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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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?
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”
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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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.
I like how they say “now” like the billionaires won’t keep jacking the fees up.
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?
They fired the wrong people. Go higher!
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.
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).
Which happens often when you focus too hard on kpis.
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)
The AI companies bet on efficiencies occurring that have not materialized.
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.
Here’s a third reason AI costs more than humans: for each mistake that AI makes they’ll have to hire several people to fix them. Eventually, they’ll just have to hire people to watch the AI and try to prevent the mistakes before they happen.
It will be like a much more complicated version of having to babysit your Roomba. Sometimes the Roomba just gets stuck and sometimes the Roomba spreads fecal matter all over the entire house.
By the way, the AI is above us in the hierarchy. So we can just go ahead and have fun with that too.
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.
Not just hiring and training! You also have to start paying state unemployment tax on that new hire. In Florida the first $7,000 is taxed on each new employee. Then there’s loss of efficiency, and related items. On top of that, if your turnover is high, your payroll company will up your rates because they’re working harder and you’re a PITA employer. I’ve sat meetings where we decided exactly that.
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.
Costing more to do less was kind of written on the wall of capitalism’s halls the whole time, so are we really surprised?
But they got to fire a lot of people which is their favorite thing to do.
The fact that it is just a cost comparison, however much humans might still be winning it roght now, is the fundamental problem.
Rule: if something looks too good to be true, then without any further evidence, it’s likely too good to be true.
