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by jstummbillig 20 days ago
I suspect this will turn out to be a super overblown issue: AI spend is literally the easiest spend to regulate in the entirety of businesses. No machinery is grinding to a halt over it, no asset that had to be bought and is now useless. You don't even have to employ or fire staff to give it a go (of course, you can still do both for other reasons). There are a lot of options that you can try out and substitute for each other, as new stuff comes up, because most things are compatible.

Sure, if you start at this point, where a good chunk of employees, who never had that ability, can now spend a lot of money at their discretion, that's probably going to be costly at first. Then people will learn from that and set direction adn guardrails.
3 comments
cyanydeez 20 days ago
yeah, it's easy to regulate, but the psychological impact isnt.

You spend 3 days making AI do something, and now what, you're suppose to spend 2 days trying to keep up with whatever it's done? That's like if your coworker's projects, every week, were handed to you on Thursday and you're told to finish them up.

No matter how smart you are, the bootstrap of new knowledge is impossible.

So sure, it's easy to turn the spigot off at arbitrary dollar values, but you can't just turn the worker's mindset off.

Workflow is valuable because of how in the flow it is.

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danaris 20 days ago
And, if you try it out and find that for your particular circumstances there's no level of spend on AI that's giving you positive ROI, you can just...not do it.

It seems like execs these days think that if they're not doing the One Thing Everyone's Doing, they're necessarily missing out, leaving potential revenue on the table, what have you. But the only reason to use AI in a business is if it makes you more money, so if you try it, and it's not doing that...I guess the question is, who are you going to believe, Sam Altman or your lying eyes?

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sscaryterry 20 days ago
> no asset that had to be bought and is now useless

Dare I say the GPU bought today won't be economical in 3-4 years time?

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jstummbillig 20 days ago
How does that concern individual companies as AI consumers? The hyperscalers have no trouble utilizing their GPUs (and I would suspect they mathed it out to be profitable but, again, that's just a different topic).
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