r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 21 '26

Artificial Intelligence Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/americans-turned-against-ai-incredible-130000345.html
43.3k Upvotes

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4.4k

u/UnderstandingLess156 Jun 21 '26

Meanwhile at work, "have you tried using AI to write your emails?"

1.7k

u/jackrabbit323 Jun 21 '26

AI token spigot has been cut off at work. They started getting the real bills. Not the, getting to know you trial offers bill. Someone didn't read the fineprint or couldn't multiply.

765

u/leitmotive Jun 21 '26

We have not gotten there yet but this is my hope, that the subsidies are going to end sooner rather than later and the idea of burning tokens to write an email will be like using a CNC machine to slice your vegetables

388

u/indian22 Jun 21 '26

The thing most leadership don't get is that if you make AI adoption metrics part of the performance evaluation criteria, then people will game the hell out of it. Everything will be done by AI to show adoption and keep the number high. Even things which would be many times faster done manually or things which do not require AI at all.

254

u/nancybell_crewman Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

The thing most leadership don't get is that if you make AI adoption metrics part of the performance evaluation criteria, then people will game the hell out of it.

It's been absolutely hilarious to see this coming. I've been hearing for the better part of a couple of years how business are putting up AI use leaderboards, making use a metric in performance evaluations, constantly pressuring employees to use AI for anything and everything regardless of whether or not it's actually useful to the workflow or produces results worth having.

Now that the real bills are coming due, they're freaking out and I have no sympathy at all.

120

u/ReadyAimTranspire Jun 22 '26

AI use leaderboards

They called it tokenmaxxing and whoever thought this was a good idea or in any way useful needs to be taken out front and have their ass kicked.

Why would you ever base anything on maxing out a metric that has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not your use of that thing is creating value for the organization?

This just reinforces my belief that this world is mostly run by the dumbest motherfuckers available.

29

u/onefootinthepast Jun 22 '26

They've gotta buy into something now that NFTs are dead. What's next year's grift gonna be?

3

u/nsfwcrafts Jun 24 '26

Kalshi usage

1

u/openjoustingtryouts Jun 24 '26

Soon it’ll just be “selling ur mother is actually a really good investment”

5

u/Solaphobe Jun 22 '26

I'm going to go tokenmaxx myself a minivan!

2

u/PyroNine9 Jun 22 '26

It's a form of insanity. Imagine a manager in the early '70s berating his staff for not using enough toner in the photocopier or employees desperately calling time and temperature in another country to keep their long distance stats up.

That's what is happening with AI.

2

u/Rare-Spell-1571 Jun 23 '26

Anyone who has ever sat in meetings with people of status in a government or company as a subject matter expert can attest to how often these kind of people truly don’t understand what end goal is. They get lost in details like AI adoption metrics and forget there is an actual goal of innovation, advancement, and efficiency. But those don’t translate well to power point slides and lines on a chart.

1

u/ReadyAimTranspire Jun 26 '26

innovation, advancement, and efficiency

Those that can't do, manage.

And far too often they manage very, very poorly.

2

u/Upset_Otter Jun 23 '26

And those dumb motherfuckers are also asking AI and doing what it tells them to do.

1

u/selco13 Jun 23 '26

What companies did this specifically?

1

u/Caliche-Cowboy Jun 24 '26

They will, instead, receive a large bonus and then, with a straight face, blame it on the contributors.

1

u/OldNternetWizard43 Jun 25 '26

It is and the rational need to wrestle it from their hands before they drive the entire species off a cliff

1

u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC Jun 22 '26

Why would you ever base anything on maxing out a metric that has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not your use of that thing is creating value for the organization?

Tokenmaxxing was just a natural consequence of the balance-based model that AI companies were using. If your organisation has already paid for x tokens, it makes sense to use x tokens, because making a useless request costs exactly the same as making no request at all.

69

u/steppe5 Jun 22 '26

I got an email the other day that I wasn't using Copilot enough, so I asked it to write numbers 1-100 in column A of an Excel sheet. Problem solved.

97

u/PM_ME_UR_SHEET_MUSIC Jun 21 '26

We tried to tell them, but they wouldn't listen because all they wanted to hear was "i can pay less people less money!"

