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Janaque's avatar
Janaque
Seasoned Veteran
11 hours ago

Will EA continue to use AI?

I just read that many companies that adopted AI now discovered that using AI cost MORE than just having employees do the work manually.

I heard that EA makes their programmers use AI for everything... and that AI makes a lot of mistakes, and that is why they have to put out emergency patches all the time to fix the breaks the patches create.

AI destroys the environment, is expensive, and does a bad job. People are boycotting AI in art and games. Why is EA continuing to use it?

"For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees." 

"But the actual companies deploying AI at scale are discovering the math doesn't work. The MORE employees use AI, the HIGHER the bill."

"The companies building AI are telling investors it saves money. The companies using AI are finding out it costs more than the humans it was supposed to replace. And even the company that makes the chips just admitted it through its own VP.

"This is the gap nobody on Wall Street is pricing in.

"$725 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year across Big Tech. And the first companies to actually deploy these tools at scale are already pulling back because the economics don't work."




From this:

"Microsoft just banned its own engineers from using AI.

The tool was literally costing MORE than the humans it was supposed to replace.

They lied to you about AI adoption and now the whole narrative is blowing up:

Microsoft gave thousands of engineers access to Claude Code six months ago and encouraged them to use it.

Engineers loved it and adoption exploded. But then the invoices arrived.

Token-based pricing means every query, every code review, every debugging session costs money. At scale across 100,000 engineers, the numbers became so large that Microsoft issued an internal order to cancel nearly all Claude Code licenses by end of June and force everyone onto their own cheaper tool instead.

The company that invested $5 billion in Anthropic just told its own people to stop using Anthropic's product because it costs too much.

Uber's story is even worse...

Their CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information that the budget he planned for the full year was "blown away already" by April.

Uber had rolled out Claude Code in December 2025. By March, 84% of their 5,000 engineers were using it with 70% of all committed code coming from AI systems.

Heavy users were burning $500 to $2,000 per month each. Naga himself spent $1,200 in a single two-hour demo session.

The company had even built internal leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used. They literally gamified the spending and then ran out of money.

Now look at what Nvidia's own VP of applied deep learning Bryan Catanzaro said to Axios last month. Direct quote:

"For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees."

This is a VP at the company that SELLS the chips saying that using AI is more expensive than paying humans.

Think about what this means for the entire AI narrative.

Every CEO on every earnings call for the past two years has said the same thing:

AI will make us more efficient, reduce headcount, and cut costs.

The stock market rewarded every company that said it.

Fired workers, stock goes up. Announced AI adoption, stock goes up.

But the actual companies deploying AI at scale are discovering the math doesn't work. The MORE employees use AI, the HIGHER the bill.

Goldman Sachs forecasts a 24x increase in token consumption by 2030 as companies adopt AI agents. Gartner just published a report showing that even though individual token prices will drop 90% by 2030, total enterprise AI costs will go UP because agents consume exponentially more tokens per task than basic tools.

Meta built an internal dashboard called "Claudeonomics" to track which employees use the most AI. Amazon started pushing engineers to "tokenmaxx," their internal term for consuming as many AI tokens as possible.

Both companies are spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure this year alone.

And Microsoft, the company that bet its entire future on AI, just told 100,000 engineers to stop using the tool they liked best because the per-token bills got out of control.

The companies building AI are telling investors it saves money. The companies using AI are finding out it costs more than the humans it was supposed to replace. And even the company that makes the chips just admitted it through its own VP.

This is the gap nobody on Wall Street is pricing in.

$725 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year across Big Tech. And the first companies to actually deploy these tools at scale are already pulling back because the economics don't work."

What do you think?

3 Replies

  • Janaque's avatar
    Janaque
    Seasoned Veteran
    10 hours ago

    Source where I found it:

    https://x.com/Ric_RTP/status/2058546401483653236

  • It should be on the countries/regions to set up limitations, standards or bans for AI. A company in order survive/compete tends to have to use unscrupulous means, and it falls on the community/government to speak up, set precedence and/or keep them from getting out of hand.

    Boycotting, IMHO, at a company level—when it should be a country or united countries/regions level—might not be as helpful as intended. Otherwise, you are just punishing a/this company for using a tool other companies are using/going to use that they are competing with.

    They have to stop building for AI infrastructure or it will be continuously used (private or publicly), and yet at this time I believe they are still looking to expand.

    But I digress this might be a political discussion more than an EA/Sims discussion—even though it concerns their practices. Your concern is valid though.

  • AI does need to be trained first on what it needs to do pretty much same way a new employee needs to be trained on the job. Then there is the code behind AI that needs to be streamlined to make sure it reads and processes information as it should. I think the best way to describe how AI works in all fields is to take an AI generated image. At first glance it looks good, then at second glance and on closer inspection you start to notice things that are not how or where they should be. Personally, I think it can work great for areas where you don't need precision as it is not a fully calibrated tool yet and I have seen feedback from people who have used it successfully for some everyday tasks. If you don't mind looking for the inconsistencies and doing the corrections and it takes you less time to do so than it would have taken you to do the entire work from scratch, then yes it's a great tool. If companies are paying for it then it makes perfect sense that costs are adding up as it's an extra expense and since it's an uncalibrated tool and still in testing it makes perfect sense that it's output will need to be checked and corrected where necessary. It probably would make more sense to compare cost benefits of using AI in an field where employees are paid by the hour to make it possible to compare costs to AI. 

    Janaque wrote:

    Heavy users were burning $500 to $2,000 per month each. Naga himself spent $1,200 in a single two-hour demo session.

    If they spend $600/hour that's like a really expensive lawyer but even with lawyers there are some that don't charge as much/hour for the same work, quality and result and some even do it for free. I have read about people who have used AI to appeal cases and have won. Maybe they got lucky but they had nothing to lose as they didn't have the money for an attorney. For them it saved them attorney fees. But just as well I have heard of attorneys that have lost cases because they used AI to do their case research and didn't bother to check if all information was correct. In this case AI is expensive, it cost not just to use it but also lost income and reputation. 

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