cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/38083497
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
Meta was spending ~300 MILLION dollars per MONTH on tokens around a month ago.
I knkw they are using Claude, so the price estomation of 5$ per 1M tokens is kind of true, more or less.
Tell me how is this sustainable in the long term?
In a 30-day period, total employee usage on the dashboard exceeded 60 trillion tokens, and the highest-ranked individual user averaged 281 billion tokens. Using the least expensive version of Claude Opus 4.6, which costs $5 for every million tokens, that one user alone could have cost Meta more than $1.4 million.
https://fortune.com/2026/04/09/meta-killed-employee-ai-token-dashboard/
~300 MILLION dollars per MONTH Tell me how is this sustainable in the long term?
Every single rich SOB on earth is pooling their hedged bets together. Since 2022 Meta has been issuing bonds directly to investors. They announced another 30 Billion in bonds at the end of 2025.
People need to realize that the AI bubble will not pop by accident. It will pop as a direct result of the Epstien-Shareholder class cashing out and leaving retail investors hodling the bag.
At least with human labour companies have control. They withhold raises and bat down wages and the people tend to have to take it.
With AI you get suckered in and all of a sudden have a subscription or something similar. Then next year the costs go up. You’ve already tailored your workflow to use AI, you can’t just not pay the higher bill. Next year, costs go up again. What are you going to do? Not pay your bill and lose your entire workforce all at once? Now the company is being held hostage by the AI companies.
Any service you depend on in the modern world, you need to be asking yourself ‘what will I do when this enshitifies itself’. And it is a when.
Short termism on all sides is destroying our society.
Tbh, this is just SaaS in general
Workers can and should do this too.
Union strong, babbyyy
Of course they are too dumb to expect this outcome, but it’s so fucking obvious this would happen. OpenAI is still burning billions each years, just wait and see how much it will cost when they need to make a profit. (They have already cut down on the free version)
I mean, it’s the same freaking market strategy that’s been used for over a decade in tech and nobody seems to realize they’re inside a slowly boiling water…
this is the part that really baffles me, though I guess I can’t expect much from the class that seems to be literally incapable of foresight.
Like say AI actually does get there. Some company is able to crack human consciousness and we get truly intelligent AI, good enough to replace your workforce with… that AI isn’t going to be free. It’s going to be a monthly fee for your business. and then when you’re fully reliant on AI, when skilled labor is simply too difficult to cultivate any further, it’s going to inevitably enshittify. These corpos will end up slaves to the AI company.
It’s like they fundamentally cannot see that they are giving up control. They’re so fucking stupid.
Eh. It’s par for the course. 20 years ago, at the height of the frenzy of outsourcing things to China, I remember saying that this will just result in US companies creating their own competition. Anyone with a brain could see that Chinese companies weren’t going to be willing to serve as second-fiddle to their US masters. The idea that you could keep design and management, while sending production overseas, and that you can keep that arrangement stable long-term? Pure fantasy. Of course a country isn’t going to be content just doing the grunt work. They want the highly paying design and management jobs, not just the menial labor ones.
Well, it’s a good thing China doesn’t make cheap LLMs that you can run on local hardware…
A lot of AI contracts and services were priced assuming literally everyone was going to adopt it so the MLMs all tried to undercut each other to get market share.
Turns out, not everyone wants it and they undercharged significantly so the snake oil salesmen are jacking up their prices to try and stay viable. Leaving a companies that early shrunk their workforce holding the bag paying more in expenses and lower productivity because they bought in to the bubble without even checking how factual claims were.
The cost has also shot up because a lot of the new frameworks are much more token heavy than the old ones.
So the original free plan might have made sense when people were only typing little questions into it, and using a handful of tokens, but is no longer cost-effective with things like modern agent pipelines constantly throwing tens of thousands of tokens at the service.
I tried running a little locally hosted agent thing on my computer the other day, and it was feeding a hundred thousand tokens at the model every few minutes, because it was keeping all the files in context. Sure, it hit the cache a lot, and so the effective cost would be less, but it’s still a lot more token usage than me poking the model with inane questions.
This is what happens when mfkers don’t read any Marx.
