• Kaligalis@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    You can’t even properly review the result of burning 4.5k in tokens with just a single senior dev.
    The real limit still is how much high-skilled natural neural compute you got to make sure that the AI output is actually any good.

  • shuffle3765@sh.itjust.works
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    13 hours ago

    Firstly why would you pay API prices when you can use the subscription plans for 20x less

    Secondly that much API spend would require dozens of senior engineers using it full time, like you’d be doing the work of an entire, quite large engineering team not a single junior

    • SleeplessCityLights@programming.dev
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      11 hours ago

      They are changing the pricing plans to move away from the subscription model to a metered model. Beause operating at a loss is not a long term goal. People have no idea what July is going to be like, when MS changes Copilot to metered in June it’s going to be bad. I checked the usage for my companies plan yesterday and we are going to be paying more. At least 2x. Good luck to the companies that are burning tokens as part of their business plan. Either they get massive bills and go broke, or lose access to Ai after 5 days.

    • RamenJunkie@midwest.social
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      12 hours ago

      Aren’t some of the LLMs moving away from the unlimited token subscriptions since they are losing a ton of money?

      I don’t really follow that, I would neverpay for an LLM.

    • Jiral@lemmy.org
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      12 hours ago

      Currently, yes. However, if you build your business on highly subsidised temporary prices, you are probably like the CEOs that can’t think further than their shareholders. If you believe there will be flat rates in the end I have a bridge to sell to you.

  • laz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    17 hours ago

    Dude my nephew was telling me this an AI company galytix is literally running on Indian grads and claiming to be ai what a scam

    • VinegarChunks@lemmus.org
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      11 hours ago

      I really wonder to what degree “Self Driving Vehicles” are being completely or partially supervised and controlled by an overseas desk worker.

        • ThirdConsul@lemmy.zip
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          8 hours ago

          0% my dude. There is no lvl 5 driving car. Anything below lvl 4 requires human supervision (how often is a different topic).

        • Jiral@lemmy.org
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          9 hours ago

          Source? Has it progressed so much? I remember substantial double digit percentages.

  • ozoned@piefed.social
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    22 hours ago

    Literally was in a presentation at work the other day where they said someone used 2 million tokens and the next person used 1 million and they were so excited by it.

    I didn’t get it. I asked went 2 million was better than 1 million. The VP basically said it’s not, just costs us more money.

    So why the hell is the presentation acting like it’s a fucking victory?

    • shuffle3765@sh.itjust.works
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      13 hours ago

      Because it’s a proxy metric for adoption. Currently you generally want your engineers to be using it as much as you can afford to so that they all learn and improve and adapt existing processes etc

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        Which is a stupid mindset.

        “Go forth and burn tokens and your performance will be measured on that”

        Looks like I’m going to make a for to ask for a for every word in /usr/share/dict/words. Look at all the tokens I burned.

        It doesn’t reflect upon business value, performance, or education.

        It’s even worse than the disastrous lines of code metric.

        Their problem is they have no idea what to expect, so to signal affinity to hype, they just measure tokens.

        • ElegantBiscuit@lemmy.zip
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          6 hours ago

          It’s just managers who have long since abandoned retaining any practical knowledge in the field, if they even had any at all, and pushing what their boss wants to hear and what they have all convinced themselves to be true in the world of management and linkedin lunatics, because that’s how you get promoted in management. Because everyone from the top down is all in on AI because those at a high enough level are all chasing a seat at the table of the ownership class holding the keys to the AI kingdom and the stock valuations that come from it.

          So if their company or their company’s AI model or AI usage makes them an important client of someone that the stock market has deemed important, or if they think their company is the special chosen one that will figure out the secret to AI productivity that none of the other thousands of companies will, that is all that matters. They know nothing about its actual usage, just that more tokens = more usage and therefore must be good, because more usage means their company stock goes up and it that means a bigger golden parachute.

          The problem is that either they are genuinely ignorant of the fact that it is a bubble, or they believe that they will be able to time their exit right. The worst part is that a lot of them will, but all the people and the organizational chaos that the burst of the bubble will create that they are knowingly contributing to, well that’s some other sucker’s problem. And that someone else is everyone, whose power and water bills will go up, whose ram and hard drive prices go up, and whose 401k will tank when the bubble collapses.

      • VinegarChunks@lemmus.org
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        10 hours ago

        Engineers under such incentives should ask AI how to most easily and speedily consume as many credits as possible, I bet it knows a great way

        • Kaligalis@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          In my experience with Claude Code Opus, analyzing or generating files eats the most tokens while thinking is actually surprisingly cheap. I guess, the token-counting is somewhat wrong on purpose to incentivize use of high-effort thinking mode because when you incentivize using lesser models or modes, people get disappointed by the output quality and stop using the service…
          So just let it analyze the code base for flaws and bugs in a loop using lots of sub agents for each type of bug or code smell.

          The good thing about that method is that it is technically malicious compliance; but it also offers a high degree of plausible deniability and likely yields some actual bug fixes to offer as justification.

