- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/26/ai-cost-human-workers Uber’s chief technology officer already blew through his full 2026 AI budget due to token costs, according to The Information.
Lol. Lmao even
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Pretty sure the point was to drive down the price of labour?
Not the only point. No one to complain or so you when you say to do something immoral ,unethical, illegal, hateful, or just plain old evil.
Not having to worry about hire/fire cycles, can just turn off and on as needed. Can make AI work 24 hours a day everyday assuming you have lobbied to get unfair access/cost to/on the energy
And you can have it tell you anything you want it to when you have board meeting
I’m not sure how you don’t think that all translates into labour value. These are expenses and the fake narrative that this technology is even capable of labour is itself oriented around making human labour less valuable. It’s always been about reaping even more from the only resource they have difficulty owning completely.
You would THINK that of all people on the planet, CEOs should understand the enshittification strategy.
…Or the board of directors, or the major investors, etc.
If you outsource the entire value chain of your $million/billion business to the $trillions guys, how do you think that will go? What would YOU do in their place knowing you have all the leverage and none of the risk (re: the smaller companies being bled dry and left to rot)?
It’s funny to see it happen to other predatory tech companies like uber though.
“Of course it can’t happen to me! It only happens to my idiot users, and I am not an idiot!” [expense blows out of control] “We’re going to have to let go more people for budget reasons. You see people use tokens, and tokens are expensive! We’ll have less people who will use more AI to replace them, I was told the last version improves further productivity!”
It’s not about the money, it never was. If it were a matter of costs, subcontractors would have never existed.
They just have wet dreams of businesses that run without having to rely on humans. That’s all.
Humans ask for raises, get sick, want vacations or just want to get the fuck out of there and do something else than working. That’s communism, in their book: You all not being a bunch of docile slaves.
I don’t know who is gonna end up buying the products they sell, anyway…
We’ve seen that trend for decades already. Neo-liberalism was all about trickling up wealth created by work.
But you see that in all advanced economies: commoners budget are tighter and tighter as cost of life increase faster than wages. That’s the expected outcome of neo-liberalism.
Now politicians pretend the housing crisis is an anomaly and car makers wonder why sales are slowing down. AI is bad, but it only accelerates and amplifies what was already happening.
I remember companies doing this with cloud services.
CEO: Get rid of everything on-prem, the cloud sales person said cloud is cheaper!
First year cloud coats are more than 3 year depreciation of on-prem equipment
CEO: Huh…welp it’s impossible for me to be wrong, so we’re just going to say it was cheaper.
Those same managers eleven seconds later when they get an ad for a new startup making the same obviously empty promises as the last startup:
They love those the most because they integrate them and then use it to justify a promotion or move so they can get out of Dodge before the inevitable explosion happens on the next guys watch. The next guy blames the previous guy and then repeats the process.
this better not awaken anything in me
is dhat two things edited together?
You don’t remember this iconic scene?
An OpenAI investor told Axios that the shift could benefit them, since they view Codex as superior to Claude Code at maximizing tokens efficiently, cutting down on usage costs.
Oh boy, wait till he learns about Chinese models. American AI companies and their investors are in deep trouble 🥳
This feels predictable. AI is one of, if not the most invested in yet unprofitable industries in the history of humanity.
The last few years have been the beta and the tech demo. But that is not paying for itself yet. US companies are competing with (and falling behind) Chinese state-sponsored companies. OpenAI in particular, a company whose revenue doesn’t even cover half of their operating costs, has extended themselves into owing more than a TRILLION dollars to the entirety of big tech who are building chips and data centers on these IOUs, and will need to be paid sooner or later. The bills will come due.
Other corporations are already paying massive bills for licensing, tokens, training, and infrastructure changes to accommodate this shift to AI while laying off massove chunks of skilled workers on the idea that AI is cheap and will get cheaper over time. But that is simply not the case. This is the “first taste is free” part of this deal. Once they have companies deeply invested in AI and have destroyed the fabric of the labor economy in favor of it, that price is going to skyrocket because OF COURSE IT WILL.
Maybe at some point this will all level out. AI bubble will pop. Prices will sky rocket. Companies will try to backpedal, which will be slow and difficult, they’ll end up paying AI companies huge sums while they work to decouple themselves after just forming the bond, they’ll also end up paying stupid money to professionals who are suddenly in high demand, and many companies won’t survive the chaos. But the ones that do will settle into a new equilibrium.
AI will eventually get cheaper (but probably never this cheap again, at least not in the near future), and it will probably be a permanent fixture in our lives and work to some degree. But it’s usefulness and cost effectiveness will be limited in scope, with specialized purposes. It will not ultimately be the great labor replacement companies think/thought it would be, even as stupid and short sighted as that desire is in the first place (if 30% of the global work force is unemployed, how do you think that will effect your revenue, morons!?). But that also is assuming that the coming chaos doesn’t turn out so bad that AI is permanently legislated into oblivion after the chaos it’s about to cause.
AI is one of, if not the most invested in yet unprofitable industries in the history of humanity.
I think there are some Dutch tulip farmers who would like a word with you
Not quite the same. The tulip industry was making money hand over foot. It was the speculators that ended up being shafted. Tulip mania was more comparable to the beanie babies craze, or even NFTs. AI companies, on the whole, are making no profit at all.