American capitalism would be doing way better at profit maximizing if people in positions of power across the private sector had studied Marxian economics. Giving away your means of production as a software business would be an obvious no-no.
The whole AI scam has always been the techbro CEOs snatching the money from the non-techbro CEOs. Me or you as a private person was never the direct aim. . . . General artificial intelligence will not come. We don’t even have artificial intelligence yet. The terms artificial and intelligence contradict themselves. It’s an oxymoron. It’s still just machines that learn shit without body and soul…
IDK. I get really uneasy about claims that a computer or AI can never be intelligent or self-aware. Sure, it’s “just” circuits, but your brain is “just” cells passing information between each other. An individual cell is no more intelligent or self-aware than an individual transistor is. It’s deeply unscientific to believe there is some magic voodoo involved in biology that can’t be reproduced in a machine.
I have never argued that it is never possible, just like time travel or teleportation is technically possible given a radical breakthrough in our understanding of how the universe works. But as of right now, AGI/true intelligence/etc. is still purely science fiction and LLMs are not even remotely close (and are a complete deadend towards that goal).
Except it’s not comparable because we literally have general/true intelligence right now… it’s just not artificial. There is no radical breakthrough needed. We know it’s possible. We just don’t know how.
Teleportation is not possible as far as we know, and backwards time travel isn’t either. That’s not comparable to true intelligence, which already exists, just not artificially.
I think at some point we might get better and better at simulating intelligence, and maybe even building actual intelligence in machines, but we can agree that LLMs is closer to your phone suggesting the next word than it is to your brain. If we ever get general AI it can’t be based off LLMs so the current wave of speculation is little more than hype to drive profits up and distract from the problems that already arose.
I spent an hour today on a webinar about how to optimize token usage with more than 500 other participants from the company I work for. Because billing is about to have its come-to-Jesus moment.
Cave man mode. Save much token. Very easy. Get straight to point. Missing semicolon line 182.
As in “Jesus, it’s costing how much??!!?”
My boss is getting annoying with this shit.
I’m stuck on x issue
Have you tried putting x into ai?
Yes I’ve been doing that for two days.
Really? Huh. It should work.
K well no it doesn’t.
Just copy the error and put it into Claude
Yeah…I’ve been…doing that.
It should just give you the solution
https://mstdn.social/@hkrn/116589985138352696
A decent article about enterprise depending on AI subscriptions and a discussion on hackernews.
I don’t really get what the punchline is. It’s not sustainable seems to be it, but it doesn’t seem likely to be destroying OpenAI or Anthropic etc, which is what I want to happen.
That’s why it’s titled “It’s a ticking time bomb for enterprise” not necessarily for AI companies.
Hmm. Doesn’t seem like it’ll be good news for the average person afterwards then. But perhaps when the bomb goes off computer (ram) prices can go down(?).
If the bomb goes off AI companys’ enterprise customers will die like flies. That’s not good for business. If they scaled up too fast, AI companies can’t get a return on their investments and die with their clients.
Depends though, because companies like Google and Meta are still ad platform companies first when looking at profits.
Not sure what the most likely, favourable outcome is supposed to look like atp.
Wait until they learn how much it costs to fix the mistakes made by Artificial Idiocy.
The AI craze among the Epstein class has revealed some indisputable facts in a way more obvious than ever before:
- The rich hate the poor and hold a genuine, malicious and sadistic desire to see them suffer and die. Its not just a consequence of their pursuit of money, it’s an outright explicit goal
- The ruling class is abhorrently incompetent, increadibly lazy, and inconceivably stupid. There is no group of people less qualified to lead the world than the class of people who currently lead the world.
- There is no “things will change before they become irreversible”. The ONLY answer is to eliminate the Epstein class. They will lead the world to Armageddon with a smile on their dead faces.
- Technology under capitalism doesn’t become mainstream when it has sufficiently satisfied the problems it promises to solve. It becomes mainstream FAR before it is ready because the Epstein class thinks its magic.
Of course. If they had a grain of empathy they wouldn’t be rich, to begin with.
AI CEOs might end up doing better, you know?
At least better than the type of human CEOs that decide to go full AI.They can’t even run coffee shops.
