• xtr0n@sh.itjust.works
          13·
          4 个月前

          Total cost of employment is something like 140-160% of salary for a software dev. So my super handwavy half pulled out of my ass math puts it closer to 20 jr. engineers.

          • fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            4 个月前

            In France it’s more like 200%. minimum. Which is why our salaries are so shit when compared with US ones.

            But the new trend is hiring interns which are much cheaper, work twice as hard, and come with tax deductions.

            • Omgpwnies@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              4 个月前

              US salaries in general are inflated and not entirely indicative of actual spending power. They have a lot more ancillary costs like healthcare and other insurances, not to mention a significant lack of public transport means most people also need to pay for a car and gas and whatnot.

              Add to that the fact that they get fuck all for vacation time meaning if they want time off, it costs their salary for the missed days. I think when you weigh it all out, it balances pretty evenly, if not somewhat in France’s favour.

    • DreamButt@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      4 个月前

      I meeeean yeah, but also there are just some people who don’t work out

      I do prefer that over bots on everything tho. It’s getting rather exhausting

  • zewm@lemmy.world
    332·
    4 个月前

    Is the face AI morphed or something? It looks uncanny valley weird.

  • ozoned@piefed.socialEnglish
    22·
    4 个月前

    Literally was in a presentation at work the other day where they said someone used 2 million tokens and the next person used 1 million and they were so excited by it.

    I didn’t get it. I asked went 2 million was better than 1 million. The VP basically said it’s not, just costs us more money.

    So why the hell is the presentation acting like it’s a fucking victory?

    • rainwall@piefed.socialEnglish
      8·
      4 个月前

      Because they believe that AI will replace payroll, which is generally a businesses highest expense. The more AI usage, the more likely they can eliminate jobs and give themselves bonuses.

      They are excited the way a farmer is excited when his pigs are gorging themselves on grain and getting really, really fat. The farmer is glad to pay for grain because its much cheaper than the money he makes from selling them for meat.

      They are giddy because its almost time for payday.

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
        5·
        4 个月前

        payroll, which is generally a businesses highest expense

        This is something that changed in the industry; it was a investment back then.

        • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
          12·
          4 个月前

          Huh, it’s been an operating expense since, let me check, the dawn of business?

          “Investing in” your employees doesn’t make a ton of sense when they could just hop over to the next company after a year, much like loyalty in a company doesn’t make sense. It’s all a business transaction in the end so if you can get a better deal, you should.

          The unfulfilled promise of AI is to reduce the expense to a minimum so the few remaining people can accomplish the same work. That’s more of an investment than paying people to work for you until they find a better job ever was. In theory.

          • 0tan0d@lemmy.world
            2·
            4 个月前

            Hi I suggest you crack open a history book and look at why ford didn’t pay his employees in peanuts.

            • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
              0·
              4 个月前

              To solve the turnover issue, sure. It’s not like the employees had that many other places to go to that could afford to do the same, he could just double or triple everyone’s salary and nobody’s going anywhere. It was a necessary business expense. EXPENSE. He could’ve made more money if he didn’t have to pay it. Similarly to the raw materials, electricity, and every other unavoidable business expense.

              It’s also not the same for software engineers, for an example. Too many companies hiring, or at least there used to be until a few years ago. You have to not just pay a lot of money, you also have to have a large bonus 3 or 4 years down the line, often in the form of stock options. Otherwise your engineer making 300k will just take the next job for 400k in half a year to a year.

              In normal companies that can’t afford bonuses that are more or less life-changing windfalls, there’s no “investing” in employees. You can pay the market rate for a new grad and they disappear in a year or two to another company that doesn’t take new grads at all but rather poaches employees once they’ve gotten some initial work experience and thus they waste less money than the companies hiring and training juniors and can afford to pay more. The company that doesn’t “invest” in employees, gets more bang for its buck.

              • wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                0·
                4 个月前

                He could’ve made more money if he didn’t have to pay it. Similarly to the raw materials, electricity, and every other unavoidable business expense.

