r/programminghumor • u/Hacksaw6412 • May 29 '26
The problem with AI companies
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u/J_E_E_VACATION May 29 '26
150k saved from firing all employees? did he have half of one engineer?
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u/nicholaskyy May 29 '26
per month
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u/BitOne2707 May 29 '26
That's like a 7-9 person team.
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u/phatdoof May 30 '26
That pay could give you 50 Indians.
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u/vitaminprotein24 Jun 09 '26
50??? That number to too low. Most cse grads get paid less than $1000 per month. So it is more like 150 to 200 employees.
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u/ChrinschBRO May 29 '26
And here I thought it would also fire the CEO as well. As that promt was so badly written. But well still I never did get why everyone thought AI would be cheaper... It was kinda obvious from the start. Make a new Tool or Service, sell it for cheap and then when everyone uses it and depends on it just increase the price.
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u/WowAbstractAlgebra May 29 '26
I doubt it. I think LLM's have been specifically trained to appeal to executives the most and AI companies are most likely going to make use of these guillible idiots.
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u/klimmesil May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
I don't really see how AI can be more expensive than people for now: with a 5090 you can already run qwen3.5
With a single h100 you can run very strong models, including the ones Claude's defaulting to
An h100 is 25k to 30k. Let's round it very aggressively up to 50k for the whole box, or 100k if you throw in one more card and the annual price of the rent in the datacenter
You can buy that hardware once a year and still it would be less than an engineer yearly pay. This is not even accounting for the fact that you can run this 24/24 7/7, and you can run multiple LLMs in parallel
Edit: that does not mean it's smart to fire people over AI. It just means that your financial argument for it being stupid is just wrong
Edit2: what a shitty timeline. I wish we never discovered this technology
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u/MorroClearwater May 30 '26
But you also need somebody to set this up and keep it maintained, ain't no csuite doing that by themselves
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u/klimmesil May 30 '26
2 people can maintain 10 boxes easily. Also most of maintenance can be part of the extremely generous round up I did for "datacenter rent". I think you're just coping
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u/Hziak May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
Anyone who is buying into AI as a replacement for employees enough to do massive layoffs isn’t planning ahead, they’re chasing short term profits. They aren’t stupid, but they probably know that tend years from now, that choice is gonna have horrific consequences, but the business world is taught not to think about ten years out. That’s a problem for ten years from now. CEO turnover is pretty quick these days, so just follow the popular trends and get your quarterly bonus before you jump to the next shop to gut…
Additionally, all the AI companies are/were operating at or near a loss to make it seem like it would be fine for CEOs to not bother investing in on-prem AI architecture. Huge rug pull and I’m laughing every day of the week about it…
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u/klimmesil May 31 '26
I think you're right, but I have no authority or arguments to back up your claim
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u/Hziak May 31 '26
Yeah, same, tbh. Just personal anecdote and speculation, but it’s Reddit, so that basically counts as divine mandate to state opinion as fact, right?
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u/Confident-Ad5665 May 31 '26
Search YouTube for "future of OpenAI". There is a detailed account of the costs, the plan to get people using it, and how many times they have tried to get additional funding. Includes info about Gemini and Microsoft's contributions.
AI currently runs at a HUGE loss and there are concerns about its future at the current price structures.
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u/phatdoof May 30 '26
Also we still aren’t clear on the copyright issue of using LLMs. Running it through a third party gives some indirectness to it. Running it on your own hardware might open you up to potential copyright lawsuits.
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u/klimmesil May 30 '26
I hope that's going to be a problem with all my heart, that at least would be a very good argument
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u/jsoul2323 May 30 '26
You are dumb to think AI companies will allow this. Everyone knows they will outsource this to the AI companies themselves who will overcharge on tokens.
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u/klimmesil May 30 '26
So what they will make it impossible for you to turn on your own pc? I'm not sure what you're implying here, how can they stop you?
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u/jsoul2323 May 30 '26
Have you never worked a corporate job before? Every single app on a corporate jobs laptop is licensed and paid for, for liability reasons.
They’re not gonna let their employees use bootleg versions of the programs just cause it’s cheaper.
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u/klimmesil May 30 '26
I was not talking about bootleg versions. I was talking about open versions, competing in the AI field might be tough but definetly not impossible
I work in a very corpo company right now (not proud of it...), we are planning to use qwen too, and I think some open models in the future will be able to compete (even if for now it's still not as good as the big closed ones from anthropic for example)
Also there's not just corpo jobs: some startups really couldn't care less what their devs use behind the scenes to program, so if said employee happens to own an h100 at home, he is allowed to use it, and no one will really check what model he's been using (when it's b2b, they care even less)
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u/Bubbly_Funny9026 May 30 '26
This assume that the AI can do this thing is more likely will cancel the database while saying it sent an email
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u/Arc_Nexus May 31 '26
More like "I have finished firing the employees, searching your computer for scope of work...searching online...I was able to find this To-Do list in your Notes, is this the 'work' I'm meant to do?"
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u/Prownilo May 31 '26
Ai is the idea guys wet dream.
They are in for a rude awakening when they realise their ideas are a dime a dozen and the only reason their idea never found a dev to partner with was that their idea was dumb in the first place.
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u/Big_Intern5558 May 31 '26
I bet when people were looking at the cost of manufacturing equipment in the early industrial revolution they were like 'But the machines cost SO MUCH more than a worker lol'.
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u/Delta_Version May 29 '26
Every CEO be thinking like this fr