[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/apple-cuts-...
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/accenture-j...
Yes. The frontier models are good, indeed, but they are just far too expensive to use much. Recently I was showing my executive leader that we could simply run a certain set of tasks on the top frontier model and we'd be good to go. Oh but it would cost over 15M/year. We're a relatively small company, that's over two magnitudes more than what makes sense for us. So, never going to happen.
What remains then is an optimization exercise to bring the cost down. For months now we've been optimizing usage so we can run nearly all tasks on very cheap models to good success. It's fun to optimize and keeps the CFO from having a heart attack.
But not good news for the AI companies relying in a firehose of cash coming in from their frontier models.
It's kinda like commuting in the autobahn with a Porsche.
Some agentic madness is like doing donuts in the parking lot drinking beer impressing the local baddies.
So, so much fun. But at the end of the day we used to get so much more done with much, much less computer power, energy, mental drain.
It's always more software tooling, more moving parts, more apps, more more more. Fun. Looks neat. Used sooo much energy, I feel so drained. It was fun.
But at the end of the day, for the long run what I want in my life is to win at rally on a dependable machine with a nice navigator I'm friends with. Or have a shed full of tractors making money for my family on the farm everyday.
LLMs are fun. But I want to use my mind to write great software that adds value in as little lines of code as possible designing systems that people can understand readily and maintain well 2 or 3 handovers from me.
For the edge cases that might need more like running a security audit, it would make more sense to submit that as a project proposal and have the expense approved.
They could be tightening the purse strings further until they hit some magical ROI numbers.
It's easy to spend a lot when writing an entire service, large features, or doing research loops.
- freely experiment and understand the limitations of AI
- create things outside of what they are officially expected to
I’m not advocating for people who burn tokens for the sake of it. But I do think a single engineer has more potential for impact today than ever before and a high budget unlocks that.
It also isn’t _that_ much more when a fully loaded mid-level engineer is costing you $300k+
- Convert PPTX to TypeScript
- Allow editing of that TypeScript via an LLM interface
- Convert TypeScript to PPTX
The intent was to create slide deck templates via code. The first step was to convert our existing templates to this new format.
So I had it write a harness, gave them problem to Opus, and a couple thousand dollars later the import/export worked near perfectly.
At my company at least, I think our developers waste a ton of labor and money on getting LLMs to produce tools like this. Then they use tool a few times and ultimately forget about it or throw it away. At the end, they've spent a few hundred dollars on frontier tokens for the effort.
More time gets spent tweaking/iterating with the LLM than it would take to make the decks by hand. And sharing takes effort, so our devs mostly roll their own tools with minimal reuse. At the end there's no business value to show for it other than the slide decks that could have been made the old-fashioned way.
You do not need much creativity for that. Just forget to put build artifacts or node_modules in your agent's ignore list and it will happily burn through the cap in thirty minutes
That is not to say that you can't spend a lot more. And I would be surprised if Apple did not allow for that too. Note that the text says "for some of its own engineers", which could amount to a total nothing-burger, given the overall vagueness.
[0]: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-subscription...
They also should have a smart model supervise the cheaper and less capable ones.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/accentures-ceo-says-using-ai-...
So it's about staying nimble enough so you can easily switch over. Don't tie yourself down to a single product/harness.
That's why those plans are only available to small companies with 150 employees or less.
As far as I can tell, that's not the limit. A team plan may not have more than 150 members but the size of the company doesn't matter. I you have 150 people who need to use it inside an organization of 200, 500, 5,000, whatever, that's fine.