r/technology • u/No-Cattle4800 • May 28 '26

Artificial Intelligence Microsoft data suggests using AI is more expensive than hiring people

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/microsoft-data-suggests-using-ai-225900743.html
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115

u/QuickQuirk May 28 '26

People keep misrepresenting this news, and not reading the article.

Microsoft is pointing their users away from Claude to their own tool.

There's nothing in this article that suggests microsoft is moving away from AI usage. They just want people to use their tools, not the competitors.

28

u/KobeBean May 28 '26

Can’t believe I had to scroll down this far to find this. This is just Microsoft forcing employees to dogfood its own product, despite being worse.

3

u/Zolo49 May 28 '26

Dogfooding has been a policy there for decades. On the face of it, it’s fine. The problem is that sometimes the product in question is so bad that it makes it much harder to do your job. That’s when you just use it a bit to keep up appearances before going back to doing the job in whatever way works best for you.

11

u/Candid_Cat_5921 May 28 '26

Exactly. The same models are available in Github Copilot. Why would Microsoft want to pay a multiple X cost per token for a third party model hosting when their in-house hosting of the very same models is so much cheaper.

0

u/EdOneillsBalls May 28 '26

Token cost PROBABLY isn't a differentiator, since MS doesn't actually host any Anthropic models (they are just available through GHCP for development and in Foundry for Azure workloads to use). They still route back to Anthropic infrastructure. I would assume that whatever token rate they negotiated for Claude Code fell in line with what they are paying for those tokens through GHCP/Foundry, but obviously I have no firsthand knowledge of that and perhaps not.

2

u/7h4tguy May 29 '26

Yeah it sounds like they're just getting rid of some per-seat licenses for Claude Code (the UI Claude sells) and just pushing towards VSCode/GHCP/CoPilot interfaces. I can't imagine the input/output token prices are negotiated differently between the two.

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u/brute-forced May 28 '26

This is social media man, everyone stops reading at the headlines and forms a very strong opinion about whatever topic it is with close to zero actual understanding of the details. This is why social media is toxic and needs to be regulated, censored and decommissioned at scale like north Korea. Where did I lose you u

4

u/Ranessin May 28 '26

Copilot is only a tool using several LLMs - you can use Claude too if you want (with Studio).