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Comment by lorecore | Hacker News Reader

The crazy thing is their salary does not actually benefit from riding these trends. Unless it's equally/even more clueless board level pressure with ulterior motives (i.e., lifting their other AI investments or the sector as a whole).

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Every c suite in the country is panicking about being left behind, from their perspective it’s either token max or fade into obscurity, or at least that’s what they were sold

I don't think that's accurate. I think every C suite in the country is looking to do away with labor's leverage as much as possible. I think this is a cultural thing more than anything else, C suite + investors looking to get rid of those pesky humans required to prop up their lifestyles. AI is the most credible path toward that. Short, medium or long term returns be damned, this is a reconfiguration of society and they want to shed what they consider to be baggage.

Like anything it's a mixed bag. I am certainly working with people who I think truly believe the "max out on AI usage or become irrelevant" line. There are people who will privately let you know they're just working with the current meta the best way they can, but others who are drunk on kool aid.

Trying to operate as a rational, thinking person in a lot of environments right now feels impossible. Rational thought is being treated like AI skepticism.

Please. These are the same people that force their employees to use Microsoft teams because slack is $5 an employee a month. They're not going to sit idly by while employees burn thousands a month in tokens.

It depends on which people you're referring to. The allocation toward AI budget has been so massive that I think a lot of businesses are way behind on trying to assess value for dollar for the AI-related crud they're shelling out for.

Everyone is feeling it out but the vast majority of spend has been subscription based. Some outliers may have used a massive amount of tokens but companies didn't pay for that.

That VC funded gravy train is likely coming to an end. But fortunately there are also reasonably efficient models now so that the tokenmaxxers can still make the (much cheaper) tokens go brrrr.

Those reasonably efficient models assume you use a harness that supports them well, the one size fits all harness of Claude desktop or codex does not support what you want well, and that’s intentional. It’s contradictory that these AI companies will continue to brrrr to the moon and return on AI spend requires discipline…

The next recession (and there's always a next recession) will clean up this AI bubble. The actually useful products and companies will make it the rest goes down.

Yes, but unlike the dot com bubble we’ll be left with half finished (or not even started) abandoned data center projects, instead of reasonably reusable fiber and ISP infra

its a herd mentality, its a lot easier to follow the louder voices than to spend time understanding how it impacts your own particular business. Because google does this way, or apple does this way is a common argument in lot of feature/business decisions

I deeply believe this but have no strong evidence. Revenue has always been a cure all remedy. This will keep model providers alive along with the very wide range of companies that are experiencing growth with them (from chips to backhoes), for a time anyway. If/when that house of cards starts going in the other direction there’s going to be widespread pain. By analogy the nonsense of the dotcoms and that crash had a very direct impact on their suppliers (e.g. telecoms). My only advice is to let the Microsoft’s and Meta’s do the tokenmaxxing, and don’t get suckered into the idea you (startup, individual, etc) should be playing that game.

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