- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/38083497
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/26/ai-cost-human-workers Uber’s chief technology officer already blew through his full 2026 AI budget due to token costs, according to The Information.
Lol. Lmao even
A lot of AI contracts and services were priced assuming literally everyone was going to adopt it so the MLMs all tried to undercut each other to get market share.
Turns out, not everyone wants it and they undercharged significantly so the snake oil salesmen are jacking up their prices to try and stay viable. Leaving a companies that early shrunk their workforce holding the bag paying more in expenses and lower productivity because they bought in to the bubble without even checking how factual claims were.
The cost has also shot up because a lot of the new frameworks are much more token heavy than the old ones.
So the original free plan might have made sense when people were only typing little questions into it, and using a handful of tokens, but is no longer cost-effective with things like modern agent pipelines constantly throwing tens of thousands of tokens at the service.
I tried running a little locally hosted agent thing on my computer the other day, and it was feeding a hundred thousand tokens at the model every few minutes, because it was keeping all the files in context. Sure, it hit the cache a lot, and so the effective cost would be less, but it’s still a lot more token usage than me poking the model with inane questions.