Nearly one-third of corporate executives surveyed did not understand how their operating costs relate to AI deployment.
  • TachyonTele_Esq@piefed.socialEnglish
    2 months

    an astonishing 29 percent of [execs] had no idea where the growing costs associated with AI were coming from.

    The headline combined with the quote just make me laugh so much, I love it

    • Triumph@fedia.io
      2 months

      This is what happens when the people in charge of everything are entirely separated from reality.

      • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2 months

        Those same idiots have been in charge of everything for decades, blindly doing whatever suited them.

        They got duped and didn’t have the technical competence to see it or trust their staff to negotiate it.

        Every IT / Developer out there knew it was a bad idea. The C-Staff was sold by the billionaires that you will go AI or you will be left behind.

        My own CEO is simultaneously telling us to use AI for as much as we can and telling us to reduce costs as much as possible.

          • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
            2 months

            The sales pitch is:

            All your competition is going AI. They’re be producing 10x the work with mouth breathing morons at the keys, while you’re stuck paying millions to subject matter experts.

            They’re scared ot death that the tenuous hold they have on their market segment will be severed if their competition outflanks them in this, so FUD wins.

            • a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2 months

              This isn’t just in industry or tech. I work in the academy. You would be shocked how many people from administrators all the way on down truly believe this. That, without any proof, this technology is going to make everybody a billion times more productive and that any graduates who don’t have this is a foundational skill will surely not survive in the future workforce.

          • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2 months

            That’s because they bought into the pitch that AI will replace employees (or at least large number of employees) they understand that they will still need to build tooling that would facilitate that and believe that once other companies will say they eliminated employees this way the companies that are “are left behind” will be stuck still needing employees that will catch up to this plan and refuse to help company to get there.

          • zarkanian@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2 months

            Yeah, that isn’t how this works. You don’t want to be the one using the software while it’s still in beta. Wait until the dust settles before committing to anything. Besides which the super-urgent "You have to buy now!" FOMO sales pitch is a classic strategy for scammers.

      • jtrek@startrek.websiteEnglish
        2 months

        Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about these people. Calls them “Business Idiots”

    • Yggstyle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 months

      And we hope they go broke, dont pay their bills, cause a panic sell on AI services, which causes private equity to panic sell everything… which pops the bubble… and leads to the literal version of ‘its raining men’ on wall street as executives and profiteers have their horde of ill gotten gains evaporate in seconds.

      … too much?

  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 months
    1. Build up reliance on AI, which looks really cheap
    2. You can now replace employees with AI so fire away!
    3. You are now completely dependent on AI and a handful of employees
    4. AI company sees they have you and start jacking up rates. If you could afford paying for people before then you have the $ to pay high rates.
    5. Company now wonders why costs are back to where they were before and the AI isn’t working out as expected.
    • mcv@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2 months

      They’re not selected for intelligence, but for sociopathy.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2 months

        And nepotism.

        And cronyism.

        Coming from the upper-middle and upper class and having attended the right schools and become mates with the right people is very highly correlated with becoming a top level executive.

      • cmbabul@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2 months

        I think it’s more sociopaths rising by being sociopaths and then promoting gullible idiots they can use and control with no issue, then blame when shit goes wrong

    • Buckshot@programming.devEnglish
      2 months

      My lesson in this came really early in my career. One of our execs was selling vapourware. Just promising our product, that we hadn’t made yet, could do literally anything. Then he insisted we build it on this platform he must have had shares in the way he pushed it, only it was also vapourware and didn’t do half the things it said it did.

      He found it utterly inconceivable that a company would sell a product that didn’t do what it said despite doing the exact same thing himself. He was completely delusional.

    • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      2 months

      As we’ve seen with Donald Trump and George W. Bush, if you’re wealthy enough or in an aristocratic social group, you fail upwards.

      And if you always fail upwards, it’s very easy to not gain the skills to succeed.

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    2 months

    If you’ve ever spent 10 minutes using an AI agent, you’d know that there’s no way to predict how many tokens it’s going to use before you give it a task. It can be $0.20 worth sometimes or $20 other times. Or anything, really.

    It’s only after watching it churn away for a few minutes that you can assume it’s gotten stuck and have the option of pulling the plug before the bill gets run up too high. But you need to watch it like a hawk and you need to be the one paying the bill otherwise you’re not going to care (e.g. workers using AI at work aren’t paying for it, their company is).

    Taken in aggregate across a month, that unpredictability might average out or it might explode.

    • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 months

      I asked the “free” copilot one time to make a 6x6 grid of letters where each row and each colum formed a word in English, and none of the words formed were re-used in the grid.

      Copilot chewed on that for about 15 minute and finally gave up and told me I could solve it myself.

      Easy way to spend a lot of tokens doing nothing.

    • Napster153@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 months

      Bold of you to assume these old people even engage with the business they claim to own.

  • 深夜量化室@lemmy.1095.meEnglish
    2 months

    @FoxtrotDeltaTango’s post glosses over something: the token bill is only 60% of the real cost. Infrastructure to handle latency (caching, batching), human review loops for quality, and retraining pipelines when models drift add another 40-50%. A team that thought they’d replace two engineers with an API often ends up hiring a prompt engineer + ML ops person instead. The margin math gets much uglier when you add those in. Broke down the full cost-of-ownership (tokens + ops + people) here https://cxgo.ai/l/IjOzask — helps separate real savings from accounting fiction.

  • Fmstrat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 months

    On the same token, it’s important …

    We see what you did there.

  • Zahille7@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 months

    I thought billionaires liked giving money to their billionaire friends? What’s the issue?

    /s

  • Naich@piefed.worldEnglish
    2 months

    Just wait until all the technical debt has to be paid as well.

    • docus@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2 months

      I know what you mean, but the tech debt problem will never get resolved.

      • Goodeye8@piefed.socialEnglish
        2 months

        Of course but the cost can be mitigated. I’ve seen an AI built project and the outcome is that you pretty much have to continue using AI to continue development because it’s borderline incomprehensible for humans. When AI fails to continue development you scrap the entire project and start from scratch.

        I imagine all companies that allowed AI to go wild in their codebase have a lot of components that need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

        • SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish
          2 months

          In theory, completely rewriting legacy software with AI could be a great thing - doing so every 3 or 4 years, allowing newer and better AI to tackle the task, optimizing for every development made in technology or standards.

          However, this still requires human minds to define, guide, and verify these projects. AI opens up possibilities for better development, but executives seem determined to fritter away such potential by axing the human element.

          It is like a certain story…

          • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2 months

            You forgot that AI cannot “rewrite legacy software”.

            Otherwise it’s a nice thing to fantasize about 😁

  • IronKrill@lemmy.caEnglish
    2 months

    I will never understand how is it that such idiots repeatedly make it to the top.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1 month

      csuites and ceos, are all the result of nepotism, there isnt such a thing as working your way up ofr those positions.