Execs Confused and Horrified by the Huge AI Bills After Thinking They Could Replace Workers for Free
futurism.com
Nearly one-third of corporate executives surveyed did not understand how their operating costs relate to AI deployment.

By now, it’s clear that the only way the tech industry can justify the cost of AI is if it replaces vast swaths of the human workforce with machines that run 24/7.

The bad news is that this situation has created a world-historic financial market that, by some metrics, is looking worse than the run-up to the Great Depression. The good news is that this future of an AI takeover is looking increasingly unlikely, at least at the industry’s current pace, a fact which is now dawning on some of the biggest rubes and dupes in the corporate world.

According to a new survey from “Big Four” accounting firm KPMG, a significant number of corporate executives are reeling from sticker shock over new usage-based AI pricing schemes. Though enterprises could once count on AI companies to subsidize the price of large language models via flat-rate contracts, that’s no longer a given, as the rising cost of computational power forces the entire tech sector into a defensive posture.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    18 hours ago

    Gee…

    Who would have guessed that the techbros would start charging a shit ton more money once they had captured market share…

    I’m honestly surprised how long it took, I figured the second companies fired humans for AI, they’d jack up the rates

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      14 hours ago

      All the brilliant people jacking each other off and sitting on each others boards probably didn’t have time between all the self-congratulatory bullshit about their collective “leadership” to even read the executive summary of the thesis around enshittification, I guess.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        52·
        17 hours ago

        Then you disagree with both the article, the survey it references, and reality…

        As usage-based pricing models become more common, many organizations are still building the capabilities required to forecast, monitor, and manage AI spending effectively,” the report authors write. Translation: one third of execs had no plan for how to actually use AI productively, a fact which is becoming increasingly clear now that the meter is running.

        The finding underscores what many workers forced to use AI tools on the job have come to suspect: that an alarming number of corporate leaders treat AI as a plug-and-play solution for lowering overheard without understanding the how of it all, a kind of magical thinking entirely divorced from practical reality.

        They drove adoption with flat fees, pay $X and get all you can slop for a month

        Now it’s token based, that kid you hired to be good at computers now eats $1k a day on AI to produce work a human needs to redo anyways.

        It was treated as a flat monthly expense which made it cheaper than humans.

        So companies pivoted to AI and fired humans.

        Now they charge by usage and AI is more expensive than humans.

        How the actual fuck do you not think that’s happened yet?