Very productive at creating slop that’s warming the earth beyond what most people comprehend. The heat has to go somewhere when data centers burn energy and where else will this heat go but into our atmosphere.
The big push happened right after the crypto crash. I have a suspicion both are pushed by energy companies. If power consumption goes down, we start switching to renewables and stop consuming dirty sources. They can’t have that, so they pushed crypto to consume it. They let it crash because they started pushing “AI” instead. Politicians always say we can’t decrease power consumption, and we just need to build up to replace dirty energy sometimes in the non-specified future. We will never reach that if they can instead keep creating excuses to expand demand.
The dark patterns on meta products are downright evil, and infuriating. How anyone can stay on their products baffles me. They punish you for using it.
Only decent way to see local events and updates on stuff happening in my area, also most people use marketplace so it’s how I find stuff to buy locally.
Facebook with ublock and a userscript to clean all the crap off it is at least generally usable.
You make the mistake of assuming any of that matters.
You’re talking devotees of the LessWrong crowd. The self-proclaimed “rationalists”. They are quite literally a religious cult that worships AI. (I know this sounds deranged. That’s because it is deranged!) The money is beside the point to them. What matters is that they trigger the Singularity so that the Rococo Basilisk (I know that’s not the proper name: my artistic license number is MY0B) doesn’t torment their simulacra for eternity.
No. I’m not making any of that up. (Except that it’s Rocco’s Basilisk.)
The app is falling apart. From marketplace discussions the link back to the listing is mostly broken. The app crashes frequently. Images and video will glitch back and forth by several pixels, randomly.
I think they are doing a massive study on how automating code production kills products. It is a brave move and I look forward to the papers they publish when the company folds.
Management has proven to the board that they’re using the technology everybody in corporate likes. They’ll surely get a bonus for that. And once it’s obvious it fails they’ll lay off thousands to compensate for the billions spent and get a bonus for the thorough cost cutting. Then hire a bunch offshore to get work done.
An agent can produce code quickly, but at the accuracy level of a co-op unless a significant amount of time is spent to “prepare” the agent. Trouble is, you have to know how to do the job you’re asking the agent to do to be able to effectively steer it to an acceptable solution.
With a co-op (or junior engineer), I still need to do the equivalent of the above to train them on the tasks/concepts they need to perform their work, I still need to have a firm grasp of what it is that I’m asking them to do to be able to guide them to the correct solution.
The difference is that the co-op/junior retains that knowledge and is able to extrapolate that to different situations as well as come up with innovative solutions based on that initial knowledge. One of the biggest risks to tech work from LLMs (aside from the general problems with LLMs) is it encourages managers to not hire juniors/co-ops, which means that there will be no new generation of senior developers coming up to replace us when we retire (lol, as if).
I want to push this outside engineering. It sounds like they want to train computers, not employees. Which, I don’t know about your fields, but folk aren’t exactly looking to mentor their future competition in the financial industry. So you pretty much get to teach yourself or go back to school.
Historically (at least in orgs that aren’t maximally toxic) software engineering has actually had a great culture of seniors helping Junior and midlevels grow. IME most of us enjoy mentoring, and further enjoy having someone else who can do the boring shit for us. It’s why, despite incompetent management being the norm, the industry has succeeded as much as it has.
Unfortunately I think this is changing now. The ownership class has finally pushed too far and I think a sizeable portion of us have realized that we devs have to stop maintaining the engineering cultures of our orgs to fight back.
I would imagine the answer Meta execs would want, would be “effectively microtargeted advertising to those most likely to buy the product, creating sales for our advertising clients and allowing us to charge them more”
Going through massive sets of user data to figure out which of them would most likely be interested in a product does sound like a plausible use case for AI
Their models suck, if they didn’t they’d sell them.
Edit to add: they’re selling access to their GPUs, that’s how bad and under used their models are. Again, if their own models were any good, someone would use them.
They have their own models, it depends on a teams manager and a few other constraints if they are required to use them or if they are pestered to use generative models at all.
I’m betting that cost is just the cost for the token usage and nothing else.
im required to use ai at my job. they don’t pay attention to what i do with it. so it now answers my emails 1 business day after i receive them, and responds (appropriately) that im working on their request and ill check back in with them with progress. its a constant loop.
its funny how many tasks in corporate america get forgotten bc they weren’t executed immediately :D
corporate elsewhere too. it’s all for The Metrics, to see usage and adaptation go up. i’m not required to use it at work, but our developers are.
let’s just say clients are increasingly choosing the (worse) fallback browser version of our service instead of the vibecoded and more and more broken app full of vulnerabilities.
because at least the browser side has issues they expect and usually know by now.
but hey, new graph go up, right? ignore the old graph we cared about before.
my fav is the fact that our dev team is use 80% of the companys ai tokens, but have to push to production at least four times bc of bug fixes. every week. we used to publish once, maybe twice.