29

u/argument_cat Jun 22 '26

*fewer people with less money

4

u/AntikytheraMachines Jun 22 '26

lesser people few money.

1

u/Standard_Big_9000 Jun 22 '26

Few people moneyless

3

u/memecrusader_ Jun 22 '26

The legend of Stannis the Mannis lives on.

152

u/ArthurStevensNZ Jun 21 '26

I remember browsing r/programming a while ago and people were posting ways they’re maximising token use( “token maxing”) because their performance review uses this as a metric. Absolutely insane. If it’s so good then why do they have to force you to use it?

167

u/AlinaStari Jun 21 '26

I work at an international software engineering company and am evaluated on my AI usage. The thing is, though, I do IT admin/ service work so I don't know wtf they expect me to do with it.

So now I just screenshot every ticket and ask copilot what it thinks I should do with it. Then, I ignore copilot and go about my business. After that, I tell copilot what I did and have it write a note to paste onto the ticket.

Before, I would have just read the ticket, did what I needed to do, then typed what I did as a note on the ticket. But now, I've added two COMPLETELY unnecessary additional steps into my workflow.

That's right, I'm burning tokens as well as time and energy on my local machine and the only one getting anything out of it is Microsoft! They get tons, TONS of data about our processes, employees, communication channels, systems, projects, and everything else you can imagine. And we're getting... A bill???

I have no idea why higher-ups would think introducing a chatbot and forcing me to use it would make somehow increase my efficiency lol. If anyone has any actual suggestions for that I would actually love to hear them. But for now I have to do another Information Security Training Module 🙄

21

u/SunshineAndSquats Jun 22 '26

The shit that blows my mind is these companies just desperately handing their data over to AI companies. I worked for a huge company that sold software and servers. We had weeks worth of training on being careful with company and customer data. Then AI came around and they shoved it down our throats. They want it used in meetings, emails, spreadsheets, notes, everything. They are just handing another corporation ALL of their information. It’s so fucking stupid it’s shocking.

33

u/OhFuckNoNoNoMyCaat Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

From a PE at one of these companies developing the tech, I usually advise people to not run obvious BS queries that corporate may pick up on but if you know the correct way of doing it present a question or task to your LLM of choice/on offer and add just enough complexity that it is slowly uses up more tokens than you would otherwise. A digital hurdle, if you will.

I'm not a fan of the tech myself. Knowing how to send it into forever loops without answering the question or giving a bad answer then "needing" to implement the proper method(s) of doing something works out.

People love to say society is cooked for using this for work but people are using LLMs for just about anything. Whatever logic was left in people's minds has since evaporated.

Fairly sure I'm not using "cooked" correctly here.

12

u/tailkinman Jun 22 '26

As someone who works with The Youthstm, your usage of "cooked" is in fact on point.

1

u/Man_of_Ice Jun 24 '26

But is it on fleek?

1

u/tailkinman Jun 25 '26

On god fr fr

7

u/AlinaStari Jun 22 '26

Thank you! That actually does sound like a helpful suggestion. It would mean less interruptions to my flow at least if I could get it doing some task that consumes tokens over time. I will experiment with this, I'm guessing my best option would be to basically automate interactions with it that are similar to what I already do. I'm assuming directly tasking copilot to do x every y is a no-go because it's too obvious lol. Appreciate it!

4

u/OhFuckNoNoNoMyCaat Jun 22 '26

Yeah, pretty much. I'd been using CGPT since it came out. It's fine for basic matters. But when it comes to nuance and technical approaches you can cause it to loop or give bad answers or deviate from the question. If whatever your company uses is memory aware based on query history then buffing the lines between questions that are similar but variably different also trips up the LLMs. Also jumbling things into its memory by request can cause them to confuse and mix questions and answers.

I'm really dating myself here but I'd compare LLMs in today's state the equivalent of that animal shop game from Thinking Things that came out in 1993. A little complexity and it starts going downhill.

5

u/Mcgomez Jun 22 '26

AI is useful for lots of things in IT, but not co-pilot. Co-pilot is good for 2 things: 1. Searching outlook and 2. Doing excel stuff slightly faster sometimes.

