"An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees."
Like physically, how could this even happen?
I wonder how many megawatts that waste represented. Just one guy, worse than a small air force of private jets.
"Check all of Confluence for outdated and conflicting info"
"Review all the legal contracts over the past 10 years"
"Evaluate the source code in all our dependencies for vulnerabilities"
All of those would be fairly straight forward for a single person to kick off without thinking about the data set size. Especially if they have Claude set to Opus 4.7 x high effort for everything.
Even someone saying something like "rewrite the 25 year old Java monolith in rust" as a PoC and leaving it running in the background for a week
You have to fight quite a lot with agents to get them to actually read the fucking files in full
They are not the same.
I agree fully with you on the potential for energy waste. We always do that, though, with nearly everything. How many of today's jet plane flights really needed to happen? The question is how much value people feel they're getting. People are having a whole lot more feelings about AI than they ever could about cryptocurrencies, and that train aint stoppin'.
> How many of today's jet plane flights really needed to happen?
Many jet plane flights are indeed not necessary and there are people who deliberately avoid such unnecessary flights.
> The question is how much value people feel they're getting.
It is indeed a question we should keep asking and weight the answers against the energy footprint.
We need to plan for the world we're most likely to be living in in addition to the one we want to live in but probably won't. The latter energy isn't entirely wasted, but it's also not as essential to our immediate survival.