                Citation needed with data. Because I’d argue pay on the factory is also proportional to quality output. So would they have still made the money with a worse product?

                • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
                  11·
                  3 个月前

                  What data? If he could’ve built the cars without paying a single employee, it would’ve been more profitable. That, however, was impossible. Hence, “necessary operating expense”. He just realized that the actual necessary expense was higher than what was previously thought, and in fact it was underfunded.

                  You CAN invest into human resources, but salaries ain’t it. If your new employees are having trouble getting started and you spend the time and effort to build an onboarding plan, that’s an investment. It’s a one time thing that pays off repeatedly in the future. If you buy or build amenities for your employees to have a nicer time in the workplace (even just a coffee machine and ping-pong table), even those are investments. Employer-provided housing for employees? If it’s owned by the company rather than rented continuously, it’s an investment.

                  Mind, the expense still dictates the quality of your service or product. Like I said, AI hasn’t replaced us yet. But if there was an AI you could host on-prem, that could replace one single human worker perfectly and improves over time like the human, and it cost, say 50 grand for a server to run it and a grand a month for the electricity, but the human it replaces has a total cost of employment of 5 grand a month? Just over a year and it’s paid off. THAT is an investment, versus continuing to pay the employee indefinitely.

                  I pulled the numbers out of my ass because actual nvidia DGX servers cost way more than that, but it’s to illustrate the point of what’s an investment, vs what’s an operating expense. And an entire server dedicated to one company could run multiple agent instances in parallel off of one LLM, if our hypothetical future human-replacing AI is just an LLM with an agent layer, so perhaps it costs 500k and replaces 10 people instead. Also the human employee price here is closer to eastern europe than western europe or US.

                  R&D is the one exception to labour costs being an expense vs investment. Paying someone building a new revenue stream is an investment, because one day that revenue stream will pull in more money, even if it’s no longer being actively developed. The hours people spend working on maintaining all the old stuff, which in most big orgs is honestly a fuckton of manhours, however, are an expense.

                  Look, I’m not trying to assign humans a lower value or anything. I’m just saying that from an accounting perspective, most employees are just a necessity to keep the thing running, like electricity. The process of R&D is a bit of an exception and some businesses will even give their software or other intellectual property a value in the books and depreciate it over time. But even then, the investment is into the product, not the people. Because the people can bail on you at any time, barring some special exceptions.

                  TL;DR: Look, I’m saying employees are a NECESSARY business expense. It’s just that we’re not slaves and after a large bonus or whatever, your employee can just… leave. You absolutely can get more productivity and better retention out of your employees by paying them more, but it’s not an investment on its own. Investment in the business implies future value even if you stop investing. As such, the best investments into your employees are actually things that still benefits the next employee after the current one is gone. Equipment, amenities, etc.

      • Pyr@lemmy.ca
        3·
        4 个月前

        I wonder at what point government will tax AI use by companies similarly to payroll taxes and incomes taxes.

        If they pay an AI company $150,000 a month to replace $50,000 in salaries, the government then loses all that income tax from the previous employees as well as the payroll tax on $600k a year.

    • shuffle3765@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      4 个月前

      Because it’s a proxy metric for adoption. Currently you generally want your engineers to be using it as much as you can afford to so that they all learn and improve and adapt existing processes etc

      • deeves@lemmy.world
        3·
        4 个月前

        Also, I’ve been noticing more and more APIs are adopting a policy where they get rid of any unused credits that you’ve paid for at the end of the month, creating a ‘use it or lose it’ FOMO mentality.

        All very normal and sane.

      • VinegarChunks@lemmus.orgEnglish
        1·
        4 个月前

        Engineers under such incentives should ask AI how to most easily and speedily consume as many credits as possible, I bet it knows a great way

      • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
        1·
        4 个月前

        But why force adoption? If it’s really good people would adopt it naturally like we do with every other tool. Why for this really expensive one, do we now flip the whole system on its head?

        • shuffle3765@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          3 个月前

          The subscription plans are insanely cheap currently, but won’t be forever. Atm you can pay $200/month to get anywhere from 1.2x to 5x faster depending where you are on the learning curve. If people aren’t taking advantage of that then it’s equivalent to if your office had a team of 10 engineers but only 5 of them are being given any tasks and the others are told to do nothing.

