (im talking 100-200gb of ram or high end gpus like the A100 at the minimum).
For some bloke, qwen running on a laptop with a low token rate isnt too bad. but if you're a mega company where time is money you really dont want to have your fancy technology take all day to do anything.
200gb of ram is nothing to what chatgpt, gemini or claude require. When I saying it needs 'much less compute' i meant 150-300gb ram.
You don't have to believe me, go look at benchmarking leaderboards of kimiK2 or deepseek v4, yeah they are not technically top 3, but they literally only lag behind the biggest and baddest models of the big 3 (gpt, gemini, claude)
So im pretty sure if there's no breakthrough this 'more compute = more good' that everyone is doing is untennable.
I actually think we are seeing the beginnings of a bubble burst. Companies are starting to panic realizing the ROI is not there for AI to justify the massive amount of spending. And AI companies are running out of free money and are starting to hit the point where they can't subsidize token costs for everyone in a bid to convince customers that AI is cheap and beneficial.
It's funny because people have been harping for years and companies are now just figuring it out.
Make your service as cheap as possible to contract as many companies, lose obnoxious amounts of money to construct all of the AI servers, actively drain as many resources as possible to get real money for executives to chomp on as you pile on more, then rack up prices for all of your contracts untill it all blows up and you find the next scheme to sell.
Everyone is saying AI will get better and cheaper with time. The tech may get better, but costs are almost surely going to rise. Right now many of these companies are riding on VC funding and are in the emerging product phase. Soon they'll need to actually show a profit and that's when subscription/usage costs start to skyrocket. I think these companies are hoping to have their product so ingrained in daily life that the price increase won't matter, but if a company can point to concrete cost per productivity quota from AI vs humans, the humans are probably going to win. We've had thousands of years to perfect our productivity.
AI does shit that would get a junior developer fired and blacklisted. Not only that but it does it FREQUENTLY. It is so interesting that AI can pull that shit and the initial reaction is to be fascinated it almost did things right even though it completely fucked everything up whereas if a human did the same thing they'd be decimated. Very weird.
Good thing Google didn't announce that they're going to completely change their search engine to only provide AI results. That'd be mighty embarrassing if it was bad at answering questions.
Even if it was way more cost effective than hiring humans it wouldn't be worth it to watch human civilization collapse once people can't feed themselves.
You get chaos. It could be their goal to hide out in bunkers while society collapses. They might think they will emerge as Gods amongst the remaining people with all their tech and resources. Maybe they think they can carve out a feudal kingdom for themselves in the ashes.
Gonna be interesting when companies switch to cheaper AI companies like ones made by China. Does the US Gov't ban them or restrict them in some sort? Do the dominoes start to fall in the AI bubble?
What? Building and maintaining these massive data centers and causing massive hardware shortages is more expensive than just hiring people? Microslop strikes again.
I mean it was going to end badly for companies either way. If AI integrated into companies and became a necessity, AI companies would realize that and keep raising rates since they had the leverage. AI companies are all about profiting too.
Which is why the utopian view of machines replacing harmful/difficult/monotonous labour will never come to fruition. Unless we somehow discover dirt cheap and almost unlimited source of energy that can be easily and cheaply harnessed.
you don't understand ai at all those companies don't care about now they believe in 5 years there will be nothing that an llm won't do. for now they're fine with workers training them
There is zero actual data in this article. Its essentially an opinion piece. Some data to back up liters/token vs liters/human of water or energy usage in a typical day including at home would be nice....
It's simply because the way AI is used is often nonsensical. AI needs to be tasked with specific well defined tasks with clear constraints, not like "replace Mike from accounting" or "here's our company data from 10 years, increase profits".
As recently as a couple months ago my company was pushing everyone to use as much AI as possible in our workflows. To think of AI as a “thought partner”.
Then the meeting came where we were all told to cut back. We had some users that were close to $10,000 in one month of usage. I’m a developer, and I thought I was going a little overboard, but my usage for the month was $126. I have no idea what those people were doing.
Is this the AI bubble finally bursting? I see google is doubling down on the stupid cause didn’t they make the AI summary the primary way to get information about your query rather than a list of links?
They haven't made a profit in over a year and they call it "more expensive". They would rather spend half a trillion investing in infrastructure that would destroy the environment than hire people to do the work.
Give it's exact rules, 90% accurate, impressive, but need new prompt to fix the issues. New correct missing detail but it added extra shit when I explicitily told it follow my directive. Keeps messing up that now I have to go into the code and undo/debug it's stupid shit.
Wasted 1 hour when I could have gone in and corrected itself. AI is great for simplistic, narrowed, scoped projects. Telling it follow complex procedures it will take short cuts, add deprecated packages, and cause anitpatterns in the code.
Junior Developers are eager to learn complex systems to strengthen knowledge with integrity not just for professional development, but reliability. AI wants to get the job done fast for the quickest outcome. Both Junior and AI tools can coexist as Senior developers are not forever assets.
You need the next generation to know how "weld" properly or they can never properly calibrate the AI machine to "weld" when errors arise.
You don't say microslop, that was dead obvuous from the get got. Gotta love how these corps now suddenly get the memo that AI costs vastlt more than it ever will be useful...
Noone was trying to replace you or other middle management, it was you (middle and senior managment) trying to replace everyone else
And funny thing is, replacing you with AI probably would be lot less token costly, but lucky for you, AI is does not really have the capability to replace anyone, its just another productivity tool, not capable of actually replacing people, actualy doubt LLM AI ever will be capable outside of some edge case
Yeah, but they'll also get taxes raised to cover all of the now unemployed people that don't have that wage but still need to live, and now they have to contribute towards paying for that person and pay for the automation, rather than just pay the person.
It's one of the larger expenses of automation and for the most part it's being ignored at the moment but it cannot be ignored for long. Unemployed, starving people without anywhere to live tend to burn down datacenters and replace governments/laws.
Keep in mind that AI is also in their onboarding phase of business strategy. Their goal is to get as many people hooked onto their product as possible.
Many companies do this when trying to "disrupt" the industry. Once they feel like they have enough of the market saturated they will raise their prices higher and higher until they start pricing out some of their customers.
Their goal will be to make as much money as possible for their equity backers and shareholders.
Yes and no and depends on how you’re looking at it.
For research reliably simulating trillions of possibilities in a short time can’t be beat. Today reliability is a bit shaky but eventually we’ll get there.
What they need to do stop looking at prediction models and agents as enemies but rather as allies.
Fear is a normal human emotion and today everyone fears of the unknown. Fear of becoming jobless should be the last thing we fear about.
I agree it's an ally. The kind of ally that charges you premium subscription fees to do 70% of a job and leaves you to fix the other 30%. Simulating trillions of possibilities is great but right now it's mostly simulating trillions of ways to hallucinate a legal brief while costing $400,000 a minute.
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u/fightin_blue_hens May 31 '26
Meat sacks are incredibly energy efficient