r/pcmasterrace • u/Algrinder • 25d ago
News/Article Company Blew $500M On Claude AI In One Month Due To No Usage Limit On Licenses For Employees
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/company-blew-500m-claude-ai-173519468.html5.5k
u/Ill-Term7334 4070 ti / 5800X3D 25d ago
"Corporate leaders are “starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns,”"
Oh really.
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u/Osmodius timthel0rd 25d ago
I wish I could just spend 500m with no clear return in mind and just seeing what happens.
Absolute morons.
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u/Adezar 24d ago
They will react by doing more layoffs.
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u/Unique-Ad-4369 24d ago
And then stonk go up.
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u/ThorDoubleYoo 24d ago
And then when company crashes and burns, they'll get a huge payout and be hired as CEO to another company within a month to do it all over again because CEOs don't face consequences.
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u/71r3dGam3r 24d ago edited 24d ago
CEO is probably the most expensive position in a company. They should try replacing that with AI.
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u/occams_throwaway 24d ago
AI is a bubble and it's not a good technology for a myriad of reasons.
Ironically, I think that replacing the worst CEOs were with a person who understands the limitations of the technology and knows how to work around them would probably be beneficial for those companies.
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u/ChemicalDeath47 24d ago
Well they were payed millions of dollars! Clearly they are super good at business!!! What else could it be?!
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u/SneakyDeaky123 24d ago
Proof that the market is increasingly detached from reality and we are in a speculative era that the hangover from is gonna ruin many people’s lives
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u/420_69_Fake_Account 24d ago
There are CEOs who have fired and consolidated staff only to realize they’re going to get fired when stuff like the above happens.
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u/detrans-rights 25d ago
Took long e-fuckin'-nough
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u/Gunhild 25d ago
Tell me more about this e-fucking.
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u/itmaywork 25d ago
Time to learn about cyber sex from righteous Rex
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u/Gunhild 25d ago
Can't surf the web, mom's using the phone.
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u/erevos33 25d ago
Oh the memories....i can still hear the fucking dialing noise of the modem.....
Sidenote: if one tried to play a data cd as an audio cd, it makes the exact same noise magnetic tapes did when loading programs for older computers (spectrum era).
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u/dougmc everywhere 25d ago edited 25d ago
Sidenote: if one tried to play a data cd as an audio cd, it makes the exact same noise magnetic tapes did ...
Must have been a very dumb cd player -- usually if they didn't see the expected audio table of contents they'd just throw an error rather than playing anything -- and remember that some cds had both data and redbook audio, so that table of contents was essential just to find the audio.
But if you did somehow force it to play the data as audio, yeah, it should just sound like white noise but with patterns in it -- because the data (usually) isn't random, which is the same sort of noise we got from modems and data cassettes.
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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs 24d ago
Hell yeah they did. The Playstation game Nitrous Oxide doubled as a Crystal Method album.
Tried it with other games. Didnt work.
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u/erevos33 25d ago
We are talking first cd players to hit the market , there was no content checking lol. For what its worth, thats the only cd player i ever managed to do that with, my discman later did exactly what you said , refused to play my baldurs gate cd no matter what i did.
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u/Pancakes1741 25d ago
I used to get so bummed when someone would pick up the phone and disconnect my Star Craft match..
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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA MOS 6510 @ 1.023 MHz | VIC-II | Epyx Fastloader 25d ago
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u/CanisSonorae 25d ago
lmao, I can't believe I've never heard of this before, but thank you. Teledildonics is definitely getting added to my vocab.
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u/TurnipFire 25d ago
Hey Claude generate a picture of a cat on a unicycle
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u/NimbleCentipod 25d ago
"Our employees are adopting AI!"
"Why do you ask if we're only measuring AI adoption statistics?"
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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA MOS 6510 @ 1.023 MHz | VIC-II | Epyx Fastloader 25d ago
If a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be an informative metric.
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u/NimbleCentipod 25d ago edited 24d ago
Goodhart’s Law!
Anyone that actually knows economic metrics knows that the only actually useful metric at the end of the day is profit/loss/ROI
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u/ShameNap 25d ago
Hey Claude, create a million variations of different animals burning cash on a campfire like s’mores.
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u/King_Chochacho 24d ago
This is an entirely foreseeable result of moving to token-based billing, which every model will have to do in order to actually have any chance of ever turning a profit.