We’ve been seeing posts of people using AI for stupid stuff because their bosses wanted to show their bosses that they were all in on AI.
Now that they’ve effectively churned the waters for effect, the companies have realized that - Surprise! - there was no result. Now they want AI used for real stuff, which is what they should have been doing in the first place. Companies got way out over their skis way too early on this one.
And the AI companies made billions, and they’re still broke, and years away from profitability, if ever. And viability, if ever.
Zuck the Fuck has proved time and again that he is completely bankrupt of ideas or vision.
Facebook he stole from the Winkelvoss (sp?) twins
Instagram he bought
Threads he copied from Mastodon
GIPHY he bought
Messenger he bought
Kustomer he bought
… and I’ll stop there because that list is endless, seemingly.
Things he actually did himself under his own “vision” such as it is?:
the Metaverse, something he went so all-in on that he changed his company name to suit the new vision; the Metaverse is now officially shut down because it was too embarrassing turning on the lights in an empty hall
Now he’s going to tout his new direction of AI, but … ah … that’s all purchased too:
Manus AI
WaveForms AI
Moltbook
PlayAI
The dude is creatively and morally bankrupt, and at the rate he’s burning cash in this latest corporate turn, he’ll be fiscally bankrupt in no time flat as well. Zuck the Fuck is like Melon Husk Lite: All the idiocy, half the cash.
Imagine you have to go on with a company name that is the worst failure in your company’s history? Every time you say the company name, you are referencing what a loser you are.
The system prevents people this rich from going down. He could literally toss a coin on every decision and at the end of the year he will be richer than before. These people basically cannot stop themselves from getting richer.
Is this whole token thing really just the same as paid in-game currencies, just designed to get you to not think about the fact that you’re spending money? Or is there another use for it?
Tokens are an AI context of units of text. Could be a character or a word. Why use the term tokens instead of words? Who knows. Maybe because some units aren’t words? The tech industry delights in creating stupid terms for things that already had terms.
There are to many words to have each be it’s own input, but bundling frequently used snippets is more efficient than using characters.
Then the investors came and decided to measure success by wasted energy and the rest is history.
A token can range from individual letters to several words in a stock phrase, from what little I understand. It’s a piece of whatever they’re doing behind the scenes leaking into the public-facing terminology.
According to my SO, it’s safe enough to just say “a token is a word” as long as you remember this is only an approximation.
Tokens are pretty much the compute used for one word, approximately, or some other information of a similar size. (Long words are two or three tokens each actually)
Then, yes those tokens are paid for with “credits” which is them gamifying the purchase lol
I’m sure making Instagram clog my feed with suggested posts and other shit I don’t follow has done wonders for their engagement metrics. I really love how meme posts and other shares are now clogging that shit up as well.
It’s definitely not a main contributor to what made me finally delete my Facebook. Kind of ironic that, given how much of my data they scrape, they still couldn’t piece that together.
There are more than 7.000 AI apps out there, most used are all from big corps (Gargle, M$, Zuckerbot, etc), meanwhile there are pretty good and private indie alternatives which are struggeling to survive.
That is the real problem, not the AI as tool as such, but those which biased these for own greedy advantages, to profile and manipulate the user. Adding users which use it without criterio and knowledge to substitute with it own research and brain, instead of an tool which can help with research and work, using it for what it is.
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And they achieved… what exactly?
More faces per book? Instant Instagram? Whatsapp is now appier? Finally copied Second Life in meta horizons?
Like… What does $221,000,000/month of AI even get you?
“Productivity”
Very productive at creating slop that’s warming the earth beyond what most people comprehend. The heat has to go somewhere when data centers burn energy and where else will this heat go but into our atmosphere.
They added legs to horizon world!
Dang, and right after it shut down, what a bummer.
I guess it didn’t have “legs” after all.
I sometimes wonder whether AI is just a way to launder money at the same time as burning the planet.
The big push happened right after the crypto crash. I have a suspicion both are pushed by energy companies. If power consumption goes down, we start switching to renewables and stop consuming dirty sources. They can’t have that, so they pushed crypto to consume it. They let it crash because they started pushing “AI” instead. Politicians always say we can’t decrease power consumption, and we just need to build up to replace dirty energy sometimes in the non-specified future. We will never reach that if they can instead keep creating excuses to expand demand.
THEY ADDED $221,000,000 to the GDP every month!! see, the economy is doing great
Got more work done that doesn’t matter and also atrophied their workers mind.
Right? I haven’t noticed anything change, everything is as buggy, slow, and difficult to use as it ever was.
The dark patterns on meta products are downright evil, and infuriating. How anyone can stay on their products baffles me. They punish you for using it.
Only decent way to see local events and updates on stuff happening in my area, also most people use marketplace so it’s how I find stuff to buy locally.