It makes more sense if you position Ai companies as the speculators and chip makers as the actual tulip producers.
It would if all the the chip makers weren’t making chips on credit from a broke ass industry. Though they’ll likely get paid with a bailout including interest, so… they will probably still make out alright regardless
hey you leave us out of this!
that was a long time ago, and now approx a 3rd of flowers worldwide come through here in one of the top ten largest open buildings in the world (still) and we invented the Dutch auction…so suck it
Didn’t that last a month (shorter by a factor of 50 so far)?
Good stuff. One small note: I’m not sure how useful the distinction of “Chinese state-sponsored companies” is in recent history when comparing to the US, let alone now. The US has retooled much of federal research engine toward promoting US AI. Even fired the NSB (among many other long standing, expert driven advisory boards) to replace it with a bunch of tech baron stooges. States are offering unprecedented payouts to data centers. The AI hyperscalers already have a bailout all but guaranteed when the bubble pops. It’s all state-sponsored, just with extra steps.
The Chinese AI companies being state sponsored just means that they can go longer and throw more money at development without turning profit than other investor driven companies.
The US is certainly throwing a bloated amount of money at AI too. And a much as it infuriates me, they’ll almost certainly absorb the bubble pop with tax another bailout for criminal corporate behavior. But it’s not quite been a direct pipeline of openly flowing cash, just yet. They’re still paying for discrete contracts which have to be approved in the budget. They’ve been massive contracts, but they’re still making these companies compete e each other for them too. Like with the recent flip from DOJ contracts with Anthropic to OpenAI, for example.
In China, they’re buying in supporting the entire industry. They’re building infrastructure for AI data centers, giving them grants and subsidies, have direct ownership in the companies, and had made specific carve outs in their laws to give AI development deregulated room to do what it needs. I’m not in favor of either approach. Just pointing out that China’s approach does seem to have been an advantage in the AI race, or at least was enough of one that they made up a ton of ground, and maybe passed their US counterparts.
I like how they say “now” like the billionaires won’t keep jacking the fees up.
Maybe… just maybe… the ones at the top with all the money should not be the ones with the least knowledge and the worst skillsets.
Yeah no shit. You get people dependent on your product, then Jack up the price
Corpo fell for the oldest corpo trick.
“Why did you destroy your company to just inflate your next quarter bonus?”
“It is my nature”
“Lol.” Said the scorpion. “Lmao.”
it in ymmature
It’s funny too because at our company people keep repeatedly asking “what are you gonna do when they predictably jack up the rates?”
And every time “don’t worry about that right now. We’re keeping a close eye on it. “
Uh huh.
And it’s from their own playbook
That was always the reason AI was put into everything.
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Perhaps it is my bias as someone who studied AI at the university, but I never believe it when someone claims to loose job due to AI. AI never fired you, AI never managed to replace you. Your manager is just bad at making business decisions, as most managers are nowadays. Current rich world of big successful companies was built on competent managers, those people are now either dead or too old to work and their replacements will drive us back to the medieval times while pretending they know best.
There are good, valid, profitable uses for AI. They are not pushed by big companies, rather utilized by small actors who fly under radar.
If your new work colleague Gerald introduces himself by knocking you over the head with a frozen chicken, it’s as correct to say “ow, I’ve been hit with a chicken!” as it is to say “ow, I’ve been hit by Gerald!”
If your boss says “I’ve hired this guy Gerald to do your job instead of you because I can pay him in frozen chickens, you’re fired!” you can say “damn, I’ve lost my job due to Gerald!” just as much as you can say “damn, I’ve been fired by my boss!”
So, losing your job because your management has made the shitty decision to use AI instead of employing you can be accurately described as “losing your job due to AI.”
Anyway, fuck the boss and fuck Gerald.
So few people seem to have an innate understanding that two things can suck simultaneously
That sounds just like an excuse to hate one more person…
You’re smart. The market needs a major correction and everyone knows its coming. But now with the advent of AI, you can fire people and pretend it’s a good thing and keep your stock price high!
It’s almost like it was an obvious and stupid pile of lies and shit the entire time. If only literally everyone with a brain had been constantly pointing that out literally the entire time, then we could have done better, right?
CEOs learning
Bet
Cap?
No, ong
These companies have been tokenmaxxing i.e. judging employee performance based on how many tokens they use, so employees are incentivized to use up as many tokens as possible, even if it doesn’t actually improve productivity (and can actually result in the opposite).
My favourite quote about analytics:
“A measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure.”
Which happens often when you focus too hard on kpis.
This is what happens when you reward people based on token usage. People no joke can just put in before every PR “review every detail, be very thorough, make sure it fits into everything, check for every possible undefined behavior etc.” while giving the model a massive doc with list of all files in the project.
Not even sure if they check the prompts because “review formatting of the entire codebase” is also super heavy in a large repo but if prompts get checked it’s an obvious token sink.
The model will just ransack the whole project every time through the whole stack when you could enforce a contract with a couple of tests with strict input validation.
Uber has the dumbest AI policy in the industry.