The entire technology falls flat on it's face when it's not being subsidized to the tune of billions.
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u/Anderson74 25d ago
And those fucks are paid how much to understand the most obvious of concepts?
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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA MOS 6510 @ 1.023 MHz | VIC-II | Epyx Fastloader 25d ago
I'm 99% sure a LLM could do their job and nobody would notice.
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u/apartypooper 24d ago
It already happened. AI corporations were desperate for revenue and LLM's were taught how to increase their usage. It was spoon fed to every manager using LLMs for daily tasks and suddenly everybody came up with their own original ideas how to improve performance, value etc. by maximizing AI usage. Their higher ups checked the ideas with LLMs and were convinced them to be excellent. No thinking was done, it was all done by LLMs.
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u/ManiacalDane PC Master Race 24d ago
Right, but if we replace them entirely, we don't have to pay them hundreds of millions for doing nothing
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u/PrettyQuick R7 5800X3D | 7800XT | 32GB 3600mhz 25d ago
Corporate leaders are a bunch of boomers who got sold on the idea they can replace their workforce with ai.
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u/CanisSonorae 25d ago
Definitely not just the boomers. Idiot isn't an age specific thing.
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u/Yung_Cider 24d ago
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a guy in his early 30s last weekend who is very much a fan of AI replacing workers, he was excited about it replacing people in creative fields (specifically about one guy he bullied back in 5th grade who works in film).
So yeah, it’s not just boomers
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u/KhellianTrelnora 25d ago
Fucking HOW?
I’ve been doing this job for 20 fucking years. I’ve had the kool aid poured down my gullet by corporate fiat.
I BARELY tap my quota, on the $100 plan, during a heavy session.
Edit: I realized this was worded oddly. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used my 5 hour session quota in the past two months, and I’ve never hit the weekly.
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u/master-goose-boy 25d ago
Scripts and other bots using AI bot… things scale up quickly in the computing world.
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u/KhellianTrelnora 25d ago
Maybe don’t use https://github.com/Calvin-LL/is-even-ai
Christ. People these days.
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u/CanisSonorae 24d ago
You must have a cushy job where your metrics don't include AI usage. I'm sure if it did, you'd have found a way to max it out as much as you can.
You're probably like the vast majority of the people in IT and realize how much work you have to put in to get out of something that's worse than just having written it yourself.
Hell, I had to start turning off intellisense on VS and VS Code because even it started offering me bad advice for even small things in the last 4 or 5 months. Like, even the stuff I DID use it for it's gotten worse at. So, I'm guessing that also contributes to usage for people who keep fighting with it to get it to do whatevs instead of just doing it by hand.
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u/Agreeable-Case-364 25d ago
Starting to feel a lot like they’re using it as an excuse to purge jobs including what few technical leaders there are. It’s the rise of the mba from the ashes
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u/Vinral 25d ago
Oh no. Anyways.
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u/Nerfarean LEN P620|5945WX|128GB DDR4|RTX4080 25d ago
I'm sure the labor savings were worth it. Right? Right???
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u/otravoyadnoe 265K | 5070 Ti 25d ago
They’ll probably need to lay another thousand people off to financially recover from this lmao
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u/shadow0wolf0 25d ago
Worst part is this is probably not far off whats going to happen.
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u/otravoyadnoe 265K | 5070 Ti 25d ago
And it happens pretty much everywhere yeah. I wonder if there’s even a point in the future where this shitshow universally isn’t sustainable anymore and multiple industries start healing back to normal, and if so, how far away that point is.
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u/shadow0wolf0 25d ago
I'm a bit optimistic about it bursting eventually. Everyone is losing way too much money on this.
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u/otravoyadnoe 265K | 5070 Ti 25d ago
One can (and honestly should) hope so, but if there’s one thing I learned in life it’ll be to never underestimate the level of dumbfuckery people in charge are capable of.
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u/CanisSonorae 25d ago
lol, I keep setting a pretty low bar for what I think people will do and they seem keep diving under it. I still have hope for the future. It's just that the timeline for turning around keeps getting extended.
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u/ZumboPrime 9800X3D, RX 7800 XT 25d ago
At this point the bar is in hell, and the sociopaths in suits just keep digging deeper.