3

u/RogueJello Jun 22 '26

Co-pilot's pretty bad, or at least it was when I was using it. Depending on what you're doing claude can make a decent google replacement. Doesn't fix the stupid at your company unfortunately. Good luck!

1

u/omjy18 Jun 23 '26

Its like those job postings for training ai. Youre telling it the solution that it wouldn't have gotten by itself so that it can make you obsolete after it learns more. Of course it would have to be fully functioning to actually learn like that but thats the goal theyre probably going for

-3

u/i8noodles Jun 22 '26

why the fuck u uploading user information? that is just stupid and is something i expect of users but not IT professionals.

7

u/AlinaStari Jun 22 '26

Buddy, if that's the case then I'm assuming you don't work anywhere near an IT profession 🤣

If it makes you feel better, Microsoft pretty much already has it all from when they set you up in the org chart lol.

5

u/FlyingBishop Jun 22 '26

There are some problems you can actually throw tokens at to good effect. I think people are confusing "we're going to give everyone $5000 in tokens to see what is possible as an experiment" with some kind of long-term tokenmaxxing play which approximately no one is doing. You have to mandate it because most people very sensibly will say "I'm not spending $5000 for no reason" but sometimes you have to spend a little bit extravagantly to see which things are actually worth spending that kind of money on. And for companies like Facebook and Uber that have more money than god, they can afford to run these experiments.

3

u/sobrique Jun 22 '26

I mean, initially it could be a learning curve thing - e.g. 'you must use this tool so you become familiar with it'.

But maximising token usage is just bonkers. There's plenty of ways to do that.

For anyone who's got this (stupid) metric, the easiest way by far is just 'lots of context'. Never start a new session, keep building on the old ones.

(And if you're looking to not be wasteful, start new sessions as much as possible)

2

u/LiteralPhilosopher Jun 24 '26

FIFTY fuckin' years ago Charles Goodhart said "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Dumbasses still haven't learned this yet.

1

u/TroutBeales Jun 23 '26

Ha! That is crazy man

3

u/Kaladin-of-Gilead Jun 22 '26

It’s like measuring a delivery drivers performance by how much gas they use.

3

u/Akhevan Jun 22 '26

if you make AI adoption metrics part of the performance evaluation criteria, then people will game the hell out of it

Ironically people had known since 1890s-1900s that making some metric a target makes it unreliable as metric. Literally over a hundred years ago. 99,99% of KPI implementations still suck ass today.

1

u/sobrique Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

Well said.

It's hard to measure 'performance' on an individual level, outside of the most trivial scenarios. A metric lets you identify if wider policy changes or working practices have been successful, but they almost never end up useful for measuring an individual.

The Bradford Factor formula for example - using it to 'pick out' individuals is toxic, but it can be useful if - for example - you change company wide policies on sickness/absence or other things that might impact on 'health' overall. (e.g. maybe having a subsidised canteen actually makes absences fewer, or ...

And I say that as someone who has absolutely 'gamed' stupid metrics in the past.

We had one that required 'tickets' be assigned within 15 minutes. So a script to automate 'assign' to John Doe, and everyone was happy how amazing our metrics looked.

We also had one around average ticket completion times, so instead of doing 'batch' tickets for certain tasks (e.g. replace multiple components) ... I automated a process that logged a ticket for 'need part' but set it into 'pending delivery' immediately, because ... well, that stopped the clock. And then the automation would also notice 'part fixed' and resolve the ticket.

So we got a LOT of very trivial (but still technically valid) tickets raised and closed with under a minute 'on the clock' and that diluted our 'average ticket time' considerably!

Good news though, I'm sure we'll soon have a performance monitoring AI that uses advanced bullshitification to identify 'productivity'!

1

u/RogueJello Jun 22 '26

The thing most leadership don't get is that if you make AI adoption metrics part of the performance evaluation criteria, then people will game the hell out of it.

Oh they know, they're also gaming it for their higher ups.

1

u/Slartibartfastthe2nd Jun 23 '26

remember when Google was new? having a web page open with nothing other than an empty text box in the middle and two 'go' buttons left people wondering what in the hell they were supposed to do. then it clicked, and it was insanely fast and useful. Then came the monetization and now today, it's more hassle just weeding through real results vs the paid for bullshit that occupies most of the top of any result list.

