If AI isn't worth what it costs why are some of these companies allowing $1,000+/employee/month?

manwithopinions 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Matthew Prince of Cloudflare has been outspoken in saying that companies that do not go all in on AI will be left behind. There probably is some value being received in exchange for tokens but it seems quite plausible that some or even much of this spending by companies is driven by fear.

$1k/month is nothing as a hedge against a CEO being accused of causing their company to be left behind in the AI utopia of tomorrow. If you’re in a peer group that rewards risk taking and all of your peers are taking a risk, you’ve got to take that risk too. Better to burn money trying something and then failing, than to not try. Failure is acceptable, missing an opportunity is not.

https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2025221270061580453

“My advice: don’t be a [dinosaur]. I’ve seen this movie before and they go extinct. ”

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prymitive 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Partially because they think that once employees put enough context and rules into markdown files they can be fired and replaced by an online subscription.

	▲	simonw 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm not convinced that's happening, any good evidence that it is? The impact of AI on jobs appears to be more in terms of hiring slowdowns: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5425555 > Following adoption, junior employment declines in adopting firms relative to non-adopters, while senior employment trends remain largely unchanged. This decline is concentrated in occupations most exposed to GenAI and is driven primarily by slower hiring rather than increased separations.
	▲	ares623 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I used to go above and beyond and take pride in writing decent/good documentation for my team and have gotten a lot of compliments about them. But I've started to deliberately constrain myself because of what you describe. Sure, I'm not convinced that it actually come to fruition, but just the realization that this is what they're daydreaming about makes me sick so I've forced myself to only do the bare minimum or less now.

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SpicyLemonZest 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's just not very much money for these companies. The source article says Uber allows $1,500 per month, but senior engineers at Uber make $400k/yr ~= $33.3k/month; even disregarding fully-loaded cost, the AI only has to make them about 3% more productive to be worth it.

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

The two that I know of are in a phase of trying to figure out what the return is.

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ares623 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI is Labubu for CEOs.

The value is somewhere else (i.e. being able to brag at the next conference/dinner/awards show and to not feel like a loser)

Once that value is no longer there, I will stock up on popcorn. Sure Labubus are still around and still have "users", but...

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

Mass hysteria

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elktown 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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