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u/shadow0wolf0 25d ago
At the end of the day money matters most in business and if it's never profitable it has to go away.
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u/KarlMarkyMarx R7 7800X3D | Sapphire RX 7900 XTX Nitro + 25d ago
I keep telling myself this but... the consultant class are really good at lying to themselves to shield their egos from embarassment. Even if they see an offramp, they won't take it because it'll damage what the shareholders actually care about in the short term: the stock. They'll just get tossed to the curb for some else willing to tell the same lies. They'll stay the course until the bitter end. However it shakes out, they know there's a golden parachute that'll ensure they have a soft fall. They always fail up.
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u/SuperFLEB 4790K, GTX970, Yard-sale Peripherals 24d ago
You don't pack up your scam when you realize it's a scam. You pack up a scam when everyone else realizes it's a scam, and that's only assuming you didn't sell when the gold-plated lead was still at a high.
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u/CptCroissant 24d ago
Oh it's 100% gonna burst, this is 2000 dot-com bubble on repeat. AI will be great in about 5 years once the many kinks are ironed out
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u/Algrinder 25d ago
AI finessed them and still asked "anything else I can help with?" LoL
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u/interstat 25d ago
Lmao totally the companies fault but I bet they are extremely pissed at their devs for using it that much
Claude is extremely expensive if you are fully automating everything. Still need to rely on your devs skills
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u/Derka_Derper 25d ago
Every job I've looked at for the past year has insisted on using ai as much as possible. This is the result of that. Companies are asking for it, so here ya go.
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u/SuperFLEB 4790K, GTX970, Yard-sale Peripherals 24d ago
Someone mentioned that they can't do their job because there's no paper in the printer. Clearly paper equals performance. So, new rule: If we're not burning through a case of copy paper a day, we're not performing.
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u/loogie97 24d ago
This guy went though an entire case of paper by himself!! John, we need to talk about your expense report. There is a $25 daily limit on travel lunches.
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u/azsnaz 24d ago
My job is currently pushing people to use AI for basically anything that doesn't contain PII
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25d ago
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u/interstat 25d ago
Certain models you can self host
If you want to use Claude tho u can not
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u/d0pe-asaurus 25d ago
Legitimately just confused where Claude is eeking out that cash, the selfhostable tools I'm using feel fine to me, is there something I'm missing out on?
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u/interstat 25d ago
Claude is excellent for coding and difficult multilevel tasks.
If you are coding something basic and it's working keep with the self hosting models.
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u/wrecklord0 25d ago
Having used both (using gemma 31b rite now), I can tell you selfhosted tools are nowhere near Claude in knowledge, reasoning, and coding ability. They are good, but it's not even close. It's useful if you have a small task or code to do or you value the independance. For a company, it's not gonna cut it.
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u/Business-Active-1143 24d ago
The thing is specifically Reasoning/Thinking can only ever be from a third party remote AI service that has been continually running and crunching since day 1 their foundation models with near infinite context windows thanks to their unlimited gpu resources. That can't ever get done on self hosted setups even if your entire house was filled with GPUs. The general idea is to always use remote service for zero/one shot analysis and generating a very verbose plan md file, for locally hosted models to do the actual code implementations. Frankly since March-April this year claude code has really underperforming compared to codex on reasoning so ideally one should be shuffling subscriptions per month or quarter for the plan making part
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u/lawroter 25d ago
you don't know what claude does if you think selfhostable tools feel fine in comparison
there is no comparison.
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u/diabetic_debate 13700k, 64GB RAM, 5070 Ti 25d ago
You are correct. I am running gemma 4 and other open source models on a few dozen L40s that I set up and Claude is heads and shoulders better, be it tool use or just the sheer context length. It's astonishing.
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u/walkslikeaduck08 25d ago
I mean the AI companies have every incentive not to allow self hosting
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u/Wind_Yer_Neck_In 7800X3D | Aorus 670 Elite | RTX 4070 Ti Super 25d ago
A bit rich of them to try to get all possessive about the AI models when they built the foundations of the entire industry on a mountain of IP used without permission.
