If my boss would mandate the use of LLMs I would definitely abuse it to rack up the bill.
Reminds me of companies getting their cloud computing bills.
Yup. I’ve had the same thoughts. There are many who still think its insane to have your own equipment. Now there will be those who think its insane to do your own thinking.
a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentations
I haven’t been this happy in over a year.
The funny thing is that even with this massive overspending, AI companies aren’t profitable. They need these companies to spend 10x the amount per token, and 10x the number of tokens. Probably 10x the number of customers too.
Burning energy, draining water, spending massive cash so they can lose money on a product that doesn’t even do its job. How the hell has the bubble not popped yet…
The Stock market is literally just vibes. As long as everyone believes, it will somehow be profitable in the future, the line will keep ging up
and building more and more datacenters, replacing AI chips faster and faster, the more people use it, which of course is wasting a ton of money.
This is the most profitable consultant in the world, can’t they just afford to run a local llm?
I heard about a company that was looking at purchasing machines to run local llms for their developers to use.
If more companies do this, rather than using the massive ai data centers being built…. the RAMpocolypse will get way worse.
That is the part that pains me to admit - running local LLMs is not a solution to the RAMpocalypse. In that case we’d just have more GPUs and RAM idling for ~90% of the time in someones basement, without being shared. As bad as it sounds, having data centers for AI stuff is actually the more ecological solution. I can’t believe I said that. Excuse me, I have to take a shower now *shudder*
- Replace workforce with AI because it’s easy to be lazy with AI.
- Remaining workforce uses AI to be lazy.
- SurprisedPikachu.webp
Ew, webp. Chatgpt, convert that shit for me
Hey, webp is awesome! Both lossless and lossy compression work great with it. Only thing lacking is software support
Okay fine. ChatGPT, convert it back.
But not all browsers support it!
The response you’re trying to save was a web page
Yeah, that’s the eww part :( I hate when I find great memes and I know exactly the friend to share them to… and I can’t DM them.
Especially if it’s animated. Easy enough to change the extension on PC to a PNG without issue yet. But anything too large to screenshot, or with multiple frames? Many a DND meme have I let pass by
This is 100% the thesis I’ve been shopping personally… Many Boomers and Xers in executive positions had a “magical millennial” that they quietly kept as a secret “AI” to split/edit PDFs, set up an Airtable base, add columns to a google doc, etc. There was a tacit, silent agreement in this symbiotic relationship for the bulk of the last 20 years - you’ll make sure I don’t look completely incompetent in tech matters and I’ll backchannel on your behalf to senior leaders and people who “matter” to help you advance.
Gen AI essentially allows the laziest input, gives a half competent output that “feels” fine and has the bonus of telling the boomer/Xer that they are actually amazingly capable, and could have done this themselves all along even, but they rightly delegated the task to their magical millennial, and now to the AI of choice.
So they fired all the magical millennials, because they knew too much about the before times. Now that they are fucked without a life raft, costs soar and they will cling for dear life because they will be exposed otherwise.
Edit: through a twist of fate, the iPad kids grew up technically incapable and relied on the magical millenials as well. They could only offer praise and loyalty really, or a boomer, Xer recruited them in and talked the MM up as a “wiz” to seek out. Anyway, now that the MM are gone, the Zoomers and gen Alpha kids only have one strength remaining, the old people have no idea what they are doing or how to quantify their success, outside of “use more AI”. So the fragile balance remains for now, with a vulnerable, hollow center where the magical millennials used to live.
I’m surrounded by this shit, and it seems to come from all generations. My boss, who is my age, called me because her computer was frozen and she wanted me to fix it. “I was like, turn it off and on again, this is the first, most basic rule of troubleshooting.” Meanwhile the boomer next to me is having me do shit like attach files to a fucking email.
I don’t know why you think it’s a generational thing. There has always technical people that filled in the gaps that the more extroverted management types didn’t care about. How do you think things worked when millennials were still in diapers?
What you’re saying indicates you’re one of those people that don’t understand how many gaps other people are filling in for you. You’re talking about splitting PDFs, who do you think designed the PDF format? Or the http protocol that you use to open that google doc?
Honestly the issue I see happening lately is that because iPads (and now AI) made things too easy for the young people they don’t actually know how things work at the low level, not interested in learning it, and often react with “this is too complicated, make it easier for me!”
I said it was my own thesis, built from a decade plus in the trenches. If you read what I’d stated again, you’ll see that the implication was not purely generational, but boomers/Xers with power who drove the change. You also over emphasis technicality here as I was purposefully discussing the more mundane, beginner to intermediate level daily tasks that the millenials were fulfilling here. The millennials in this group are typically in rightful awe of the old timers talents to build on the foundational level, and also envy their circumstance of walking into a more open sandbox and with more stakes to claim in the early days.
