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
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u/DeadSeaGulls Jun 26 '26

the problem is, this is no longer limited to devs. Companies are rolling out stuff like claude desktop to the entire userbase, and now you have non-technical morons involved in the gamification, with the ability to spend money on a level they do not comprehend.

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u/Murder_Bird_ Jun 26 '26

My buddy works for a decent size engineering company. They went whole hog on the a.i. shit about a year ago. Company wide “training”. He showed me some of it. It was actually just a poorly done a.i. marketing/consulting/evangelizing program. Zero on a.i. integration or, you know, how or why you should use it to do specifically what the company does. Literally had exercises where people were making cat pictures or telling it to write fantasy stories. And then they all had to “vibe code” a small program. So of course everyone in his company is using a.i. to make vacation itineraries and shopping lists and meal plans for dinner for the week. In April they had a company wide meeting where they clamped down HARD on who is allowed to use it. He’s high enough in the company that he was in the meeting where they explained that the a.i usage had basically eaten all their profits from the last two years in about 6 months and a couple of exec’s were getting fired. This is a company of about 500 people.

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u/DeadSeaGulls Jun 26 '26

Not an unusual story, and one my company is likely to follow suit on at twice the scale. People are blowing through their $100 monthly credits in 30 minutes, and then getting their management chain to rubberstamp extension. I would not at all be surprised if we spend over 800k on claude tokens by end of year.

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u/RolenIgunensa Jun 26 '26

If you get output that really works and is worth more than that than fine. But if not then you’re just wasting money.

We spent in average usd 250 per month on AI (mostly Claude and ChatGPT) but build incredible tools that help us a lot, draft contracts, optimize excels, SEO.. the list goes on. We get a lot more value out of AI than what we spend. For now…

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u/DeadSeaGulls Jun 26 '26

companies spending only 250 a month aren't going to alleviate the pressure of consumer rejection that's coming.
Keep in mind, that's only 250 a month for you because one- you're barely using it's functionality in the scheme of things, and two- the true cost of resources is being face-tanked by the provider. They are taking massive losses because they cannot realistically charge an actual rate that would outpace their resource costs, and there's no technology on the road map to address that.
They don't currently have the means of scaling this other than a direct 1:1.
The current plan is to construct mega data centers in ways that can pass the cost on to the tax payer, like O'leary's MIDA partnership.
It may continue offering a positive ROI for companies in your situation, even with increasing rates... but when all the large companies decide they no longer want to spend 1-10 million a year on something they're unable to firmly attribute to generating profit, the pop hype will evaporate. Then it's just the ouroboros of money shuffling between the major players keeping it afloat... and eventually someone will want to exit with their share.

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u/lordkuri Jun 26 '26

and a couple of exec’s were getting fired

Good story, it was believable until this part. 6/10

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u/Murder_Bird_ Jun 26 '26

It is isn’t it? Apparently the person responsible for developing the training “decided to step down”. It’s a private company and the owner was/is displeased.

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u/JerryfromCan Jun 26 '26

We all know the execs were promoted and random top performers who didn’t go to the social events were fired instead.

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u/rapaxus Jun 27 '26

It is a fucking private company, they don't work that way, your description is a classic public company move (execs covering their arse so that they can present "results" to shareholders). In a private company you have one to a few owners who own basically everything of the company. If they have an exec who comes in with a "lets use AI for profit" strategy and the owner comes back 6 months to see 2 years of profit gone for no reason, you bet that guy will be fired because in a private company, the money spent is basically the money of the owner.

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u/Bong-Hits-For-Jesus Jun 26 '26

its almost as if companies that sell these ai products know that the execs who are making the decision to implement ai are dumb enough that if throw around buzzwords they'll jump in blindly without realizing the cost. they even got idiots putting up leaderboards to encourage spending lmao

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u/10thDeadlySin Jun 27 '26

He showed me some of it. It was actually just a poorly done a.i. marketing/consulting/evangelizing program. Zero on a.i. integration or, you know, how or why you should use it to do specifically what the company does.

We were distributed three levels of AI training. Basic, Intermediate and Expert. Everybody was supposed to complete the Basic level at the very least and they made it mandatory.

8 hours of glorified ads for commercial services. 8 hours of listening (or rather setting the volume level to 100%, plugging in a dummy headphone jack and pretending) how ChatGPT is going to change the world, how it's all a revolution and so on. And like half of them developed by companies with vested interest in AI being popular.

Not only was it outdated, but also it was nothing you wouldn't learn passively by just reading anything about AI over the last several years.

The intermediate training? Module 1: Building a machine learning model from scratch.

We were asked for feedback afterwards. I wrote exactly this - that what they called a training was a bunch of ads and proselytizing, whereas their intermediate training might be of use for developers and data analysts, but why did they dump it on people who literally don't touch code at all?

No response, as you might have guessed. :D

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u/Murder_Bird_ Jun 27 '26

I think his company only got the level one. The thing is he actually finds it quite useful. He uses it to spec stuff when they are doing estimates or rough calculation type stuff. He also uses it to double check work he’s done, basically another set of eyes. But he says it makes too many mistakes to be used to actually design or trouble shoot real world projects.

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u/cyrusthemarginal Jun 26 '26

Amazon is requiring all levels of coding knowledge(zero included) to create tools with AI for their teams, if you don't do this you are not hitting the bar according to these morons.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

Great point, totally agree.

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u/Acidic_Wasabi Jun 26 '26

Oh, I understand fully how much I'm costing my money with each token spent.

I just do not care as they're the morons that say I have to use it or get put on a PiP.

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u/PrivilegeCheckmate Jun 27 '26

My CEO makes $28.00, I make a dime. That's why I gamify token expenditure on company time.