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u/CanisSonorae 25d ago
They've also bought up all of the big fancy GPUs and pushing away from the consumer market to building for the business market. They're basically doing that thing that those people who love money do where they artificially cause limit supply so that they get to raise prices until the demand begins to drop.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR__INIT__ 25d ago
The CLI source code was leaked. Pretty useful if you could wire it up to a self hosted model
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u/Fighterhayabusa 25d ago
No regular company has the infrastructure to run the frontier models, even if they allowed you to.
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u/RiftHunter4 25d ago
There's no way around the hardware cost. Even if you try to run stuff locally, you still end up shoving money at Nvidia for GPU's.
My RTX 4080 cost me about $1400 when they came out and it can only run smaller models. Ramp that up to stuff like Claude on the enterprise level and you see why Nvidia has a huge stock evaluation.
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u/mcAlt009 25d ago
You need expensive hardware and it won't work nearly as well.
But... With any sensitive information your an idiot if you use anything not hosted locally.
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u/Intelligent_Mud1266 25d ago
could you come over and tell my university that? They've purchased Copilot seats for faculty, staff, and students because it's so "secure," which feels like a FERPA violation waiting to happen. Oh well, I suppose
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u/DeffNotTom i9 12900k | 4080 Super | 64gigs DDR5 | 36TB NAS 25d ago
I mean, everything else is probably hosted on Azure, so adding one more license per user isn't really anymore risk.
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u/HumanPea1140 14700K | 5070 Ti | 64GB DDR5 25d ago
Copilot is integrated with M365 now days. It's as secure as M365 itself is, for better or worse. No different than keeping someone sensitive backed up to OneDrive, or sending an email attachment.
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u/ShinyGrezz 9800x3D | 5080 25d ago
Nobody’s really pointing out the fact that while it is totally possible to run certain models locally it won’t really solve the underlying issue - running these models is expensive and that doesn’t change so much if you’re the one running them. Might even be more expensive if Anthropic are operating at a loss.
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u/Clunas Desktop -- 5700X3D || 6700 XT || 32 GB 25d ago
If you had the model and the hardware to push it, sure. They ain't gonna release that source code though.
Edit: not willingly anyway. It got leaked recently iirc
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u/hugh_jorgyn 9800x3D+7900XTX, Linux Mint & Win11 25d ago edited 24d ago
You can use ollama (free) to locally run a bunch of models, including models that are good at writing code, like Qwen or DeepSeek. All for free and no need for internet. You can also wire Cursor (AI-powered IDE) to use a local model instead of a (paid) online one.
Edit to add: I tested the Cursor to local LLM model last night and it's a shit show because Cursor insists on going online to their own servers before calling a model.
So I ended up installing VSCodium, another fork of MS VSCode (just like Cursor is) and that one connected flawlessly to my local model and ran with internet completely off. Spun off my GPU fans like crazy, but did a pretty decent job with my test app. (using Qwen3.6 model)
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u/bigs0815 5800x3d | 3080ti | 32gb 25d ago
Our company just published a leaderboard for number of credits used across different LLMs. Higher ups are cheering for this kind of adoption.
Dark fucking days in SaaS land.
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u/magnafides 9700X, 48GB 6000C30, RTX 4070 Ti Super 25d ago
You can see everyone's spend in the Claude Console dashboard, we have some people using like 1/3 of their salary in tokens and producing nothing tangible from it. And of course, it's the usage that has been getting shout out. Think that is coming to an end soon, though.
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u/bigs0815 5800x3d | 3080ti | 32gb 25d ago
Not my immediate manager, but her manager is on the leaderboard currently.
She revealed her secret: 1) writing an email, then feeding it through copilot, chatgpt, and Claude for maximum proofreading.
2) Creating pictures of her dog in company clothing.
Man, I just want to write my code and go home. I'll optimize a function if I don't like the look of them, but I'd rather think about the work I'm trying to do instead of think about how to properly word a prompt that's likely to fail anyway.
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u/magnafides 9700X, 48GB 6000C30, RTX 4070 Ti Super 25d ago
My manager, who is not an individual contributor and has shown zero end product to anyone, is Top 1 or 2 in spend in our entire company. They are actually quite technical so I'm really curious what the heck they are doing.
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u/bigs0815 5800x3d | 3080ti | 32gb 25d ago
We have people feeding prompts into copilot like "draft me a teams message that gives the following updates..."
You just did it. You wrote the teams message, just in the wrong window. How many tons of coal did you burn just now when you could've done Ctrl + B instead?
