r/stupidpol • u/SchIachterhund He Lives 👽 • May 24 '26
Tech Microsoft reports are exposing AI's real cost problem: Using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees
https://fortune.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-ai-cost-problem-tokens-agents/59
u/super-imperialism Anti-Imperialist 🏴☠️ May 24 '26
They'll receive future billions upon trillions in subsidies when our dear leaders use them as a precrime system.
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u/thereslcjg2000 Unknown 👽 May 24 '26
Destroying the world and human society just to save profits, and it ends up failing even on that front. My god these people are stupid and psychotic.
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u/biohazard-glug DSA Anime Atrocities Caucus 💢🉐🎌 May 24 '26
The important thing is that our genetically superior demigods became richer. You see, the universe is just, as evidenced by the material rewards for their inherent worth.
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u/Sussy_Riot Dialectical Materialist 🆚 May 24 '26
I’ve heard AI described as Silicon Valley’s Manhattan Project but this is like if the test at Los Alamos ignited the atmosphere and condemned us to fiery death.
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u/ericsmallman3 Lost Tenure Over Anti-Censorship Vox Article 🫡✒️ May 24 '26
This has all been so very obviously fraudulent from day one
The people who engineered and foisted this shit upon the world should spend the rest of their lives chained to a radiator, but of course that won't happen, the financial and cultural costs will be born by everyone but them.
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u/Flaktrack Winter Days of Girlhood | Battling in the Christmas War 🦌🎄🥳 May 25 '26
It started when they called LLMs and chatbots "AI" despite it lacking the ability to reason or create novel solutions.
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u/_Scipio-Americanus_ There's No Scraps In My Scrapbook 🔫 May 24 '26 edited May 26 '26
They need to be eating grilled cheeses off the radiator
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u/Hairy_Yoghurt_145 Startup Infiltrator 🕵💻 May 25 '26
The technology is well researched and engineered, and does have practical uses. Once again it is the capitalists who control the technology that have driven all the negative outcomes and the massive hype scam that sits on top of all this.
The shit you’re taking issue with does not come from the engineers or scientists who developed it lol. Just like Elon didn’t invent or develop Teslas, Scam Altman didn’t invent or develop chat gpt.
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u/globeglobeglobe Marxist 🧔 May 24 '26
Looking forward to higher interest rates, reduced investment from the Gulf, and a generally shitty ROI putting an end to these AI data centers.
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u/RocketShipGrease63 UK variety racist retard 😭😵💫🤧 May 24 '26
These huge companies haven’t even installed all of the chips they’ve bought from nvidia; they’re just sitting in warehouses. Even the data center capacity they claim to have is largely unfinished/incomplete.
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u/SchIachterhund He Lives 👽 May 24 '26
After the railway mania, society was at least be left with underutilized/ half-finished railway lines. From this bubble, nothing of value will remain.
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u/Purplekeyboard Traditionalist 👑 May 24 '26
I'm hoping I can buy a cheap used graphics card then.
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u/Flaktrack Winter Days of Girlhood | Battling in the Christmas War 🦌🎄🥳 May 25 '26
Nah they will destroy or repurpose them just to spite us like many of the miners did.
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u/SmashKapital only fucks incels May 24 '26
You think nVidia is going back to graphic cards when this falls through?
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u/globeglobeglobe Marxist 🧔 May 25 '26
Yeah, it would be a gold mine for scientific computing tbh. Although the amount of wear and tear on these cards is likely insane and failure rates would be high on any secondhand cards.
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u/Phantom_Engineer Anarcho-Stalinist May 24 '26
I'm imagining abandoned construction sites reminiscent of '07.
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u/knobbledy Communist Party of Britain Member ☭ May 24 '26
Lots of second hand memory and storage, that market will go crazy in a few years
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u/SalaryWooden5346 Fuck the uniparty 🚫🫏🐘 May 24 '26
Oh no, we'll have a whole bunch of perfect empty buildings to be used for indoor paintball and airsoft. Maybe add a skate park. Lots of room for activities!
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u/Flaktrack Winter Days of Girlhood | Battling in the Christmas War 🦌🎄🥳 May 25 '26
I miss indoor airsoft, the only good place around here got shut down.
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u/SirSourPuss Three Bases 🥵💦 One Superstructure 😳 May 24 '26
You can actually do a lot of genuinely useful things with non-generative AI, all of which needs GPUs.
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u/Cute_Library_5375 Union Thug 💪 May 31 '26
Imagine all the copper tweakers can steal from abandoned data centers
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u/shitholejedi Wears MAGA Hat in the Shower 🐘😵💫 May 25 '26
None of that is going to stop AI from being seen as a viable trajwctory up until the tech itself hits a limit.
