Companies Are Throttling Employees’ AI Use Because It’s Too Expensive
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Sources and leaks from Amazon, Adobe, Atlassian, Citi, and more show what is really happening with AI right now: companies are trying to rein in AI use as costs spiral out of control.

Sources and leaks from Amazon, Adobe, Atlassian, Citi, and more show what is really happening with AI right now: companies are trying to rein in AI use as costs spiral out of control.

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
    0·
    3 days ago

    Firms that find LLMs useful for this or that would start investing in their own LLM infra likely using Chinese open models. There are now models that perform well in terms of quality and speed that run on workstation-grade hardware. Those are common at corpos that build non-web software.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      What I don’t get is why most companies are not already doing this.

      I think so many corps are just going on the typical MBA mantra of not owning any infrastructure of their own, because “core competencies” and shiny object FOMO (shiny objects and “we have to scale to Google scale”, LOL) or whatever.

      It explains why so many people run shit in AWS even if they don’t really need to and buying hardware and putting it in a co-lo would have made more sense.

      This kind of thinking is probably what explains idiots doing huuuuuge AI spends that don’t have to.

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
        0·
        3 days ago

        I think all of it comes down to short-termism. All the “core competencies” and all that, all it drives to is optimizing for higher profit for the next quarter. And short-termism is built into the system, driven by the necessary competition for capital. I.e. if you need capital for some investment that takes 2 years to materialize but another firm offers better return 1 year from now, capital goes into the second. Run this in a loop over time and you get most firms optimizing for next quarter profts.

        E: Why necessary - cause capital is prerequisite to any production, software, service, or hardware.

        E2: I’ve thought MBAs are the bane of companies for most of my corporat life. These days I think that’s wrong. They follow the logic of the system and if one does not, they’re being replaced with one who does.

        E3: I mean those phenomena you mention are absolutely behind the effects you say. All I’m saying the phenomena are all driven by the basic incentive structure of the system and are largely unescapable in traditional, non-unionized capitalist corpos.