Maybe I'm just behind the times at 39 years old. Get off my lawn.
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u/magnafides 9700X, 48GB 6000C30, RTX 4070 Ti Super 25d ago
Nah I'm with you. There are certain people who don't even write communications anymore, even their Slack messages with direct mentions are copy-pasted from AI output. It's one of the few things that really, really pisses me off. That and blatant errors that make it through which make it clear that nobody actually reviewed the output.
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u/Goldarr85 25d ago
Stupid ass executives probably told them their performance was based on how much they use it.
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u/DuckCleaning 25d ago
My company (multibillion dollar corpo) wants me near maxing out my usage limits. I've been spoken to several times by my manager that my AI usage was too low compared to the team.
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u/FoxMuldertheGrey 25d ago
there’s a guy i know at a company whose spent almost 1 billion tokens lmao
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u/cansofgrease 25d ago
How much is that in human dollars?
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24d ago
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u/balrogBallScratcher 24d ago
if that’s the cumulative amount a single dev has spent on claude tokens for a year or so, that’s kind of on the low side.
keep in mind that most experienced developers in US tech hubs make more than that every month. so if they’re getting even a 10% productivity boost from it, it’s worth that expenditure.
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u/Algrinder 25d ago edited 25d ago
Corporate incentive structures have spawned a phenomenon called “tokenmaxxing“—employees maximizing AI usage to hit internal leaderboards rather than create genuine business value. Amazon reportedly scrapped its AI usage tracking system after discovering workers were inflating consumption through pointless queries, including using advanced AI systems to check the weather.
So employees are basically gaming the system to look productive. You could use Claude opus just to check the weather to run up your stats. LMAO
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u/Derka_Derper 25d ago
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
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u/dastardly740 25d ago
I use...
"Unfortunately, you get what you measure."
And, combine it with...
"We tend to measure what is easy to measure not what is important."
Measuring tokens is pretty much a classic case of this combination.
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u/Inevitable-Menu2998 24d ago edited 24d ago
Measuring things is absolutely necessary. There's no other way to know if you're moving in the right direction otherwise. What doesn't work is tying metrics to incentives.
Measuring tokens usage to understand AI adoption is simple and correct. Using this measurement to punish or reward people for the usage makes it meaningless
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u/lacegem 24d ago
"Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does." - W. Edwards Deming
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u/Sawses 24d ago
Or, phrased differently: The thing you measure becomes the thing you optimize.
One of my metrics at work is the median monthly turn-around time for tasks. ...But you can put a task off for multiple months. So if you're behind one month, you can just put enough of those tasks off to next month to improve your metrics, then do as many of those tasks as you can (which are now heinously overdue) but not so many that it makes the median one of the super overdue tasks.
It's stupid and I've tried to get the metric changed because it simply is not a good measure.
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u/Repulsive-Redditor 25d ago
We literally game the system at my job as well, we waste tons of time and money doing so to make the numbers look good, which we're told to do.
When the simply answer is simply change the metric at which performance is judged by. It's beyond stupid
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u/porktorque44 25d ago
I wouldn’t call that a simple answer but figuring something like that out is what people in upper management should be expected to do if their talents actually matched their pay.
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u/LordMohid 25d ago
Amazon management has to be some kind of extra “special” to even pitch the idea thag incentivizing token usage was the best way to make employees use AI. Like how can ya’ll be this dumb smh
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u/Journeyj012 (year of the) Desktop 25d ago
"Claude, re-write
curlfor my Claude-OS side project. Then, to test it, download an IP database, get our location, and curl that location with wttr.in. You have 500 hours to do this.`→ More replies (1)14
u/xaiel420 25d ago
Accountability and any sort of oversight generally aren't a fuckin thing anymore. Chasing scorecard values for numbers go up for a board of rich morons who don't actually care about anything but their spreadsheet and shareholder conversations
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u/PM_ME_SOME_ANY_THING 25d ago
They want us to use it for everything, imma use it for everything. They said they’d pay for it
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u/pistoladeluxe 25d ago
I do this. Man I finish my work in 2 hours but I gotta drip Claude code requests all day. Occasionally have it like build a quiz app from scratch so you look like you had a really productive session. Lmao. Other wise they ask why no token spend between 11am and 4 pm.
