How many tokens does laughing use?
I don’t feel like the companies are concerned about it costing more right now as much as they are betting that it will be cheaper in the long run. The cost of labor isn’t unlikely to decrease drastically while the technology is likely to become cheaper.
While I would love to believe Microsoft is being burned by spending on AI, I think they don’t mind spending more now so long as they can trade the cost labor for the costs of technology and maintain similar productivity.
Feels like they hope this will be to white collar jobs what Uber was for taxi drivers. Current profitability isn’t really the goal as much as being able to reproduce similar outputs.
Even if AI someday does become profitable short term, total profits will still go down long-term, because all profit comes from human labor (or exploiting nature). All any technology ever does in capitalism is to replace human labor, thereby putting more pressure on the empirically proven tendency of profits to fall. Profit gains from technology can only ever be short term and relative to competition who hasn’t yet adapted the technology. Once everyone has, prices drop, adjusting to lower socially necessary labor time.
The only way for the billionaire class to keep profits flowing a bit longer at this point is to do what we already see them doing now: get rid of the free market by enforcing monopolies with captive markets, bonded labor and merging big capital with an increasingly violent and warring state apparatus: capitalism inevitably leads to fascism-imperialism every time.
AI lends itself to this because of the centralized nature of data centers, the already monopoly based business model of tech companies and the political power and influence those monopolies hold. On the other hand, there is some potential, if not revolutionary at least disruptive potential, in small scale, specialized, open source models that can be trained with fewer resources.
The only alternative road to fascism, of course, leads to communism.
It will be cheaper for China with their massive solar panel production capacity, not for us tho
This is my take too.
People were probably making the same jokes in the early mainframe era of computers.
Hahahahahhhahahahahaaha
g a s p
HhahahhahahahbahahhHahahahahahah
There are ways to make it cheaper. Starting with maybe not encouraging token-maxing.
Generally, unless you’re either a FOSS project or generating images/video, you have to be doing something very wrong to spend more on AI than on salaries.
Generating images is not that expensive, it’s surprisingly inexpensive.
Yeah, it’s counterintuitive because it’s a lot more work for a human to draw a picture (much less a photorealistic picture) than to write a few words, but human language grammar actually has a lot of strict rules that makes that stream of letters work as “valid” output, much less “decent” output that kinda matches the prompt/description. Transpose a pair of letters or even substitute a single letter (or token) and you’ve got an output that just doesn’t work, in a way that generated images don’t have to worry about.
At least they’re being transparent about it. AI agent workflows can burn through far more tokens if they are used every day, so, normally, employees are still more affordable.
Sure, if they are using Copilot. Copilot is fucking garbage.
If they made a model that was half as good as Claude or Kimi or Qwen, they wouldn’t be in this mess.