Hey, 5 years ago, they couldn’t even solve a HackerRank preliminary coding challenge.
The only problem I see with AI CEOs is that the biggest models will be available to those that already have loads of money, so the adversarial investors get to win.
It’s been tried just to see off it could, like putting it in charge of a coffee shop. It’s not going well.
What’s the problem with the Anthropic one?
Of course everyone wants moreWcubes! No?That made my day, thank you
Probably not, AI CEOs will be trained on data from how real CEOs work … so AI CEOs will make all the same problems, with all the same gas lighting that they are doing a great job. Also the AI CEOs will be provided by megacorp models so you just know they will be biased to benefit the owner mega corp over all else.
But they won’t be trained on just human CEO data and that means they will easily be better. I think we should guillotine all CEOs and replace them with AI for a trial run for science and all that.
Sure, why not? We should probably do shareholders at the same time, they seem to be the ones forcing the CEOs to make such great decisions …
The trouble with that, I feel, may lie in the subtle differences between
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the CEO kind of psychopath: batshit unplugged for sure, no contest; just enough to make fucktons of money for far too few people, but not too cracked that they blow everything up, instead…
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and, any given bot’s penchant for going off the fucking’ rails in record time, every time —which, unless you short the whole thing, makes the opposite of money.
🤭
But hey, at least when you tell them their mistake, they say, “You are absolutely correct!!”
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They’ll be fine. Mass layoffs depress wages.
Phase one: Fuck around 🤡
Phase two: Profit! 🤑
Phase three: Find out. 😱Anyone else hate the structure and style of Axios reporting? Those bullet points like structure?
Did they seriously not see it coming? Lol.
Most management types can’t see beyond their next bonus.
That goes double for any publicly traded company.
I think some CEOs are probably okay with it costing more - that’s less benefits to pay out, less PTO/sick days to deal with, and less labor concerns when you run your AI slop machine 24/7 instead of those pesky 40 hour work weeks.
AI will have to cost a lot more, or hurt the bottom line other ways (people stop buying your AI shit).
AI is already hurting their bottom line, but they keep fantasizing about the future gains, that actually will not arrive. Ever.
Yea, and less control over your spending. The AI provider has the business by the balls and can change prices any time. And they will, by a lot, as soon as they secure enough market share.
The 25% more figure includes all of these things. How else do you think they would make the comparison?
They are being sold on the hype that AGI is possible and that eventually the costs won’t matter because somehow the AI brains will scale production massively and allow the already obscenely wealthy privatize the gains of humanity while letting millions of us die as their solution to the climate change caused by AGI. Essentially they have no issues poisoning us and wasting money now as long as they get their supreme digital slaves in place and never need human labor again. Deeply unlikely but nobody said these folks are smart.
Considering that consciousness and intelligence arise out of complexity… it should be “possible.”
But we’re not really anywhere near that reality yet. These dumb ass ai are just really good at glazing their users while speaking confidently so everyone buys what they say.
Right, definitely not impossible, but highly improbable to be based off of LLMs. The focus on LLMs is actually limiting other types of AI research.
Possible in the sense that biological brains and human brains aren’t special. But no one will ever convince me that large language models (I’m talking about the actual math and programming that they use today for “AI”) will ever be actually intelligent.
The only thing that worries me is that we don’t actually know how the human brain works. There’s an entire school of psychological theory and practice - really its oldest truly scientific branch, that holds that human intelligence actually does work a lot like an LLM. The hard core behaviorists believed that literally all human behavior was just a really complex version of Pavlov’s dogs. It sounds absurd, but they had good arguments. In principle even very complex behaviors can be the result of reinforcement and conditioning.
And get it blatantly wrong… not that a human wont also, but just like the computer, humans can be conditioned to defend the exploitative conditions of their own existence.
AI will always be more wrong than a trained professional.
Trained professionals are the 0% loss target. Infinite training has been proven to never approach 5% loss by OpenAI in 2020 and Deepmind in 2023.
Spend a lot of time developing machine learning models there @[email protected] ?
It’s management who fucked up, but let’s blame it on software because what we really care about is hating the software.
They knew. They always knew. But you gotta bonus yourself amirite?
