AI promised cost savings, but Microsoft and Uber say it’s costing more than human workers | Company Business News
https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/ai-was-supposed-to-cut-costs-microsoft-and-uber-are-finding-it-is-more-expensive-than-paying-human-employees-11779666290918.html
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At the moment, it’s also heavily subsidized by investor cash, so businesses aren’t paying anywhere near the full cost of the service.
i means its basically a less efficient (space and energy) brain that you have to pay to “educate” and take care of outside the working tasks. theres probably a ton of costs for a human that a company only pays a fraction of through taxes and parental salaries. well now they pay for all of that to an AI company plus its profit margin.
All the crypto bros went to AI and started investing and hyping AI.
AI was the new cypto.
All these tech bros are just modern snake oil salesmen, yet people haven’t realized that yet.
By the end of this, half of us will be dead, the grift will end, and private credit will be like “Oops, my bad. Bailout plz.”
No shit?
Even worse, the code that is being generated often isn’t maintainable by the same number of humans. Like, 1400 test cases might sound great for four simple screens, but if you end up having to give up AI, you’ll need a whole team of employees just to maintain them.
Well at least it’s more accurate! Pass the glue pizza.
> the ride-hailing company had exhausted its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget within just four months of the year.
> The disclosure is particularly striking given that Uber had been actively stoking adoption, deploying internal leaderboards to rank teams by their AI tool usage.
A fucking leaderboard?
G A M I F Y E V E R Y T H I N G
Not to mention the cost to society – which is virtually never accounted for.
No bro you gotta understand bro, that like, it might cost way more but like bro we’ll be able to lay off half the workforce with it and then somehow bro we’ll need that laid off workforce to pay double the electricity bills to subsidize our data centres cause no way are we paying for the grid infrastructure we need or it’s upkeep bro. Don’t worry it’ll totally work out
No way man. You’re telling me that the hundreds of billions that openAI crowdfunded and lit on fire is not cheaper than paying employees?
It was all a ponzi scheme and now they’re forced to admit it lol
The sales pitch was made that the performance of AI models were exploding and we’d have AGI within 5 years. That has pretty much died as models have stopped leaping forward and the limits are much more obvious. Now reality is catching up and companies have to try and make what was always assumed to be temporary loss leaders into profitable commerical products.
Somebody in this sub last week told me they thought it was impossible for AI to cost more than a human. Well, hope they’re seeing this one. It’s definitely possible when the cost of using AI is really, really high and companies are setting mandatory minimums for usage.
There’s no way it can be cheaper than people. The math doesn’t work that way.
Gotta spend money to make money. /s
Who would’ve thought that celebrating tokenmaxxing would have the effect of consuming all the AI budget in a few months?
AI won’t ask for human rights though, so it pays off for them in the long run. Cuz fuck humanity 🤪
They said the cloud providers are costing more. Uber (and Airbnb and others) simply moved to the open weight / free Chinese models.
That’s important because it’s not “ai costs more.” AI as a category absolutely does not. They just cut spend with Anthropic and OpenAI
But vibecoding is supposed to save everyone and generate business savings
This is a bit misleading for Microsoft. When trialing Claude licenses the payment was what anybody else would pay (and Claude like most AI, is expensive). But the same models exist in GitHub Copilot, which Microsoft owns. So it’s not like Microsoft is cancelling Claude model usage for employees, it’s just moving to its cheaper in-house model hosting.
AI promised nothing. Huckster shills grifting off “AI investment” made promises they had no intention of keeping.
It’s almost like people hate your shitty companies. 🤷🏼♀️🙃
And theyre stupid af. I had to spend an hour telling the Amazon ai the item I had shipped to an Amazon locker was not in the locker. Nor was it anywhere in the area.
Then it kept asking me which item I was referring to. Even tho I had to click the item to open the query. And even then, it couldnt comprehend the order or item number.
I feel like this shits useless and being forced on us regardless
And we’re no where near the true cost of AI taking over… The people you replace now can’t afford your product and you’ve soured the well of customers…
AI isn’t what they think it is… It has no compassion or respect at all…
Where’s that Nelson HAHA meme
thats why tech companies are dumping human employees so their compensation can be thrown into the money furnance that is AI tokens. They dont care if output is worse and overal costs are skyrocketing. All that matters is the AI fraud bubble continues to inflate until the inevitable too big to fail bailouts come.
But at least humans aren’t getting the money, so we got that going for us.
Good. I hope it burns them in the long run!
And all this computer stuff was going to make our lives so much better.
Yeah, hence the layoffs.
Some CEOs are stupid enough to increase AI budgets by sacrificing pay for workers. So they’ll keep laying off people and keep increasing the AI budgets and it’ll be a cycle because productivity will drop leading to loss of revenue leading to reduction in bottom line leading to more layoffs. We’re in the age of the Great Backfire.
The only thing that can save this kinda gambling is if the AI truly scales up to replace a human being and not require as much resources (power, water and processing power). But if the Governments (State, federal and local) truly stepped up and charged the companies what they should be charged, you’d see the price of AI increasing.
Microsoft is raising copilot prices a lot so like, I don’t know if they even know what they are doing
lol
Uno reverse. But layoffs continue
Lmao it’s almost if cheapening out on things means more expenses later? You don’t say.
That’s tragic.
AI is costing more because corporations have signed the paper contracts at higher than production cost, just to enable exit liquidity for these juicy 2026 mega IPOs.
AI will come to the cost of electricity in couple of years.
Microsoft to it’s Employees: STOP USING CLAUDE, USE COPILOT PLEASE 😭
So the clear answer is to fire more human workers till they hit the tipping point