          Doing it just once every once in a while without fanning out into tons of agents rereading the same files is the non-malicious-compliance way of using AI for bug hunting and usually worth it. Also let it write tests for the found bugs (and properly review those tests using the natural neural network in your head).

      • deeves@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        Also, I’ve been noticing more and more APIs are adopting a policy where they get rid of any unused credits that you’ve paid for at the end of the month, creating a ‘use it or lose it’ FOMO mentality.

        All very normal and sane.

      • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
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        10 hours ago

        But why force adoption? If it’s really good people would adopt it naturally like we do with every other tool. Why for this really expensive one, do we now flip the whole system on its head?

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          7 hours ago

          It’s kinda like the push to return to office. It was driven by corps having invested in the “can’t fail (ignoring the last previous crash)” real estate market and buying their offices. If everyone suddenly works from home instead of in the office, then those investments go bad because demand for office space is way down. So they tell people to go back to the office, hoping to return to that “every business needs offices!” status quo and save their investments. Though the demand is false (especially combined with layoffs), so it won’t necessarily cause any new corp to want that office space. If they don’t have the sunk cost, then they don’t need to accept the rest of the fallacy.

          With AI, it’s the same but just replace building investment with R&D as well as data centre investment. A lot of the companies really pushing AI are the ones that will profit from people going along with that. They really want to build a dependence amongst users as well as a good reputation for execs so they can get a return on the investment. Then there’s also the True Believers (who think LLMs are brilliant AIs that can solve anything if given the right prompts) and the FOMOs (who don’t know much about it but see the world moving towards it and don’t want to miss it because if it was a real AI, missing it could be a massive mistake). There’s also some people who just don’t have various skills and want the AI agents to fill those gaps (and probably don’t have a very good idea about what the LLMs are actually doing in those gaps).

          At this point, I think it’s a mistake to go all in on this tech. LLMs aren’t reliable, and their ability to “perform” is more about their flexibility than being well-suited for any task. They’ll go directly from saying things that seem “insightful” (they have no insight) to making the dumbest “mistake” (a mistake requires intent, which they lack, they just predict tokens). But there’s all kinds of false and true (albeit misguided IMO) demand right now and it’s still in early pricing mode (remember the intent is to make that investment money back).

          Oh and there’s also China which has been making more efficient models and open sourcing some of them. If they continue to do this, there’s a decent chance those investments will never give the desired returns, at least not to those who are trying to sell tokens. Or those who depend on those selling tokens, like any hardware companies selling hardware under the assumption that it will then make the money to pay for itself (which I believe both nVidia and AMD have done).

          It’s mirroring the dotcom bubble with that last bit because network cable companies started loaning the money to pay for their cables to ISPs, expecting returns that never came.

        • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          I don’t favor forced adoption… but your second sentence just isn’t true of individual people. It is ture of the industry in general. But individual people tend to stick with what they know and shy away from new things until something forces them out of that state. Usually it is someone else who tried a new tool and is suddenly able to do things easier or what not. It only takes a few power users to turn the tide. So forcing shouldn’t be needed. Just enabling those power users.

          • Jiral@lemmy.org
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            9 hours ago

            Curious, back in the early days they did not have to force young employees to embrace the web. Now with AI they have to.

    • rainwall@piefed.social
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      19 hours ago

      Because they believe that AI will replace payroll, which is generally a businesses highest expense. The more AI usage, the more likely they can eliminate jobs and give themselves bonuses.

      They are excited the way a farmer is excited when his pigs are gorging themselves on grain and getting really, really fat. The farmer is glad to pay for grain because its much cheaper than the money he makes from selling them for meat.

      They are giddy because its almost time for payday.

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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        14 hours ago

        payroll, which is generally a businesses highest expense

        This is something that changed in the industry; it was a investment back then.

        • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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          13 hours ago

          Huh, it’s been an operating expense since, let me check, the dawn of business?

          “Investing in” your employees doesn’t make a ton of sense when they could just hop over to the next company after a year, much like loyalty in a company doesn’t make sense. It’s all a business transaction in the end so if you can get a better deal, you should.

          The unfulfilled promise of AI is to reduce the expense to a minimum so the few remaining people can accomplish the same work. That’s more of an investment than paying people to work for you until they find a better job ever was. In theory.

          • 0tan0d@lemmy.world
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            11 hours ago

            Hi I suggest you crack open a history book and look at why ford didn’t pay his employees in peanuts.

            • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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              8 hours ago

              To solve the turnover issue, sure. It’s not like the employees had that many other places to go to that could afford to do the same, he could just double or triple everyone’s salary and nobody’s going anywhere. It was a necessary business expense. EXPENSE. He could’ve made more money if he didn’t have to pay it. Similarly to the raw materials, electricity, and every other unavoidable business expense.

              It’s also not the same for software engineers, for an example. Too many companies hiring, or at least there used to be until a few years ago. You have to not just pay a lot of money, you also have to have a large bonus 3 or 4 years down the line, often in the form of stock options. Otherwise your engineer making 300k will just take the next job for 400k in half a year to a year.