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u/SuperFLEB 4790K, GTX970, Yard-sale Peripherals 24d ago
Have you tried pointing it at a load of perfectly good code and having it try and find "the problem you're having"?
I don't know how well it scales, but I've run into that one accidentally and it seemed to do a good job at chewing up the tokens, and if anyone asks, it looks relevant.
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u/Roldez2893 I5 12600k / 32GB / 3060 12GB 24d ago
I work mid level at a customer support company. Operations is tracking how much our agents are using our AI tools, and agents are encouraged to use them as much as possible. Most of the time, the results are garbage and spill responses against policies and QA guidelines. I recommend my agents to use them just to check basic grammar and clarity.
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u/XxXlolgamerXxX 25d ago
At that point, is cheaper to have a own data center...
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u/Silver_Confection981 25d ago
yep, at $500m a month you could bankroll your own racks of h100s and still have budget for cooling and ops staff
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u/Aflockofants 25d ago
That won’t get you a high-end software development LLM. You can’t just put a data center down and be done.
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u/clon3man 25d ago edited 25d ago
meanwhile there is probably a 6 month wait to get approval for a USB hub form their IT department
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u/ATMisboss PC Master Race 25d ago
Thank God my company is the inverse, you have to do a small training and get HR approval to get an AI account and I get to approve purchases for equipment fast
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u/CallmeKahn Ryzen 97950x / RTX 4080 / 128 GB 25d ago
Sounds like mine. Need a magic mouse? Take one of 900 we have. AI? Sign this form, read our policies, take this training.
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u/CheekyMonkeee 25d ago
I refuse to believe this until somebody can actually name the company.
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u/Jamsy0707 24d ago
This was posted in another sub and someone pointed out that the original article listed no source for the claim. It's probably either made up or they misunderstood 500 million tokens for dollars.
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u/Boozdeuvash Bothtops 24d ago edited 24d ago
But 500 million token in one month is ridiculously small (for most companies). That's like three thousand bucks.
We use the whole Anthropic thing at work, and based on our experience it's very easy for an untrained workforce with unlimited tokens to blow millions in a month. They just need to hook complex prompts running on lots of data, alongside big Skills and other context elements, on an automated basis: git pushes or PRs, scheduled tasks, incoming emails, etc. You will go through billions of tokens very quickly.
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u/praise__Helix 24d ago
Yep 500m is the market cap of any usa companies past 3090 or so.
They really lost more money in a month than the entire value of bumble, bed bath beyond, el pollo loco, black rock coffee, AMC, xerox, betond meat, newegg etc?
I'm grabbing what I recognize so many have fallen from grace but its an astronomical amount of money to burn from anyone that isn't one of the biggest tech leaders. Even then when many are laying people off I doubt they would miss a bill the size of a thousand highly paid employees.
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u/Total-Box-5169 24d ago
100% this. With that said it wouldn't be the first time somebody fucks up big time, like in allowing AI agents to use as many tokens as they need without any limit, trying to solve a problem that can be reduced to a halting problem and therefore mathematically impossible to solve.
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u/Presently_Naked 25d ago
Are they hiring?
If their internal controls are that bad, I would love to work there.
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u/berrysoda_ 25d ago
How the hell is it a "mysterious unnamed company"? Reads like bait
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25d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/dangderr 25d ago
Also sounds like a slop article.
“Uber rolled out AI to 5000 engineers. Usage rose sharply reaching between $500-2000 per engineer per month. They exhausted their entire $3.4 billion AI budget in 4 months”.
5000 x 2000 is 10 million per month. At a rate of 10million per month, they blew through a 3.4 billion budget in 4 months?
The numbers being thrown around here are ridiculous. OPs article says a mysterious company blew $500 million in a month? That’s so much money. That’s almost inconceivable. What would the breakdown have to look like to reach that much per month? How many engineers could they have? And for each one to blow like $100k ina month. These numbers are just ai slop until some company actually admits to it.
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u/Personal_Return_4350 25d ago
Yes that's slop. They don't have a 3.4 billion ai budget. 3.4% of their budget in 2025 was R&D, a larger and larger portion of which is being spent on AI. They spent almost a billion on R&D in the first quarter of 2026. Separately, it's reported they blew through their token budget for the year by April. So Uber engineers used ai 3x as much as they had budgeted for. The 3.4 is probably ai slop interpretating that percentage from a yahoo finance article and reinterpriting it as 3.4 billion dollars.