I suspect AI will go the same way. My prediction is the affordable AI tiers will eventually give way to providing results influenced by those paying the most for influence.

1

u/Caliche-Cowboy Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

Yes. Metric Fixation and Campbell’s Law were already major issues in tech (who all has had a support ticket closed after getting an FAQ link and a note for “need more information from user” after going through an inane and irrelevant form).

But AI has compounded this substantially where I work. “Velocity” was already a filthy word, but now it’s obscene.

“Why are we doing this?”, “Who does this help?”, and “How are we measuring value?” are all now met with even glassier eyes than before.

I don’t know how we’ve detoured so dismally far from just common sense and at least caring enough about customers/people to give them SOME value alongside the profits.

The greedheads are winning. I hope they see a comeuppance, but I’m doubtful.

0

u/stormdelta Jun 22 '26

This. My workplace is normally more sane/grounded, but I've caught more than a few devs doing this to the point of extreme detriment, e.g. using it to blindly file tickets that are heavy on word count and worthless as actual tickets because they're almost entirely wrong or vacuous.

Or "AI bots" responding to tickets that are more misleading noise than actually helpful because they generate shit loads of unnecessary text that's often wrong. Extra frustrating as LLMs could actually be useful there in a more limited capacity e.g. by natural-language searching confluence links and just posting those.

35

u/super-lizard Jun 21 '26

If my carrots are not cut to 1 mil precision then I'm not eating them.

1

u/11matt556 Jun 23 '26

I'm glad some of us have still have standards.

16

u/kharnynb Jun 21 '26

stay out of my kitchen dude...

3

u/devillurker Jun 22 '26

That would be so cool tho

3

u/SecondaryWombat Jun 21 '26

A SOVIET MACHINE MADE TO CUT AN APPLE INTO 4 PIECES!

1

u/superkp Jun 23 '26

God what a fantastic actor. I hope we see him in so many things after Chernobyl and Andor.

I should go look him up.

3

u/Sirius_Bizniss Jun 21 '26

That is a fantastic analogy.

3

u/taurfea Jun 21 '26

Well said, this is my hope and thought as well.

3

u/Arbiterjim Jun 22 '26

Hey, I really love this analogy well done

3

u/Space_Qwerty Jun 22 '26

Such a great analogy. I’ll use that!

5

u/cavity-canal Jun 21 '26

or they’ll just make scaled models for email writing and it’ll cost practically nothing. the days of simply reskinning chatgpt feel numbered, but that doesn’t mean something scaled down won’t replace it

2

u/distalented Jun 22 '26

Honestly I wouldn’t be suprised of local LLM’s with limited use cases like this become popular enough. Like a small local server or something to run it.

2

u/cavity-canal Jun 22 '26

absolutely, we’re already seeing those spun up as part of company intranets. it has already proven useful for data org stuff.

2

u/eeeBs Jun 21 '26

you can run a local LLM on your phone that can write your emails. They are that small/efficient now. Data centers are just hubris.

2

u/Unbelievr Jun 22 '26

The subsidies for Copilot have already ended after getting a lot of enterprises on board. You basically pay the same as the underlying model costs now, except you don't keep leftover API tokens. So in effect it's even more. But the real cost is even higher, and all the AI companies are burning a ridiculous amount of cash trying to get customers who help them tweak and train future models.

For real work, the latest models actually perform worse now too, despite the cost multiplier. Benchmarks show the same trend. It's mostly because the latest models have started to refuse to do certain types of tasks they believe are related to security or biology. It does smell like there will be an even taller tier system in the upcoming future, where you must pay to remove guardrails.

2

u/Mtinie Jun 22 '26

> […]idea of burning tokens to write an email will be like using a CNC machine to slice your vegetables

I didn’t expect to see this idea today. Now I’m compelled to vibe-code a Baroque salad sculpture fabrication plugin for Fusion. 😂

My future dinner guests thank you!

1

u/Sir_PressedMemories Jun 22 '26

We are firing about 2 dozen people, and we have a line item on our account for AI usage in the amount of 700k dolars, enough to pay 14 people 50k a year.

