I think the level of panic in CFO offices every where about AI cost explosion directionally validates that the spending is real.

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ricardobayes 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is no panic, it's misreporting and bad journalism. 2025 AI budgets were based on 2025 AI capabilities, and let's face it, LLMs only got acceptable in around November 2025. So it's natural usage went up and budgets didn't account for that.

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aprilthird2021 6 hours ago | parent [-]

There's absolutely someone in every big company except the biggest tech companies in the world looking at spend these days because of exactly what you said. The models are good now which means people use them a lot more which means money is flying out the door more than ever before (and the impact on the businesses hasn't shown up yet as you might notice in the earnings of any business that isn't a frontier AI company)

	▲	ethbr1 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The root problem: At every company, there is always more work that could be done, but there is not always more work that would increase profits. Existing corporate command and control has optimized for people control, because people cost money and performed work. Control their assignments, and you control costs and what's worked on. Widespread unmetered AI turns this on its head, because suddenly each employee is directing their own work and the AI spend that comes with it. F.ex. Bob in accounting may think it's a brilliant idea to rebuild Lotus 1-2-3. That may help Bob, but 10x'ing Bob's spreadsheet output doesn't change the company's profitability, because it wasn't a limiting factor. It was to Bob, but not to the company's revenue generators. HN didn't like this article when it hit, but I thought it made a good point that corporate C2 is going to be the first thing AI adoption breaks: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonwingard/2026/04/23/vibe-co... Increasing AI spend without profitability improvements is a symptom that C2 is failing (or was insufficient to begin with). Seen through a charitable "CEOs know what the fuck they're doing" lens, the preemptive layoffs are about forcing AI efficiency gains in areas CEOs expect them: instead of allowing those departments' remaining employees to build their own apps, they're forced to deploy AI to cover for their missing 3 team members. Unfortunately, the layoffs were executed before there were solid results about which departments could benefit from AI use (and without a plan for continuity of institutional knowledge), so... we'll see.

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conartist6 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Right but that kinda like just happened. The market hasn't fully reacted to it yet, so it's hard to say that now is the moment when it's safe to draw a linear extrapolation.

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jimnotgym 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As that sort of person myself, albeit not in a software company right now, my thought process would be this.

1) I have a new extra cost 2) How does that make me more profit, and improved cashflow

I know I'll be bombarded with metrics about productivity, feature completion, bug fixes etc. But someone is going to have to tell me how that equates to more sales. And who is going to do that? I'll be worried that the feature wishlist will just creep up now we can handle more throughput, and yet everyone will be telling me that I don't need to worry about the lack of new customers this quarter, one more new feature and we will catch up in Q4. You can see how that could make one grumpy. Then when the sales don't come, I'll tell the CTO that they need to balance the books, if they want to use expensive tools to make each developer more productive then they will need fewer developers...

...but I don't want that, I want more great features that people will pay for, and faster. But they have to pay for themselves.

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trhway 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As Anthropic with all its revenue still needs a large outside capital, it suggests that those AI costs those CFOs pay probably don't cover the actual Anthropic's costs.