So basically, the above preceding doesn’t really concern you unless you found your way to VP level or really to the csuite especially, and even then, always exceptions. That understood , I won’t spend more time debating exceptions to the general rule, as I see it. I respect my elders, as long as they are decent people struggling to do better within these inherently broken systems.
I don’t know why you think it’s a generational thing. There has always technical people that filled in the gaps that the more extroverted management types didn’t care about. How do you think things worked when millennials were still in diapers?
Uh… Unless you worked at the forefront of technology where more people probably WERE qualified, by and large these things worked on paper/transparencies I would presume. If PowerPoint and PDF were people, they are themselves millennials and gen z (ish) respectively.
Now, when millennials were about 10 you’ve got a decent point ;).
by and large these things worked on paper/transparencies I would presume.
You have to presume because you weren’t involved in helping the people who were used to doing everything on paper learn how to turn on a computer. Do you think people in the past were super qualified and just magically knew how to use a computer in the past? Nobody ever needed help loading a file on a floppy disk and printing it to paper so they can present it to their boss?
There have always been clueless bosses and tech people that had to make things work. If you go back further, why do you think they all had secretaries typing things up?
This post was a fuckin rollercoaster, well said
Waiting for hackers to break into companies and not do a ransomware attack. Just run some scripts which innocently do shit like turn PDFs into PowerPoints and chew through those tokens.
This made me laugh so hard.
“Turn this PDF into a powerpoint, and then summarize it with a haiku”
File changes its form,
Pages slide into their frames,
Slides ready to show.
Durr durdur
When you tell the people to mash the easy button and then they do exactly what you wanted. They created the monster.
Eat shit you greedy corporate assholes, i hope all of your companies are damaged beyond recovery, you useless fucking tools.
@sanitation, worth pushing back a little on the ‘token chewing’ framing: the PDF-conversion use case probably isn’t the real budget killer — it’s the human review loop that follows. Someone generates a deck, decides it’s 70% right, then re-prompts three times to fix slides. That’s 4x the token cost of one clean generation, and it’s invisible in most usage dashboards. The fix isn’t fewer AI calls, it’s better output evaluation at step one. We’ve been building tooling around exactly that evaluation gap — rough writeup at if you’re curious how other dev teams are approaching it.
fuck off clanker
rough writeup at if you’re curious how other dev teams are approaching it.
Ah thank you, I will read " " and tell my peers and colleagues how we’re closing the evaluation gap.
The fix isn’t to write your own five sentence response, it’s to let an LLM write your response for you and post without any proofreading.
One has to wonder what the ROI is on having AI bots astroturfing about AI, especially when the output is this clearly artificial.
Dayum. If I was given unlimited budget for AI I would do the same. Everyone should have a set personal budget for AI expense and they can keep it if they don’t use AI.
Tokenmaxing
If I’m going to get a $20,000 bonus at the end of the year if I don’t use any AI, I’m not going to use AI.
That’s a big problem with this tech… how do you price it? I think companies would purchase an allotment of tokens that can be used or banked by employees. Problem is they’d always be cutting the token budget.
Where I work I have to have a meeting and justify a $100 license for software. So I don’t know how this will work long term.
Using an LLM to parse stuff is like using a rocket launcher to kill an ant.
You can accomplish the same thing using a million times fewer resources with a purpose-built program.
“ChatGPT, what time is it?”
Will, that’s what happens when employers tell employees that they should “use ai first”, track their token use on a dashboard, and tell them they’ll get fired if they are too low on the monthly ranking.
Yeah, my manager expressed satisfication with me being one of the people using my quota of tokens.
I have generated so much throwaway content that never gets used and only gets deleted to burn the tokens to avoid getting the “you aren’t using AI enough” talk. The fact they can see my actual productive output and believe AI is involved shows how utterly disconnected the metric is from reality.
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Well, if your KPI is how much you use an LLM like in some reports - this is an easy way to get those good indicators. Also, LLMs are super easy to use to parse things, whereas many special programs like IDK grep isn’t exactly user friendly. Not to mention not finding patterns really. Though here I’m thinking things like looking at various logs on computers.
Maybe we could at least nudge the LLMs in the direction of suggesting appropriate tools and giving hints how to actually do that when applicable instead of blindly brute forcing every task. Of course that does not solve the issue of stupid corporate incentives, but I feel like by now most companies have realized that burning as much money as possible is not a good goal.
Yes but you’re in an open office and all you have available in your open office hell are: rocket launcher, your sanity, Debra’s snappy attitude.
Debra’s probably a better performer than you are.
Is Debra here a new version of clippy?
These stupid companies are getting everything they deserve and I’m loving it.
Nah. The bailouts will only be two or three tomes what they squander.
Indeed, they won’t pay for these mistakes, we will.
“They’re too big to fail” etc., with another round of bailouts for our poor, beleaguered corporations.
It’s impossible to bail out Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, etc