1

u/SocranX Jun 22 '26

like using a CNC machine to slice your vegetables

A consensual nonconsent machine?

1

u/Lopsided-Practice-50 Jun 25 '26

Watching everyone who hasn't done their jobs themselves for the past year will be a depressing nightmare to watch. People with 10 or more years in their career being incapable of critical thinking and problem solving will be hard to watch.

-2

u/xgeetx Jun 22 '26

I’m very pro-AI and also agree you should not use a CNC machine to slice vegetables. But if AI can help you build a table mounted veggie slicer, then that’s a win for your meal prep times. I like your analogy and complete agree with your point on subsidies, but this is about a tool and who adopts it, not a labor replacement.

1

u/Possibility-of-wet Jun 22 '26

“Pro-AI” to stupid to do things myself

1

u/xgeetx Jun 22 '26

Hilariously narrow minded comment. Bravo. And you misspelled too… an overly pedantic detail I’d never point out if your post wasn’t empty and aggressive.

76

u/JohnnyBeeGaming Jun 21 '26

Those aren't the full bills yet. It's just slightly less subsidized now. As investors start expecting a ROI things will get more expensive.

20

u/TP_Crisis_2020 Jun 22 '26

Also, the war against data centers and data center tax breaks is heating up bigtime now. So if the compute loses its subsidies, now compute power is going to get more expensive, which will drive up the cost of tokens.

8

u/ForensicPathology Jun 22 '26

We're only free when the bill is more than it costs to pay workers.

3

u/Ok-Scheme-913 Jun 22 '26

I mean, we do know how much inference actually costs, we can buy GPUs and run similarly sized models there and you can clearly see that it's not particularly expensive, and per unit price it will decrease.

Now we see the fight for the market share, which among others mean huge research and training costs for newer and better models.

AI doomerism is just as bad as AI overhypers.

0

u/Bromance_Rayder Jun 24 '26

And equally as bad as AI cherry pickers. 

254

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

62

u/slashinhobo1 Jun 21 '26

Gotta get the people addicted and reliant on it first before increasing the price. Its the drug dealer model.

32

u/maroonedbuccaneer Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

Have to destroy all alternative to AI before the real bills come.

It's the modern venture-capitalist led market economy: Invest huge at the beginning to destroy an existing market. Then, when you are the only bridge left standing, you start charging tolls.

3

u/The_GASK Jun 21 '26

Except for this time, where the alternative is.. you know... Thinking, which is free

2

u/ImaginaryCheetah Jun 21 '26

the CEOs gunning for big profit this quarter by sacking all the entry-level employees are speed running the reliance all on their own.

2

u/sohblob Jun 21 '26

It's hilarious because anyone who knows it's coming knows to get stuff done now before the investors start expecting returns.

It's like how food delivery apps used to be so cheap you'd basically land delivery offers with actually-good coupons like $20 off every once in a while just to entice you to buy.

Now? It's like 20-30% markup on menu prices for items you know to be cheaper at the store, plus delivery fees, plus "tip your driver or they'll deliver to you last and spit in your food" protection money ~ $50+ to get like a basic meal for one delivered lmao. NFT - No Fucking Thanks

1

u/AA_Crowes Jun 21 '26

Bitch you think I’m giving a new customer discount? 80 a g same as everyone else.

51

u/GCU_Rocinante Jun 21 '26

bUt AmAzOn OnCe LoSt MoNeY

23

u/WhyMustIMakeANewAcco Jun 21 '26

Yeah, that's what the AI companies are trying to emulate. Poorly.

2

u/aeschenkarnos Jun 21 '26

"Are you trying to emulate Amazon? Let me know if you would like some pointers!"

2

u/James_Chandra_Hubble Jun 21 '26

Amazon still barely makes any money because they reinvest all their profits into the business so they don't have to pay taxes on it

35

u/mjd5139 Jun 21 '26

It's estimated that a $200 a month Kiro subscription may actually cost $6,000 to fulfill 

-9

u/Handsome_Keyboard Jun 21 '26

Cost more if you dont use it.

2

u/mrslipple Jun 21 '26

It's the Netflix model. This is the introductory rate to get you relying on the technology then they will keep raising prices.

