Hacker News Reader

Comment by vinyl7 | Hacker News Reader

AI companies have a financial incentive to burn more tokens than the task actually needs

This is only true if they can't saturate token production with a model that does less superfluous things. Given that they can (they're hilariously compute strained), having a model that solves tasks more quickly adds way more perceived value to users.

Well they decide what a token is. So they can do less superfluous things and backfill with a weaker model.

Only if the customer is paying per token. If it's by subscription they're burning their own money

If you're on one of the lower tiers (e.g. the $20 tier), they still have that incentive to burn your tokens and upsell the higher tiers.

Burning tokens does little to convince people that more tokens are a good use of money - especially if they are choosing between buying more of your tokens and more of your competitor's tokens.

the subscriptions all have limits. when you hit the limit you again start paying per token.

Agreed although the differences between the effort and reasoning is massive. I generally ship 40 hours in three with AI. I could not figure out why my delivery was behind until I started going through the logs. The thinking was extensive, the effort was beyond the original request by a magnitude of 50x

How do you even know that it's consistently 40 hours in 3? What kind of developer ever had that kind of estimation accuracy (unless it's really repetitive) or even focuses on productivity rather than the problem like that? This sounds more like factory work than design or development. I really don't get it.

We are in new territory and not everyone gets it.

I am not a developer although I have written production code but that's not what I am talking about.

I know for a fact that I can do a task in a week. It may take 12 or 40 hours but it'll be done in a week. Now with AI? I can get that task done in a day. Anywhere from 3-12 hours.

> I generally ship 40 hours in three with AI.

You ship 3 hours in three with AI. The old number is meaningless now.

Agreed and management is becoming aware.

Just like me fr fr

A.k.a. theft.

nice conspiracy theory, but it doesn't hold. these companies won't last long if people don't get actual work done.

There's a big chance these companies won't last long

Reply on news.ycombinator.com