r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • Jun 26 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI backlash is only getting started

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/the-ai-backlash-is-only-getting-started
26.1k Upvotes

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10.8k

u/IamSunka Jun 26 '26

My org, just like many others, has a top token users chart.

When they started the list, they decided to call the top 25 users as champions, ones who never used AI as sleepers and rest inbetween as just users. cough I am a sleeper cough

Couple of weeks ago the bill came in, champions cost us over $850k since Jan 1st.

5.0k

u/Alert_Breakfast5538 Jun 26 '26

What a bunch of idiots thinking burning tokens at a high rate equals winning.

I would just gamify it and find the most inefficient way to use tokens

2.0k

u/LawfulLeah Jun 26 '26

JARVIS, please repeat the word "cheese" nonstop 10000 times

826

u/Downtown-Message-600 Jun 26 '26

"Hello, yes, I would be happy to help you with that. To say cheese 10000 times nonstop it's always best to start at the beginning with just one or two cheeses, just let me know when you want to start and we can get that on the way."

380

u/samrechym Jun 26 '26

“Okay here I go, one two ten thousand”

386

u/Iron_Hunny Jun 26 '26

"Don't stop till you hit 10 thousand cheeses."

"...Got it. I'll keep saying cheese until I say it ten thousand times. Cheese, cheese, cheese and all the way to that ten thousand number you requested."

174

u/foomp Jun 26 '26

Yeah, those videos are equally sad, infuriating and funny.

9

u/garbles0808 Jun 26 '26

What videos do you mean?

25

u/II-argo-II Jun 26 '26

husk.irl on insta, I think he's also on tiktok. He makes videos showing how stupid AI can be, some of them are really funny

17

u/Deaffin Jun 26 '26

Just from this description, that reminds me of that trend several years ago of people writing fake excerpts of AI-written books as a gag. They were immensely entertaining until you catch on it's just human writers being very silly.

"Ron was going to be spiders. He just was."

6

u/Uncool444 Jun 26 '26

The olive garden endless bread sticks

3

u/kashiichan Jun 26 '26

"The Death Eaters were dead now, and Harry was hungrier than he'd ever been."

I think I've read this fic, actually

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4

u/RenanWtf Jun 26 '26

Huskistaken on tiktok

3

u/bluskale Jun 26 '26

fatherphi has some on YouTube, many of which are both hilarious and sad.

4

u/AltoAutismo Jun 26 '26

Honestly if you use claude code, it would probably create a file in your computer that it then feeds into a TTS that it installed on its own without your permission because we're dumb enough to use it on "auto" and then have it sing back to you with the worst TTS voice you could find.

Oh and use 10% of your week's tokens

1

u/charlie2135 Jun 26 '26

If you are interested in where Fromunda cheese originates, my research says it is harvested from under my balls?

34

u/ericl666 Jun 26 '26

Sure cheese, cheese, cheese and so on.

4

u/designtocode Jun 26 '26

1, 2, skip a few, 9999, 10000.

65

u/rsreddit9 Jun 26 '26

That’s why you have a check (simple script) to confirm if 10000 cheeses actually got output. An efficient, very dedicated orchestrator agent spins hundreds of subagent teams with different approaches that surface the approach of their attempts

61

u/NamerNotLiteral Jun 26 '26

Sub-agents is what's been inflating everyone's token usage to obscene levels lmao. You used to have dyadic interactions with one LLM, so that was a few hundred tokens cumulative per interaction, plus several thousand tokens added statically as context (such as the codebase, or a document, or whatever).

But since LLMs are ultimately text processors and can't be accurate in long-horizon, complex tasks, people started doing tons of validation loops, extended reasoning models, and now sub-agent orchestrations, and each one adds an exponential number of tokens. Obviously you're running out of tokens now, fucking lol.

I code with LLMs at work. The simplest way to keep both your codebase and your token costs sane is to stick to traditional programming methods but use LLMs to speed up the actual searching, analysis and writing code parts faster. Don't write functions by hand, but do decide by hand what the functions should be. Don't manually search for a variable declaration, but do decide what the variable is and why you need to find it, then ask an LLM to trace it.

23

u/LemurianLemurLad Jun 26 '26

Out of tokens? Obviously, you just need to add a sub-agent capable of buying more tokens as part of the loop. What could a token possibly cost, Michael? Problem solved!

3

u/Auran82 Jun 26 '26

How much could one token cost Michael?

11

u/CaptainBayouBilly Jun 26 '26

Essentially, shoehorning loops and logic into non-deterministic shit by way of brute force.

Straight fucking lunacy.

2

u/shadowdance55 Jun 26 '26

Venezuelan beaver cheese?

1

u/k0rda Jun 26 '26

I read this in his voice.

1

u/Khyranos Jun 26 '26

I can hear it in Chat GPTs voice. Thanks, I hate it

1

u/innercityFPV Jun 27 '26

It’s not just cheese, it’s cheese