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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

I'd bet that the goal is for people to 'game' it though. By pushing people to use AI more they'll try it, experiment with it, 'waste' time on it ... and from that they'll learn about it. That's the end goal.

They're using tokens for pointless stuff right now in order to figure out use cases where it helps. You can't do that without also learning where it doesn't help.

My company is doing the same thing.

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That is exactly the point. It may be wasteful, but it's the fastest way to explore how AI may actually be useful to your business. Even if 80% of employees are just wasting tokens, you still have 20% who are figuring it out.

Even if that were true it'd mean that current AI usage is overshooting actual, productive use by 5x. This is a problem when all the AI projections are that the current state is the minimum and future usage will be 10+x.

It does mean that, but in a situation where people don't know what the productive use is you have no other option.

It's like that famous quote about advertising that says "Half my ad spend is wasted, but I don't know which half". 20% of token use is useful, but as you don't know which 20% it is you have to spend 5x more to get that knowledge.

It is difficult to believe that you can cobra effect yourself into greatness. I'd rather say the most useful perk for companies doing this is the AI-washing adoption metrics they can report, which will hopefully (for them) increase valuations.

That would be 20% who _might_ figure it out. That's essentially R&D spend, which has no guarantee of success.

I'm sorry, but that's insane. I mean, I guess if you have cash to burn I could think of even worse ways to spend it, but seriously, this is dumb. What other tool have businesses spent millions of dollars and person hours on to try and find something useful the tool can do?? Talk about a solution looking for a problem! If it's not clear in the early stages that this tool solves a problem then ditch it and move on! Give that extra cash to your employees and shareholders instead!

Every dollar your company gives to AI providers is a dollar they're not paying you.

its also a dollar that is most likely going to busywork and not towards anything customer-facing/improving...

No it isn't. My salary won't increase if the AI budget reduces, or if the AWS bill goes down, or if the board decide not to do a retreat to Davos this year, or anything else. My salary is very strictly limited by the salary budget. The only impact of a reduced AI budget would be an increase in dividends to shareholders, but that would have a second order effect of making the company less valuable because our competitors would be racing ahead of us.

Why not?

There’s only so much money to go around. Wouldn’t a big new expense affect how much is available for the salary budget?

I’m sure it differs between companies but there seems to be a big trend of laying off workers while pouring more and more money into AI.

If every company is using AI to compete they’ll still get the same slice of the pie but they’ll spend more money on AI and have less money for salaries

Unless you install meshclaw and just tell it to use a bunch of tokens

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