              In normal companies that can’t afford bonuses that are more or less life-changing windfalls, there’s no “investing” in employees. You can pay the market rate for a new grad and they disappear in a year or two to another company that doesn’t take new grads at all but rather poaches employees once they’ve gotten some initial work experience and thus they waste less money than the companies hiring and training juniors and can afford to pay more. The company that doesn’t “invest” in employees, gets more bang for its buck.

              • wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                8 hours ago

                He could’ve made more money if he didn’t have to pay it. Similarly to the raw materials, electricity, and every other unavoidable business expense.

                Citation needed with data. Because I’d argue pay on the factory is also proportional to quality output. So would they have still made the money with a worse product?

                • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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                  2 hours ago

                  What data? If he could’ve built the cars without paying a single employee, it would’ve been more profitable. That, however, was impossible. Hence, “necessary operating expense”. He just realized that the actual necessary expense was higher than what was previously thought, and in fact it was underfunded.

                  You CAN invest into human resources, but salaries ain’t it. If your new employees are having trouble getting started and you spend the time and effort to build an onboarding plan, that’s an investment. It’s a one time thing that pays off repeatedly in the future. If you buy or build amenities for your employees to have a nicer time in the workplace (even just a coffee machine and ping-pong table), even those are investments. Employer-provided housing for employees? If it’s owned by the company rather than rented continuously, it’s an investment.

                  Mind, the expense still dictates the quality of your service or product. Like I said, AI hasn’t replaced us yet. But if there was an AI you could host on-prem, that could replace one single human worker perfectly and improves over time like the human, and it cost, say 50 grand for a server to run it and a grand a month for the electricity, but the human it replaces has a total cost of employment of 5 grand a month? Just over a year and it’s paid off. THAT is an investment, versus continuing to pay the employee indefinitely.

                  I pulled the numbers out of my ass because actual nvidia DGX servers cost way more than that, but it’s to illustrate the point of what’s an investment, vs what’s an operating expense. And an entire server dedicated to one company could run multiple agent instances in parallel off of one LLM, if our hypothetical future human-replacing AI is just an LLM with an agent layer, so perhaps it costs 500k and replaces 10 people instead. Also the human employee price here is closer to eastern europe than western europe or US.

                  R&D is the one exception to labour costs being an expense vs investment. Paying someone building a new revenue stream is an investment, because one day that revenue stream will pull in more money, even if it’s no longer being actively developed. The hours people spend working on maintaining all the old stuff, which in most big orgs is honestly a fuckton of manhours, however, are an expense.

                  Look, I’m not trying to assign humans a lower value or anything. I’m just saying that from an accounting perspective, most employees are just a necessity to keep the thing running, like electricity. The process of R&D is a bit of an exception and some businesses will even give their software or other intellectual property a value in the books and depreciate it over time. But even then, the investment is into the product, not the people. Because the people can bail on you at any time, barring some special exceptions.

                  TL;DR: Look, I’m saying employees are a NECESSARY business expense. It’s just that we’re not slaves and after a large bonus or whatever, your employee can just… leave. You absolutely can get more productivity and better retention out of your employees by paying them more, but it’s not an investment on its own. Investment in the business implies future value even if you stop investing. As such, the best investments into your employees are actually things that still benefits the next employee after the current one is gone. Equipment, amenities, etc.

          • Jiral@lemmy.org
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            7 hours ago

            I know, US style capitalism doesn’t put much value in it but loyal employees can be a win for a company, but you only get them if the companies are rewarding that loyalty. The cost of having disposable employees is often extremely high. In the worst case not only a lot of informal knowledge and skill is lost but sooner or later it will end up with the competition, no matter the clauses in the contract.

      • Pyr@lemmy.ca
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        18 hours ago

        I wonder at what point government will tax AI use by companies similarly to payroll taxes and incomes taxes.

        If they pay an AI company $150,000 a month to replace $50,000 in salaries, the government then loses all that income tax from the previous employees as well as the payroll tax on $600k a year.

      • 1984@lemmy.today
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        19 hours ago

        At some point capitalism will fail but it will take much longer than we think…

        • xtr0n@sh.itjust.works
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          1 day ago

          Total cost of employment is something like 140-160% of salary for a software dev. So my super handwavy half pulled out of my ass math puts it closer to 20 jr. engineers.

          • fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
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            17 hours ago

            In France it’s more like 200%. minimum. Which is why our salaries are so shit when compared with US ones.

            But the new trend is hiring interns which are much cheaper, work twice as hard, and come with tax deductions.

            • Omgpwnies@lemmy.world
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              9 hours ago

              US salaries in general are inflated and not entirely indicative of actual spending power. They have a lot more ancillary costs like healthcare and other insurances, not to mention a significant lack of public transport means most people also need to pay for a car and gas and whatnot.

              Add to that the fact that they get fuck all for vacation time meaning if they want time off, it costs their salary for the missed days. I think when you weigh it all out, it balances pretty evenly, if not somewhat in France’s favour.

    • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I meeeean yeah, but also there are just some people who don’t work out

      I do prefer that over bots on everything tho. It’s getting rather exhausting