Matthew Prince of Cloudflare has been outspoken in saying that companies that do not go all in on AI will be left behind. There probably is some value being received in exchange for tokens but it seems quite plausible that some or even much of this spending by companies is driven by fear.
$1k/month is nothing as a hedge against a CEO being accused of causing their company to be left behind in the AI utopia of tomorrow. If you’re in a peer group that rewards risk taking and all of your peers are taking a risk, you’ve got to take that risk too. Better to burn money trying something and then failing, than to not try. Failure is acceptable, missing an opportunity is not.
It's just not very much money for these companies. The source article says Uber allows $1,500 per month, but senior engineers at Uber make $400k/yr ~= $33.3k/month; even disregarding fully-loaded cost, the AI only has to make them about 3% more productive to be worth it.
Partially because they think that once employees put enough context and rules into markdown files they can be fired and replaced by an online subscription.
> Following adoption, junior employment declines in adopting firms relative to non-adopters, while senior employment trends remain largely unchanged. This decline is concentrated in occupations most exposed to GenAI and is driven primarily by slower hiring rather than increased separations.
I used to go above and beyond and take pride in writing decent/good documentation for my team and have gotten a lot of compliments about them.
But I've started to deliberately constrain myself because of what you describe. Sure, I'm not convinced that it actually come to fruition, but just the realization that this is what they're daydreaming about makes me sick so I've forced myself to only do the bare minimum or less now.
Have you considered that that money would have gone to raises or promotions? From that perspective the company nets out while the employee that would have received that money feels the effects of wage suppression.
Because tech is so deeply hooked on fashion and short-termism that it’ll make both a Temu & Wall street exec blush in envy. LLMs floods both these receptors like the Great flood.
$1k/month is nothing as a hedge against a CEO being accused of causing their company to be left behind in the AI utopia of tomorrow. If you’re in a peer group that rewards risk taking and all of your peers are taking a risk, you’ve got to take that risk too. Better to burn money trying something and then failing, than to not try. Failure is acceptable, missing an opportunity is not.
https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2025221270061580453
“My advice: don’t be a [dinosaur]. I’ve seen this movie before and they go extinct. ”