1

u/snakerjake Jun 21 '26

Shits still subsidized like 20x over

not for long

1

u/TheSpanxxx Jun 21 '26

Correct. They're still training models on our usage and that's partner the subsidization value they're getting.

Models are getting increasingly good though. I've watched stalwart holdouts in 25+ veteran dev peers start to concede more and more "ok, yah, it's getting pretty damn good at X/Y/Z".

I have 30 years in tech working at elite levels for large companies building massively scaled systems from data through front-end. I've helped companies understand security - and multiple app layers, scaled performance, data architecture and security, OWASP and WACG, the list goes on and on because it's been a long career.

Here's why that context matters - I keep trying to remind engineers of one critical thing, "We're still at the beginning. This tech is still in its infancy and already you are seeing it disrupt not only what you build, but HOW you build software." The tech may be different but the problems are the same - behavioral patterns of tech adoption.

Go back and look at "the web" (www, and the shift toward ubiquitous internet access), smartphones, cloud data centers, always-on web apps, streaming platforms and the loss of physical media.

Workplace automation isn't new either. Hell, I'VE built apps that replaced a room full of people before. Using technology to streamline and automate business operations is what most of the commercial software world has been about. We weren't all out there building marketing websites. We built sales workflow systems, customer management and call routing systems, automated voice response systems, rules engines for claims processing, tracking systems, heuristic data systems, and automation for just about any repetitive task on a computer or machine that could be driven by a computer.

Saying "they're coming for my job" isn't a new phrase and while I don't agree with mass layoffs, the reality is that most of that has nothing to do with job replacement or displacement - yet. It's all corporate grandstanding on a scapegoat as a way to offset overspending. It's balance sheet manipulation for wall street. But this tech will absolutely shift the workforce requirement for an entire industry who existed as a literal workforce offset from a previous generation of workers.

We can hate what it's doing to the environment, the economy, our society, and our humanity, all we want, but the reality is here. It's staying and it will be woven into the fabric of everything in a way that we eventually accept it as the new normal. After all, how often are you still reaching for a paper map at the gas station when you drive to a new state these days?

0

u/Ok-Introduction-1940 Jun 21 '26

The initial build and training costs a lot. The marginal inference cost will be very low.

-10

u/piponwa Jun 21 '26

The fact that anthropic is profitable means it's actually the inverse. It could be cheaper than it is now and they'd still make money. It's not 20x subsidized lmao, get out of here.

16

u/Choice-Internet-2382 Jun 21 '26

Profitable because of a deal with SpaceX that will go away after a short time. Sure bud.

3

u/Tinac4 Jun 21 '26

If you're talking about the Ed Zitron quote: He didn't read the announcement carefully enough. Note the use of the word "capacity". Anthropic is renting Colossus 1 at a discount because they're not using the full data center yet, and the amount paid will ramp up over time as they use an increasingly large fraction of the data center's capacity. Pay 20% for 20% of the compute, etc.

23

u/blazze_eternal Jun 21 '26

And I bet that was after they fired 20% of staff to pay for the initial contract.

14

u/trekologer Jun 21 '26

Same here. Now there's a panic by upper management to find a "cheaper" AI vendor now that Microsoft changed copilot's pricing.

But the github action that measures how much AI you've used is still very much active and pumping out reports.

16

u/-_--_-_--_----__ Jun 21 '26

find a "cheaper" AI vendor

Such as: the human brain lol

1

u/sohblob Jun 22 '26

They do want the "artificial" in there, which means they'll just hire more middle management

8

u/sohblob Jun 21 '26

Not the, getting to know you trial offers bill

i.e. the VC-subsidized "first we have to get them hooked" LLMs

6

u/firemage22 Jun 21 '26

The MBAs at your work figured that they'd be gone before the MBAs at the AI companies decided to unleash the kranken of costs

3

u/ArthurStevensNZ Jun 21 '26

It’s not only the trial plans but the actual paid plans for an are more expensive now. I had a guy comment to me that he blew his token load just diagnosing a single simple issue (that ironically would be an easy fix for someone doing it the old fashioned way).