Facebook with ublock and a userscript to clean all the crap off it is at least generally usable.
You make the mistake of assuming any of that matters.
You’re talking devotees of the LessWrong crowd. The self-proclaimed “rationalists”. They are quite literally a religious cult that worships AI. (I know this sounds deranged. That’s because it is deranged!) The money is beside the point to them. What matters is that they trigger the Singularity so that the Rococo Basilisk (I know that’s not the proper name: my artistic license number is MY0B) doesn’t torment their simulacra for eternity.
No. I’m not making any of that up. (Except that it’s Rocco’s Basilisk.)
Wasted some water, electricity, released some heat to the atmosphere…
The app is falling apart. From marketplace discussions the link back to the listing is mostly broken. The app crashes frequently. Images and video will glitch back and forth by several pixels, randomly.
I think they are doing a massive study on how automating code production kills products. It is a brave move and I look forward to the papers they publish when the company folds.
Management has proven to the board that they’re using the technology everybody in corporate likes. They’ll surely get a bonus for that. And once it’s obvious it fails they’ll lay off thousands to compensate for the billions spent and get a bonus for the thorough cost cutting. Then hire a bunch offshore to get work done.
There is some quite hot water now, don’t talk that down!
Edit: ah, another one was first…
Should read the comments, but sometimes the urge is overwhelming…
May have proved senior engineers are more effective having a team of agents rather than a team of junior engineers
Doubt that is the case, but that is likely what all these middle managers expect in these companies
An agent can produce code quickly, but at the accuracy level of a co-op unless a significant amount of time is spent to “prepare” the agent. Trouble is, you have to know how to do the job you’re asking the agent to do to be able to effectively steer it to an acceptable solution.
With a co-op (or junior engineer), I still need to do the equivalent of the above to train them on the tasks/concepts they need to perform their work, I still need to have a firm grasp of what it is that I’m asking them to do to be able to guide them to the correct solution.
The difference is that the co-op/junior retains that knowledge and is able to extrapolate that to different situations as well as come up with innovative solutions based on that initial knowledge. One of the biggest risks to tech work from LLMs (aside from the general problems with LLMs) is it encourages managers to not hire juniors/co-ops, which means that there will be no new generation of senior developers coming up to replace us when we retire (lol, as if).
I want to push this outside engineering. It sounds like they want to train computers, not employees. Which, I don’t know about your fields, but folk aren’t exactly looking to mentor their future competition in the financial industry. So you pretty much get to teach yourself or go back to school.
Historically (at least in orgs that aren’t maximally toxic) software engineering has actually had a great culture of seniors helping Junior and midlevels grow. IME most of us enjoy mentoring, and further enjoy having someone else who can do the boring shit for us. It’s why, despite incompetent management being the norm, the industry has succeeded as much as it has.
Unfortunately I think this is changing now. The ownership class has finally pushed too far and I think a sizeable portion of us have realized that we devs have to stop maintaining the engineering cultures of our orgs to fight back.
I would imagine the answer Meta execs would want, would be “effectively microtargeted advertising to those most likely to buy the product, creating sales for our advertising clients and allowing us to charge them more”
Going through massive sets of user data to figure out which of them would most likely be interested in a product does sound like a plausible use case for AI
I don’t work for friendface but I do not use AI with good intentions.
Is that cost in electricity cost? Or they are not using their own AI models?
Their models suck, if they didn’t they’d sell them.
Edit to add: they’re selling access to their GPUs, that’s how bad and under used their models are. Again, if their own models were any good, someone would use them.
They have their own models, it depends on a teams manager and a few other constraints if they are required to use them or if they are pestered to use generative models at all.
I’m betting that cost is just the cost for the token usage and nothing else.
Meta is not using their own models internally because their internal models are far behind the state of the art.
This is why Zuck is in a frenzy too, trying desperately to catch up, failing consistently to actually do so
im required to use ai at my job. they don’t pay attention to what i do with it. so it now answers my emails 1 business day after i receive them, and responds (appropriately) that im working on their request and ill check back in with them with progress. its a constant loop.
its funny how many tasks in corporate america get forgotten bc they weren’t executed immediately :D
https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn
Github dot com slash disco inferno
corporate elsewhere too. it’s all for The Metrics, to see usage and adaptation go up. i’m not required to use it at work, but our developers are.
let’s just say clients are increasingly choosing the (worse) fallback browser version of our service instead of the vibecoded and more and more broken app full of vulnerabilities. because at least the browser side has issues they expect and usually know by now.
but hey, new graph go up, right? ignore the old graph we cared about before.
my fav is the fact that our dev team is use 80% of the companys ai tokens, but have to push to production at least four times bc of bug fixes. every week. we used to publish once, maybe twice.
somehow this is better?
CI/CD?
