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When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

https://tomtunguz.com/ai-spend-breakeven-2029/
35•kiyanwang•1h ago

Comments

geon•27m ago
Garbage. You can't include training by the companies that develop an llm in the comparison against companies that merely use the same llm. Apples and potatoes.
avaer•21m ago
I don't know, compute is compute. Arguably making complex software with LLMs isn't all that different from training a model to do a thing. You're throwing a lot of compute at the problem and hoping for a stochastic solution. The distinction will become even blurrier with time.

Though I agree it might be informative to split it by industry sector.

alexjurkiewicz•16m ago
AI training uses wildly more compute than most companies, who are generally building domain specific CRUD apps.

Compare AI costs per-engineer-salary-dollar, because more expensive engineers probably need more expensive AI.

scrollaway•14m ago
If you’re going to include AI training in costs, you should include education as part of the costs of an engineer …
imhoguy•5m ago
... and that clicks - senior engineers have spent actual paid time to train juniors.
vksv6•5m ago
why stop there? Count how long and how much energy it took for evolution to produce that 3 chimp brain that is then educated, and add how long it took culture to produce the knowledge in text books for said education to be possible.
psychoslave•16m ago
Apples and potatoes are both something people will need to eat if we want to see it from the human utility perspective, and they both require some land space to be allocated for their culture (though one can of course conjugate both culture).

If you want to take the DDG LLM summary at fate value, apples are lower in calories and sugar but higher in fiber compared to potatoes, which are richer in vitamins and minerals like potassium and vitamin B6. Overall, apples provide more dietary fiber, while potatoes offer more protein and essential nutrients.

Comparison rarely lead to one obvious all superior option that discard every other considerations.

iLoveOncall•16m ago
OpenAI and Anthropic aren't charities, so whatever cost they inccur for training will be passed down to the companies using the models. So you absolute should include it.
zaphirplane•4m ago
[delayed]
peppevignanello•13m ago
Exactly, it's like saying Shell is spending a fortune on fuel compared to what they spend on employees, if you count oil extraction costs as 'fuel'.
general1465•7m ago
So where are these training costs getting paid from?
spiderfarmer•20m ago
I'm not a VC guru but in my opinion you can't include the time and money it takes to grow a tree and mine the iron to compare the time it takes to hammer in a nail with a hammer versus using your fist.
mclean•20m ago
A missing thread by the author for how Anthropic's training expenses becomes expenses for employee workplace expenses. And this is before we start adding Anthropic engineer's ability to use it's tools/models for far less than market price.
pablobaz•12m ago
The bear case being set at 40% of employee costs is still quite wild.
schnitzelstoat•12m ago
Ignoring the bizarre inclusion of training compute for the AI company estimates, the other comparisons are still valid.

> The rest of the software market trails. The top 1% of companies spend $89k per engineer per year on AI, 40% of a fully-loaded $224k senior engineer salary. The median spends $137. That is the gap : ... 0.4x at the top of the market, near zero at the median.

So it's not more expensive than an engineer it's 40% as expensive, and for many companies use-cases the cost is virtually negligible.

Even here in Europe where developers are much cheaper than in the US, it still makes sense to pay for the LLM Enterprise subscriptions.

A_Duck•11m ago
Analogous statement:

Evian use 1.25 million litres of water per employee per year. When can we expect other non-bottled-water corporations to rise to this level of water usage?

alwa•9m ago
This includes the cost of training the models that the other companies consume by buying it from the comparison group? Isn’t that more a direct input to the thing the Anthropic-type companies are selling? Wouldn’t we expect non-AI-selling companies to spend less on making AI, and more on making what they make?
brown_munda•8m ago
Mr. Mark Zuckerberg is particularly not happy about these stats. He was promised something else and he has already fired like half of the company.

It is really crazy people didn't think this through.

KaiserPro•6m ago
Excellent, with stunning insight like this, you can see why this VC is earning the big bucks.

This is almost economics level of line projection.

It would be good to understand _why_ anthropics "AI" bill is so high. First, They are going to be renting a lot of inferencer just to service customers (Meta's Capex bill is about 2x its wage bill) It then also needs a huge amount of infra to both run training and experimentation.

The other thing to note is that claude usage inside anthropic is tiny compared to the customer's usage. even with uber agents at "mythos++" its going to be at best a few thousand servers. not like the massive fleet needed to serve the paying customer.

So using anthropic as some sort of rational target to base any kind of prediction is madness. Its like looking at lyons tea rooms and going yeah, every company is going to spin up an R&D arm to make a company specific computer: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/meet-le...

ALSO this assumes that the current way of running LLMs is the way forward. Custom software is expensive (in both time and tokens) to look after, its much easier and cheaper to buy it in from SaaS companies and let them figure that shit out. (yes I know SaaS apocalypse, but you are paying for real world experience, and a packaged way of doing things, rather than experimenting your self, where in a lot of cases the company doing the experimentation doesn't know what its doing)

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