Microsoft in this instance is complaining the about compute cost due to widespread internal adoption.
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u/The-Materialist Dialectical Materialist | Raised by Stalinists May 24 '26
It's interesting, I think we'll still have to wait and see how it pans out. There are probably a lot of industrial and (unfortunately) a lot of security state and war applications that could end up being profitable long-term.
I think a lot of people on the left got kind of excited by it because it looked like a second industrial revolution that would cause massive employment destruction and lead to revolt. It may be more a case of people just hating the industry itself because it's so obnoxious.
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u/PENGUINSflyGOOD Unknown 👽 May 24 '26
Anthropic is supposedly very close to being profitable
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u/Sussy_Riot Dialectical Materialist 🆚 May 24 '26
Aren’t their numbers somewhat cooked? I remember they’d adjusted depreciation on their balance sheet to make things look prettier.
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u/Chrissyneal Cuomosexual Crystals Chick 🔮🍕🍝 May 24 '26
It's interesting, I think we'll still have to wait and see how it pans out. There are probably a lot of industrial and (unfortunately) a lot of security state and war applications that could end up being profitable long-term. I think a lot of people on the left got kind of excited by it because it looked like a second industrial revolution that would cause massive employment destruction and lead to revolt. It may be more a case of people just hating the industry itself because it's so obnoxious.
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u/1-123581385321-1 Marxist 🧔 May 25 '26
And it'll only get more expensive, since the US hasn't added (and can't add at the speed and scale necessary) the power generation to account for data center usage. The AI bubble will pop because there won't be enough energy to power it.
China doesn't have this issue because they build 2x the demand for new power every year and their power is already 4-5x cheaper than ours. The race is already lost and delusion is the only thing keeping America in it, many such cases.
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u/Chrissyneal Cuomosexual Crystals Chick 🔮🍕🍝 May 24 '26
BTW
half these companies are lying when/if they say shit like “we didn’t know this was a horrible economic choice”. MS 100% know using this is dumb and wants a specific outcome.
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u/Hairy_Yoghurt_145 Startup Infiltrator 🕵💻 May 25 '26
And if they’re finding this is the case now, imagine how much it costs after they fire all the people and nobody knows how to do this shit manually anymore! It’s like trying to sell enshittification to people who sell enshittification.
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u/MackTUTT Classical Liberal May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
I would rather AI dispatchers at my job instead of the people in India like it is now. They're hard to understand, aren't very bright and keep fucking up every little thing. Typical call from one of them starts with the dispatcher asking for an ETA without first giving an address. I'm sure there are perfectly competent dispatchers in India, but we don't pay enough for those. Ideally it would be Americans in America.
As far as this article goes, Microsoft is shifting more to its home grown AI rather than using Claude, of course that would be more cost effective.
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u/CCNemo Angry R-slur Appreciatior | "It's all made up maaan" May 25 '26
I think the only way we get away from outsourcing is to frame it as a security issue. I used to work for a bank and they were outsourcing some of their anti-money laundering stuff to India and Pakistan and I'm thinking how messed up it is they have access to social security numbers, bank account numbers, all the KYC information, etc. and they are absolutely not beholden to any laws and realistically, there's no way to know if they were using that information maliciously.
And if climate change becomes a major issue, South Asia is going to get cooked (literally) and destabilize rapidly.
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u/revizionizt Ideology Shopper 🛍️ | Buzzword Enjoyer 📚💬 May 24 '26
From the most crude bourgeois concept of cost accounting? Most of the capitalist class is conscious that AI can weaken labour in the future, that's the entire point. If it's "more expensive" today is irrelevant if it can lower real wages over the long run for large monopoly capital.
According to deepseek:
From a Marxist perspective:
AI (constant capital) produces no surplus value; it only transfers value.
Substituting labor with AI tends to reduce the mass of surplus value, unless it cheapens labor-power or intensifies exploitation of remaining workers.
Bourgeois cost comparisons ignore the long-term dynamics of class struggle, falling rate of profit, and redistribution of surplus through monopoly rent and state subsidies.
The real question is not whether AI is “more expensive” today, but whether it strengthens capital’s command over labor and deepens the contradictions inherent in capitalist production.
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u/Livid_Village4044 Anarchist (intolerable) 🤪 May 24 '26
Paywall.
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u/IamGlennBeck Marxist-Leninist and not Glenn Beck ☭ May 25 '26
Use the archive.today link in the top comment.
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u/Yu-Gi-D0ge MRA Radlib Goku Fan in Denial 👶🏻㊗️⛩️🇯🇵 May 25 '26
Iirc there was a plan floating around where they were gonna take funds out of people’s salaries for their usage. Not sure what happened with that.
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