Lol true i guess
Deleted by author
Surprisingly difficult to find a source on this that isn’t a Twitter Screenshot of some right-wing grifter’s account.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tokenminimizing-meta-moves-curb-employee-ai-usage-ai-costs-reach-billions
This seems to be it, but I don’t think there’s currently a working paywall bypass for the information (solid site, though).
https://mlq.ai/news/meta-caps-internal-ai-token-spending-after-costs-approach-billions-in-2026/
This might be that article, but not entirely sure. Ironically, that site seems to be another questionable AI project.
Yeah! Those numbers sound absurd
We’ve been seeing posts of people using AI for stupid stuff because their bosses wanted to show their bosses that they were all in on AI.
Now that they’ve effectively churned the waters for effect, the companies have realized that - Surprise! - there was no result. Now they want AI used for real stuff, which is what they should have been doing in the first place. Companies got way out over their skis way too early on this one.
And the AI companies made billions, and they’re still broke, and years away from profitability, if ever. And viability, if ever.
It would be so funny if meta was to go broke over AI usage. One can dream
Alright, taxpayers, bail em out!
Zuck the Fuck has proved time and again that he is completely bankrupt of ideas or vision.
… and I’ll stop there because that list is endless, seemingly.
Things he actually did himself under his own “vision” such as it is?:
Now he’s going to tout his new direction of AI, but … ah … that’s all purchased too:
The dude is creatively and morally bankrupt, and at the rate he’s burning cash in this latest corporate turn, he’ll be fiscally bankrupt in no time flat as well. Zuck the Fuck is like Melon Husk Lite: All the idiocy, half the cash.
Imagine you have to go on with a company name that is the worst failure in your company’s history? Every time you say the company name, you are referencing what a loser you are.
Imagine being Mark Zucke…
Oh. Right. That’s what you said! 🤣
Cant be creative if you have no soul.
I still think “alien in a human suit” is the most likely explanation for his bizarre dysfunction.
But did you see the legs? Impressive.
He also doesn’t even deserve credit for the idea for thn Metaverse. He literally stole the premise and the name from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
I’d like to join the chorus of people saying “Zuckerberg will be bankrupt soon”, but I said the same thing about Musk and he became a trillionaire
People will continue to use his dumb products, not in the least cause he does his best to monopolize any market he’s in
The system prevents people this rich from going down. He could literally toss a coin on every decision and at the end of the year he will be richer than before. These people basically cannot stop themselves from getting richer.
I hope Cuckerberg is bankrupt at the end of this AI clusterfuck.
And in prison.
and that is not even the actual cost, because the vendors are still not making a profit.
The actual cost is a livable environment
Observe the dead-eyed stare into the middle distance.
He almost looks human in that photo.
Someone tell madame toussaud her museum got robbed again
And the marketplace search is still a broken pile of shit…wish everyone didn’t jump to it and stayed on CL…
Is this whole token thing really just the same as paid in-game currencies, just designed to get you to not think about the fact that you’re spending money? Or is there another use for it?
Tokens are an AI context of units of text. Could be a character or a word. Why use the term tokens instead of words? Who knows. Maybe because some units aren’t words? The tech industry delights in creating stupid terms for things that already had terms.
Well, yeah. You answered yourself?
There are to many words to have each be it’s own input, but bundling frequently used snippets is more efficient than using characters.
Then the investors came and decided to measure success by wasted energy and the rest is history.
A token can range from individual letters to several words in a stock phrase, from what little I understand. It’s a piece of whatever they’re doing behind the scenes leaking into the public-facing terminology.
According to my SO, it’s safe enough to just say “a token is a word” as long as you remember this is only an approximation.
Tokens are pretty much the compute used for one word, approximately, or some other information of a similar size. (Long words are two or three tokens each actually)
Then, yes those tokens are paid for with “credits” which is them gamifying the purchase lol
Thanks!
I’m sure making Instagram clog my feed with suggested posts and other shit I don’t follow has done wonders for their engagement metrics. I really love how meme posts and other shares are now clogging that shit up as well.
It’s definitely not a main contributor to what made me finally delete my Facebook. Kind of ironic that, given how much of my data they scrape, they still couldn’t piece that together.
It costs what they pay, but the value is around zilch. Strange how that works.
Still less than what Uber spent
Unfortunatly in the heart of empire they pick the winners and losers ….. news flash the losers become winners.
There are more than 7.000 AI apps out there, most used are all from big corps (Gargle, M$, Zuckerbot, etc), meanwhile there are pretty good and private indie alternatives which are struggeling to survive. That is the real problem, not the AI as tool as such, but those which biased these for own greedy advantages, to profile and manipulate the user. Adding users which use it without criterio and knowledge to substitute with it own research and brain, instead of an tool which can help with research and work, using it for what it is.
No real output and environmental destruction