@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.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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Just wait until all the technical debt has to be paid as well.
I know what you mean, but the tech debt problem will never get resolved.
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
This is what happens when the people in charge of everything are entirely separated from reality.
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.
I told my boss this:
- Right now the AI race has a lot of similarities to the dotcom bubble. The subject is packed with risky loans based on huge debts. Those huge debts are expecting to be paid as AI becomes profitable, but AI companies are largely loosing money.
- All those loans and infrastructure create the burden of sunk costs leading to a desperate need to succeed.
- The people feeling that desperation are the same people who own the largest marketing, news, and social media networks in the world.
- As a result, there’s a lot of hype around AI. A lot of “kool-aid,” and everyone wants you to drink it. If you drink the kool-aid, that means you’re also bought into the problem. You also need it to succeed, thus making their problem into your problem.
I explained to him that mature, professional use of AI is going to wind up following a similar path to data engineering. It’ll start with bullshit standards, “prompt engineers” and the like, but eventually SE disciplines are going to define who makes best use of AI. You’re going to have niche use cases for daemon AIs, local LLMs, and remote models. You’ll have stronger frameworks around session management, context management, agent permissions, …
It’s not going to be like this forever, “dump all your shit into our web upload and let the AI figure everything out in one go.” It’s going to become more fragmented, bounded, dare I say deterministic… orchestratable.
Then I told my boss, it would be better if he could frame his excitement around these future use cases… so we can skip the kool-aid stage and get right into the good stuff.
He agreed, until about a week passed. Then it was AI hype again.
Yeah. Local LLM stuff is great when you want to shove a huge pile of documentation into a model trainer and make a more intelligent search. Two of my vendors have implemented it, and it's more useful than a traditional indexing search tool, though you do have to verify the results (which is not much more effort since with a search you'd have to skim the document to find the info it matched anyway).
But for general "do everything" tool, yeah no. It can't read and understand your entire database, codebase, business process, etc.
The "you'll be left behind" nonsense makes me laugh. Left behind from what exactly? Lol
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.
This isn't Justin 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.
Someone else can output more slop than us!
These execs werw the ones we were supposed to replace with AI.
Obviously I like this article, but in general I've seen Futurism pop up a few times and enjoyed their articles. I wonder if I should subscribe
Someone should remind those soggy, arrogant execs that down here in the developer trenches we survived web services, software as a service, outsourcing, and off-shoring. We're still here after all that and we'll still be here after AI.
And the media will keep on shamelessly calling them "job creators".
Hopefully some day the average voter will see through that shit.
Lol, lmao even
SMH Did they really think all these investors just wanted to burn 9-figure sums without any serious return?
i am saying this for about a year now: Altman wants to rule the world.
Who of the billionaire (and now trillionaires, sigh) fucknuggets does not want to rule the world?
What else should one do if one already has everything and can't buy anything else...
A trillionaire sounds surreal. Imagine having an entire country economy (or a few smaller ones) as your budget.
Indeed. When I was young, a millionaire seemed rich. As I grew older, billionaires seemed rich. And now we're one step further. The average millionaire is further away from musk than the average Joe from said millionaire.
It's absurd and shouldn't be possible. Billionaires also shouldn't. Why would anyone even need hundreds of millions. You can live wonderfully with very few millions or even less than one.
These days, in many cities, being a millionaire is a prerequisite for owning a house.
True. We (Germany) experience that too. In some places you wouldn't get a 1 bedroom tiny apt for a sum you could buy a decent house elsewhere.
But I just wouldn't want to live in such cities or neighborhoods. For what purpose? Why should anyone even know I'm loaded? In real life noone knows I am. If I'd raise a cup on the streets people would probably throw change into it 😁
Nobody has to know you own a house. Don't gad about in a tuxedo wearing a monocle.
The purpose of living in a population-dense area is the culture and amenities, such as healthcare facilities and art communities.
Sure, but those you can have basically everywhere, don't need to pick the rich neighborhoods or generally expensive cities.
I lived in our capital once. It had not one benefit I couldn't find elsewhere. At least none I would've found. And we move every few years to somewhere else in krautland.
The reason I'd live in Berlin is the food and culture. Why would I need to go anywhere? every big production visits Berlin. Some of the best food in the world, beer gardens and parks and I just ride the u-bahn everywhere?
Oh and the people are fucking incredible!
Good damn I'm selling myself on living there all over again. Berlin was my favorite city in the world a decade ago. I'd have stuffed myself in a shoebox to live there in my 20s. Now I'll need a decent size flat but it's still a nice dream.
For the record I now live in a city and it's good but not the same level of dreaminess as basically any European city, even the smaller ones.
Not just referring to the rich neighborhoods. Perhaps it's different in Krautland, but in the US, moving further away from the city center moves you further away from resources like those I mentioned. It creates a difference between being able to have a medical appointment during a lunch break and having to take a whole day off for it, for example.
Oh okay, I can't judge the US there. You guys got a lot more space in between cities 😁 Then of course it's very beneficial to not live in bumfuck-nowhere... Especially if you're on a timer...that sucks balls
And think about one Trillionaire - Musk. All that money and he just trips on Ketamine and troll posts on Twitter. He's doing nothing for society.
A regular human would be doing things just for fun like restoring an old building they liked, or saving some dying kid. Maybe going the Dolly Pardon route and giving books to kids.
Not Musk. He's getting dick surgery to try and fix his dick from the last surgery and shitposting.
Who of the billionaire (and now trillionaires, sigh) fucknuggets does not want to rule the world?
But most of them have no plan beyond money, money, money.
This one has. He wants first to use his AI beasts to serve him make the rules for every*, and the rest of humanity to serve his bots, or something like that.
No plan we know of...not everyone is a 5yr old attention seeking whore like those everyone knows.
Sounds like conspiracy theories, but we know what she should know and are allowed to know.
That makes it pretty clear that most executives are the worst possible people to run a company. Well, that’s just how it is when ruthlessness and greed are the only criteria used to select top executives.
But hey, even if they were to lose their jobs because they’re burning through so much money, things will go on as usual: Anyone who’s ever held a top management position will always be hired for the same role somewhere else, because competence is definitely not the deciding factor here. Never was, never will be.
At this rate the leopards are going to have to start going on a restricted diet. Maybe the panthers are hungry too though.
I mean exactly what you think I mean.
Nearly one-third of corporate executives are dumber than an box of rocks.
4/5 actually, if statistics are anything to go by. The remaining 20% are just slightly above median stupidity, with a vanishingly small sliver actually approaching competent.
They intended to use AI to rape their employees and the American public, only to find out that the real money is in the AI companies raping THEM!