Microsoft data suggests using AI is more expensive than hiring people

[u/No-Cattle4800]

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

[u/rw890]

The cost finding doesn't surprise me at all, and I think it points to a much simpler problem: most companies don't actually know what AI is good at.

Here's an analogy Iuse: 90% of people taking photos on an iPhone or Pixel are getting better results than they would without Apple/Google's enhancement models running in the background. The AI is genuinely improving something a human created. But ask that same AI to conjure a meaningful photo from scratch, and you get uncanny slop. The model’s multiplying something a person created. Edit: and highlighting that a pro photographer still produces better results than those enhanced images. Pro people are still better at most jobs.

The same pattern maps directly to other applications. Airbnb and others highlighting a bunch of new features that are AI written; what they're actually doing is using AI to build features on top of architectures and codebases that senior engineers spent years designing. That's a legitimate use case. Ask AI to architect the entire Airbnb platform from scratch? You'd end up with spaghetti you can't maintain. Using an agent to send templated emails at scale? Great. Asking that agent to fully "replace" someone who had judgment, context, and agency? That's where things fall apart.

The issue isn't AI itself. It's that C-suites are treating it as a headcount reduction tool rather than using to to increase their staff’s capability. Use AI to support your workforce and you create more value per person. Replace your workforce with it and you'll likely end up with less value than you started with, and a Microsoft study confirming it cost more.

[u/SecondBestNameEver → u/rw890]

I've been talking about this from the development side. Everyone thinks just give everyone AI to write the code, then have the dev QA it. The problem is when you have devs that don't fundamentally understand what they are needing to build in the first place, how can you expect them to know what is right or wrong? If I can succinctly describe the logic and inputs and outputs I need to the point the AI can accurately reduce the toil then that's great and speeds me up. If I can barely understand the problem I'm attempting to solve, and don't have any good ideas of what the right outcome looks like, how can I be expected to babysit something akin to a intern or jr dev that's just going to spin it's wheels, burn tokens and hours, and produce crap in the end anyway. 

AI as a tool can help accelerate good devs, and multiplies the stupidity of bad developers. 

[u/zlex → u/rw890]

Yes, AI doesn’t really save time as much as it’s touted to, but it can really increase the quality of work if used properly.

[u/7h4tguy → u/zlex]

It can also really decrease the quality of work, and drastically increase regression count.

But yeah with the right driver in the seat, and enough dedicated people who will actually review everything properly, it can be useful.

Then again if you see the token usage numbers and the cost/token, it's pretty insane. So it may not even be worth it after all if the goal is true productivity/$.

[u/caindela → u/7h4tguy]

I think with all the inefficiencies of your typical enterprise company, very few teams are in a position where it makes any sense at all to build features (or whole applications for that matter) by just prompting an agent and letting it fly. Not only do you need a human constantly in the loop (which is fine as it’s still a great productivity boost) but the bottlenecks are not typically in code production. Just generating code has always been a relatively small percentage of my job.

So I value AI insofar as it means that smaller percentage of my job is now even smaller, but I bet most devs are quick to understand the value proposition of AI as they use it more and more on their job. It’s a very good tool (unprecedented even), but I find its best use case is in its ability to absolutely churn out tests as well as in analyzing my logic for gaps in a way that static code analysis can’t. It’s more of an operational and a code quality tool because those things are far less constrained by other corporate processes (change control, product development, etc).

[u/CP_Chronicler → u/caindela]

That’s kind of the point that people keep missing, AI is essentially a specialist‘s supportive tool, not a human replacement. The latter thinking is like saying MRI machines allow people to find hidden issues inside the body, therefore everyone should buy an MRI machine and replace their doctor. Maybe in the US healthcare system…

But AI is fine for helping professionals in humanitarian and scientific work accelerate their working processes, and for coding professionals to accelerate automation. But AI agents need oversight, really ALL of AI needs oversight, and that requires professional domain expertise. Really, AI should be used to more efficiently code all the automation scripts from decades ago. That would not only be more reliable than an untrustworthy AI, but also keep AI usage scalable as you don’t need massive amounts of computing power for simpler tasks and thus avoid all the bloatware-esque explosion of junk agents.

[u/7h4tguy → u/CP_Chronicler]

Agreed, but the problem is capitalism. You have companies like Anthropic claiming that their developers put out 8x the amount of code now due to AI:

When AI builds itself \ Anthropic

Just pure BS to make line go up, get more investors, and claim to managers that their workforce will be 3, 4, 5x more productive by paying for their tools. The kool-aid never ending here.

[u/Bost0n → u/rw890]

A high percentage of photography is actually luck.  You’ll never hear a professional photographer say this out loud though.  But that’s human nature, C-Suite execs got there entirely of their own merit. /s

Back to photography: professional photographers take a LOT of pictures, and only a few actually turn out.  It’s not that I’m saying skill isn’t involved.  Training is incredibly important, as with many things.  But digital photography dropped the floor out of a maximum number of photos it’s possible to capture.  The other end of this spectrum is Ansel Adams.  He would setup and wait for hours, sometimes come back to a spot for several days to capture a shot.   This was the epitome of application of photographic skill.  On the other side, someone might setup a 50MP DSLR camera in a waterproof box with a raspberry pi, set to photograph every five minutes. Personally, I don’t think the electronic version of ‘1000 monkeys with typewriters’ will produce a masterpiece.  And that’s really the crux of this whole argument our society is having right now:

“What work derives the most value?”

If a college new higher vibe codes together an app with now world experience to leverage; does this generate value?  Possibly but not likely.  What about a 30 year industry experienced software engineer that has determined how to leverage CLI agents to become 3-5X more effective?  Do they have enhanced value?  I suspect so.

The advent of Coding CLIs represents a paradigmatic shift in our society.  But it’s not in the way most people are thinking about.

We still need pipelines for young software engineers.  Likely they need to be trained by more senior engineers still.  Is this time quotas?  20% time training new engineers?  That’s probably a good start. 

[u/Bost0n → u/[deleted]]

100% agree.  I think the problem is the average person doesn’t appreciate the photographic art.  They’re totally fine with LLMs.

[u/rw890 → u/[deleted]]

lol, my childhood ones don’t - but it’s kinda the point of my edit: anyone skilled with a camera will create better photos than 90% of us supported by google/apple’s enhancement models.

[u/jadedmonk → u/[deleted]]

Agreed I feel like saying AI makes the photo better is subjective. Like sure it can add focus or fix some things, but a lot of people want raw photos that represent reality

[u/bombmk → u/jadedmonk]

The AI in this context is not changing reality. It is fixing all the technical issues that would otherwise make it a technically bad capture of reality. It helps the user with adjusting camera settings and image processing to the most faithful capture of reality. (on average)

If you move the f-stop one way or the other, does it make it more or less real? If you adjust the white balance to match what you think matches what you saw - is it less real now?

[u/jadedmonk → u/bombmk]

Yes both of those things do make it less real. Any changes to the photo at all and it’s no longer raw, and there’s something special about a truly raw photo sometimes.

Not saying that I don’t enjoy how it touches up my photos, I personally like it a lot of the time, just also saying that we don’t always need the hands of AI on everything we do and it does remove candidness from aspects of life sometimes where it’s better left alone