Technology

Reminds me of companies getting their cloud computing bills.

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...

This is the most profitable consultant in the world, can't they just afford to run a local llm?

@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.

• Replace workforce with AI because it's easy to be lazy with AI.
• Remaining workforce uses AI to be lazy.
• SurprisedPikachu.webp

Durr durdur

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.

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.

When you tell the people to mash the easy button and then they do exactly what you wanted. They created the monster.

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.

Eat shit you greedy corporate assholes, i hope all of your companies are damaged beyond recovery, you useless fucking tools.

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.