          As to people adopting it naturally, there are any number of reasons why they wouldn’t, even if it’s good. Firstly it’s a massive change and people as a rule do not like change. Secondly it’s a learning curve, it’s not easy, and you have to invest time in it and initially it will make you slower rather than faster. Thirdly, what’s in it for the employee? They’re not gonna get paid more if they use AI to get 2x more work done, they’re employer captures all of that. They work the same hours, have to learn a whole new workflow, just go get the same pay. Why bother?

          • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
            1·
            3 个月前

            But what does being faster really get you? Who are you racing against?

            Also it’s not actually faster. It writes the code faster but all of the other processes still take the same time. Writing code is only a small part of a software engineers job. If the code gets done faster they still need to document it, get it approved, add alerting, test it and fix any bugs. Those parts still take the same amount of time so you are only really going marginally faster at best assuming the code has no issue that need to be fixed.

            Also since the code part is done so fast those other tasks start to pile up and become a bottle neck.

            They are selling this like it’s a full fledged engineer for $200 a month but that’s not what it is at all.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
        11·
        4 个月前

        Which is a stupid mindset.

        “Go forth and burn tokens and your performance will be measured on that”

        Looks like I’m going to make a for to ask for a for every word in /usr/share/dict/words. Look at all the tokens I burned.

        It doesn’t reflect upon business value, performance, or education.

        It’s even worse than the disastrous lines of code metric.

        Their problem is they have no idea what to expect, so to signal affinity to hype, they just measure tokens.

      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
        2·
        3 个月前

        Short answer is that a token equates to a unit of work. I strongly suspect that the definition has been becoming less and less tangible as the bubble has inflated though

      • ozoned@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        3 个月前

        Excellent question. I have absolutely NO idea. Friend helped me set one up on my PC and it even churns through “tokens” on my GPU. So I have zero clue. :D I guess I could ask “AI”. lol

        • Techno-rat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          1·
          3 个月前

          It’s the ai industry’s made up In game currency. That flat monthly fee they’re trying to get rid of was basically the season pass

          It’s all fraud and gambling! :D

        • Jiral@lemmy.org
          1·
          3 个月前

          Tokens are what an LLM actually predicts, one after another. If you have very slow models that produce less than 5 tokens/s or so, you can easily follow it with your own eyes. A token is what appears at once. Often it is an entire word but it can also be parts of a word or individual letters, digits, special signs for uncommone words or special formatting, number stuff.

  • laz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    8·
    4 个月前

    Dude my nephew was telling me this an AI company galytix is literally running on Indian grads and claiming to be ai what a scam

  • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    3 个月前

    They’re all moving to tokens based billing to stop the bleeding. The markets aren’t as willing to let them burn infinite cash on operating expenses anymore. A lot of the private investors see the writing on the walls, that these AI companies are not worth anywhere near the valuations, and propping them up to ensure further datacenter build out to keep Nvidia shares high is costing more than it’s worth.

    A lot of the model providers are lining up for ipos to cash out their initial investors and dump the responsibility of the mess on the public markets. They have to jack their prices to pretty up their books if they want to cash out with an IPO though. The unlimited access for a flat monthly cost shtick was obviously never a viable business model. They’ve all been spending massively more on inference than they’ve been taking in subscriptions, and even with the changes to token based billing, they still will be.

    Anthropic is claiming that they will have their first “profitable” month soon, but that’s actually just a magic trick of book keeping. They’re deferring some cost of compute for a few months, and accepting a bunch of pre payments from customersr. Basically pretending to have high revenue and lower cost by shifting when the payments are made. And then on top of that they’re jacking up prices and thus decreasing their demand with the shift to tokens.

    Everyone is running around rearranging deck chairs on the datacenter titanic hoping they can keep their feet dry a little longer.

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    4 个月前

    Exactly. Managers live in a golden age right now where social media automatically blames their fuckups on AI.