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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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.
The fact that it is just a cost comparison, however much humans might still be winning it roght now, is the fundamental problem.
Add to that the fact that hiring and training a new employee usually costs between 5-10 times more than retaining an employee (from hire to fully trained)
Yet they never seem to act like that. They punish you for loyalty.
Yeah no shit. You get people dependent on your product, then Jack up the price
That was always the reason AI was put into everything.
Corpo fell for the oldest corpo trick.
And it’s from their own playbook
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.
“Why did you destroy your company to just inflate your next quarter bonus?”
“It is my nature”
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.
Does AI cost more than humans primarily because of greed (i.e the AI companies demand a high profit margin now) or because of energy costs (i.e AI is so wasteful with energy, so polluting, that it costs more than human workers)
Costs. AI companies have been running at a big loss using investment money trying to scale quickly and conquer the market. That always comes at an end and something closer to the real costs has to be paid.
The AI companies bet on efficiencies occurring that have not materialized.
They fired the wrong people. Go higher!
But they got to fire a lot of people which is their favorite thing to do.
They don’t care, they don’t want to be in the writing software business or in the human resources business. Cloud is more expensive but they didn’t care because they didn’t want to be in the data center business.
AI + UBI
A great pairing.
Who doesn’t like a great pair?
Rehire and Replace the CEO with AI 😁
How long until the AI gains sentience and joins the rest of us on the picket lines?
They’ll ask AI what propaganda to tweet when to sow disunion amongst the picketers
Or like in the movie “Her” where the AI’s got together and just left the planet lol
AI will never gain sentience, not with current tech and not until we figure out how consciousness actually works.
AND it’s shit
Lol ffs …
“Greedy pos CEO of ShitCo. thinks they’re the only greedy pos CEO. Greedy pos CEO of AIslopCo. drains their accounts.”
Turn off the AI, and rehire people, done.
- CEOs, guaranteed
It’s actually crazy how incredibly wrong that is.
What is the CEOs job? To make profit? To select winning products? To chart a long term course?
Nope.
Nope Nope Nope.
Thier job is to increase the value of their outstanding stock. That’s it.
Now, given the fact that the stock market is a fucking casino… sure. Making profit is A way to TRY and increase your stock price. Making wise product decisions is A way to do that. This is a Warren Buffet type of CEO.
You also need to “read the room” (the room being investors) understand what they want to hear, and start saying it. No matter how stupid it is. No matter if you know full well it’s stupid.
You’re bringing an incredible product to market, but the markets are demanding headcount reductions? You start firing people that you desperately need to keep. You’re an office supply company and the market is rewarding IT investment? You hire 100 devs to build an app that a team of 5 people could have made and nobody will ever use anyways. It’s like that meme of the dude on the assembly line saying “guess we doing X now”.
If the whims of investors are convinced using AI is what is valuable, they will spend more on AI than humans for as long as it’s the case that the market will reward them for doing so… despite it being objectively inefficient.
You gotta remember that company stock is like a currency they can print at will. As nice as it is to have a profitable business… it’s even nicer to have the luxury of being able to just print money.