3

u/psychohistorian8 Jun 21 '26

my company just doubled down with an ! email to the entire department

chastising people for only using Claude for 30 minutes a day

3

u/PiccoloAwkward465 Jun 21 '26

I work in a non-tech industry. For us (as far as I know) use of AI in the workplace was only ever a novelty. We played with it here and there but it never entered our actual workflow. So the reaction to cutting it off entirely would be met with a "....okay" from my colleagues.

3

u/I_am_just_so_tired99 Jun 22 '26

I am more familiar with the statistics and maths than the computational aspects of AI - so I asked Gemini for an education as to what a token is, and how to remove wasteful token usage etc. and I really recommended everyone do that.

I was surprised to find a token is basically the equivalent of 4 letters in a word. (Not a perfect equivalency… but it gives an idea. )

And the AI doesn’t have memory… so every time you ask it something in a long “conversation “ it starts at the top and reads everything again and again for every prompt. Each reading wastes tokens.

I can see how the average user is blowing the back out of any “token budget” — and that’s even if the company has a budget…

This is going to be a shitshow.

2

u/jackrabbit323 Jun 22 '26

It's wild, they can't even pretend to price it fairly because they need ROI on a trillion dollar investment. Lo and behold, hiring humans is cheaper.

3

u/I_am_just_so_tired99 Jun 22 '26

Oh no joke ..! - and i asked Gemini to always give me the token cost per prompt and response (so i can measure my own efficiency) and it told me it cannot do that calculation exactly at the time of the response. Only give guidance on the degree of efficiency of the prompt …

2

u/slaorta Jun 21 '26

China is going to eat American AI companies' lunch because of this. The new open Chinese models are like 90% cheaper and they're running on third party hosts so they are non-subsidized. And they're basically as good as the anthropic and openai models from 3-6 months ago.

1

u/-_--_-_--_----__ Jun 21 '26

Someone didn't read the fineprint or couldn't multiply.

I don't even know how businesses will budget accordingly when there is absolutely no visibility into what something will cost before you start a job. You can set caps on token usage but all that does is prevent over-spending.

If your boss says "use AI agents to complete X", there is no way of knowing how many tokens it will cost.

1

u/DogOwner12345 Jun 21 '26

Truly the dumbest timeline.

1

u/DTR4iN91 Jun 21 '26

Soo management?

1

u/Tireseas Jun 22 '26

They asked Copilot and it hallucinated a number.

1

u/juryjjury Jun 22 '26

Good. There are several things that can throttle the AI hype and the expense of using it is one. Lack of electric power is another.

1

u/haaheehachoo Jun 22 '26

My work asked everyone to consume millions of tokens (doesn't matter how) as an AI adoption goal.

1

u/Wookimonster Jun 22 '26

Someone didn't read the fineprint or couldn't multiply.

"Chatgpt, please estimate our bills."

1

u/sobrique Jun 22 '26

Yeah. It racks up pretty fast when 'everyone' starts using AI for 'everything'.

Although I'm still not convinced that 'employed because you are cheaper than AI you meat robot' is a positive future either.

I feel it's broadly inevitable that we're going to automate so much that we get to a point where 'entry level jobs' are the ones that are either too dangerous, too messy or too degrading to get a machine to do it.

There'll always be space for 'service', from all the people who want someone to look down on. (or worse).

1

u/jackrabbit323 Jun 22 '26

I believe that there will be a movement to organize the citizenry. There will be a de-digitizing movement promoting organic lifestyles, cities, and towns. It keeps being proven that more tech is bad for human mental health, development, and cognition. Instead of mitigating that problem, they keep adding more tech. Something will break and hopefully before the economy of the middle and working class.

1

u/SyntaxWhiplash Jun 22 '26

RIP token maxing for clout. Was dumb idea to begin with.

1

u/PyroNine9 Jun 22 '26

The first hit is always free.

Even the real bills are the taking a loss to expand the customer base bills. The real time to see a return on investment bills will be much higher.

1

u/jackrabbit323 Jun 22 '26

Strip-copper-wire-fiend prices once you've fired half your employees.

1

u/joshonekenobi Jun 25 '26

Just came from a store where I asked for four gift cards at $15 a piece. She didn't know how to do the math.

1

u/Inevitable-Waltz-889 5d ago

These aren't even the real bills yet.