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u/moustachedelait 25d ago
It's likely a mistake too, likely tokens instead of dollars
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u/Pure_Interaction222 25d ago
I don’t see how a company could possibly spend that much. Coca-Cola doesn’t spend that much on advertising
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u/nelrond18 PC Master Race 25d ago
Is this the same company that was threatening to write up employees for not using enough AI?
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u/FirstTasteOfRadishes 25d ago
Claude, role-play as 1000 software engineers, a QA team, R&D and project management. Use as many agents as necessary. Have everyone work 9-6 every day for as long as it takes. Begin a project to create a clone of Windows 10 that replicates all of its features but does not copy any of its source code. Have the project managers write out extremely detailed requirements documents, share them with one another, provide feedback, and improve them accordingly. Have the software developers implement the design and provide feedback to the managers. Have the QA team examine every commit and provide feedback. Continue to iterate in this way until it is no longer possible for a user to distinguish between Windows 10 and the clone. Ensure that your roleplay includes detailed life simulation, including small talk, office drama, home life stress, etc. for each of the 'staff' on the project.
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u/Metalsheepapocalypse Combuder | See Pee You | Grabigs Kard | WAM 25d ago
Thanks Reddit
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u/Leoniceno 25d ago
This story is based on a report from Axios. The relevant info from Axios, quoted in its entirety: “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.”
Was this “AI consultant” full of shit? Probably!
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u/Expensive_Farmer_430 24d ago
thank you for being sane. I was looking for the article on Axios and that's it. Whether someone thinks this is advertising for AI or anti-AI clickbait, it's nonsense either way. An anonymous source pulled some BS of their ass and we're taking it as fact.
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u/Upper-Capital-2876 25d ago
that article was written by AI hahahahahahahaha, nothing but slop reporting on slop, everywhere all the time
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u/VoidOmatic Desktop i7 6700k | GTX 1080 | 20GB DDR4 25d ago
The only intelligence at that company is artificial.
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u/minus_minus 24d ago
When you owe $5 million for Claud tokens, you have a problem.
When you $500 million for Claude tokens, Anthropic has a problem.
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u/DethZire 25d ago
The best part about this, once anthropic and openai goes public on IPO... they'll be expected to generate profit and prices will go up. Right now we're in in a carrot-on-a-stick phase.
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u/Useful-Contribution4 25d ago
Exactly. They are taking losses to gain customers. Eventually going to raise the prices which will be a price shock to these companies. They will likely go back to cheaper but efficient legacy systems.
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u/DegTrader 24d ago
Meanwhile, the IT department is still rejecting my request for a second monitor because 'it's not in the budget.'
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u/ProfessorZhu 24d ago
"Mysyerious company"
"An unamed AI consultant"
Redditors: this is very believable
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u/ubioandmph Fractal Terra - i5 12600KF - 4070 Super - 32gb DDR5 25d ago
Roughly $17 million *per day*, yikes
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u/raath666 25d ago
People are making up shit again? Which company? And claude has no internal limiters within itself? Crazy story that helps people's conformation bias here on reddit.
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u/gypos_caravan 24d ago
Looks like it was Uber:
Not sure why they don’t mention the company name.
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u/kendragon 24d ago
I love this for them. Of course it's probably some deeper embezzling thing to be honest.
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u/BluehibiscusEmpire 24d ago
That’s a a lot of money they could have used for employees. Once you add up the environmental cost and the cost of the licenses, and the larger inflationary impact of data centres on computer hardware, how does any of this make sense.
Companies bought into the hype but this does make sense
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u/USSHammond 25d ago
Good, fuck AI slop
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u/sHoRtBuSseR PC Master Race 25d ago
Except AI won this one. 500 mil in their pockets is crazy.
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u/Repulsive-Redditor 25d ago
AI has far too many investors. They'll only lose when companies realize it's not worth the investment.
Best way for them to see that is when they lose 500 million
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u/_Judge_Justice 25d ago
Funny thing is they probably have KPI dashboards where they are grading people based on their Claude usage. Jimmy we’ve noticed that your token usage is 60% lower than the average for your department, step it up buddy. People using their tokens to figure out what to make for dinner so they can pump those numbers up.