The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI | Leaked audio from Accenture says a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentatio…
4 months ago by sanitation to c/technology
Further evidence that most CEO's and SLT's are just confident, lucky, and born wealthy; not competent, smarter, or much better than average.
AI is about to join the list of "stupid technologies that people should really wait and see before investing on", which includes
- 3D TVs - complete dud
- Blockchain - useless for real world problems already solved by typical computing
- Metaverse - still one of the best jokes around
- Folding screen phones - overpriced junk
- Fully autonomous self driving cars - "Just around the corner" for the past 10 years
Don't forget NFTs... though I guess that can fall under blockchain.
Literally, even. NFTs exist on crypto blockchains themselves.
Folding Phones Sales Continue To Increase since 2019, showing people seem to like them
I don't think they are for me but I honestly would not include them in that list above. First of all, there is no investment bubble around them and secondly some people seem to like them and are ready to pay for them. They also do have legitimate benefits (but also downsides)
Yeah I didn’t dislike the 3d monitors/tvs they just had too many caveats at the time and VR kind of ate its lunch.
My fold4 lasted 3 years, and still works. I'll concede it was only able to unfold to about 85% open at the end when I decided to upgrade. I was happy to upgrade to the fold 7 which has a redesigned hinge and better dust protection. I acknowledged the risk of mechanical failure as a possibility compared to a slab phone and after using it for years I decided I was still very impressed with the flexibility of having a tablet in my pocket. The fact that my 7th generation is significantly thinner and has a 200MP camera compared to the 4th is what sealed the deal.
It's not perfect for everyone, but I wouldn't go back to using a slab, there's too much functionality I'd be pissed giving up.
Granted, I tend to upgrade my phone every 2 years or so anyway.
Not the same guy. But I've been using foldables since 2019 as my primary phone. Samsung fold 1 -> 3 -> 5. No case, no protectors, keys with phone in same pocket. Never had an issue.
I just replaced my S21 which I bought new, and it still works fine for everything but being a phone because it had a short or blown cap or something that kept the SIM reader from working.
...7
I like the one that folds like a GBA SP.
Not that I'm gonna buy one based on that.
But if I'm choosing between two identical models but one folds (and I guess it isn't that much more expensive), I'd go for the folding one.
Except, of course, for the fact that the next phone I buy will be Commodore's Callback.
This could also be explained by the entire rest of the market being different flavors of the exact same thing. A little over a decade ago, we actually had choices in what type of phone we wanted. Now, if you want anything other than an identical slab, foldables are your only choice.
Hyper Loop was an insane idea (in a bad way).
Motherfucker wanted to invent subway, but for cars, making cities even more dependent of cars.
hyperloop was very low air pressure subway tubes for high speed trains. Works for research tesring tracks impractical to infeasible for real world applications. But it apparently what killed high speed rail in california (because wait this will be better)
The cars in tubes thing was a seperate stupid idea.
I don't know that he really wanted to fully execute on Hyperloop so much as build hype (and Tesla stock price) around the idea while sabotaging funding for California's high speed rail project. But yes, end goal to keep people buying his cars.
Actually not entirely true.
He was proposing transportation method similar to how the communication tubes are. Where vacuum would be used to transport capsules with people.
He knew it was bunk, so initially just published that idea and let anyone do it. His actual goal was to kill California's high speed rail, which he did.
Eventually he purchased Boring company and started building tunnel in Las Vegas and called that (as you called it, subway for cars) a hyper loop and pretend that it was the original idea.
Cold fusion is a scam, not a bad idea. There is no scientific basis for that. Is as bad as “infinite energy engine”.
Green hydrogen is water electrolysis with solar power, not scam, it works, it is just a question of making it economically viable. Hyperloop is just stupid, but within the realm of possible. Cold fusion is the only scam here.
Some of these turned out to be useless, some just haven't been adequately delivered yet.
In 2040 folding phones and autonomous cars might be great, but blockchain will still be a solution in search of a problem.
Metaverse - still one of the best jokes around
This one I slightly disagree with. I got my headset on a black friday and it was super cheap, but VR documentaries are friggin' amazing and I hope museums will invest heavily in it in the coming years.
Fully autonomous self driving cars - “Just around the corner” for the past 10 years
Definitely. Makes me feel good for people who make their living driving trucks.
The metaverse isn't VR in general, it was meant to be a virtual space in VR where users could be advertised to and buy/rent things and space like in a physical city.
It failed because those were the intended starting points, and it didn't solve any problem other than a shitty attempt at a "I want to live in a ready player one world" and didn't have any compelling reasons to actually use it, let alone use it and pay ridiculous amounts to do interesting things there. They always just wanted to be the middlemen, offering space for others to pay for and do something interesting in. The most interesting thing they came up with is having a meeting with avatars instead of faces on a screen (and most people don't even want to turn on their video and just do a voice conversation instead).
Plus Second Life already tried the same idea and failed, and did so without requiring several hundred dollars of specialized equipment per user like the Metaverse did.
Though they did have the advantage of their name not being poison. When fb bought oculus, I stopped considering them an option for VR setups.
Until someone come up with things like sword art online, they gonna flop lmao
Yeah, what we call VR is just a pale imitation of the VR that made things like SAO and The Matrix so cool.
3D TVs - complete dud
The real issue with 3D TVs had nothing to do with the tech, but 100% to do with lazy implementation on the media side. Everyone was always trying to make things pop out of the screen, which was the complete wrong approach. Nevermind the fact that companies got so lazy to the point of just filming in 2D and then "adding" 3D in post.
No one wanted to put in the effort to do it right (aside from James Cameron). So no wonder no one liked it.
Because whenever they tried to use it properly, the plebs demanded their money back because it wasn’t noticeable enough.
Fully autonomous self driving cars - "Just around the corner" for the past 10 years
It exists, but they realized that why should they do that, when they can make money by creating taxis without drivers.
There is no benefit for us, ordinary people.
Are you sure? I see Waymo driving around picking and dropping people off. I would imagine that charging more for the novelty and not having to pay the driver would actually generate a lot of profit.
I watch a lot of YouTube about everything nerdy and celebratory to every detail and facet about the global apocalypse. Yesterday for the first time in months, a novel idea got through to me.. dude was talking about the overblown reactionary movement to which I initially ate my own vomit.. yes, I consume this drug, but yes, I am cognisant it's really bad, so don't tell me it's all okay... Something along lines of "everyone thinks it's like the industrial revolution. It's not. It's like the Internet or mobile devices. We just forget how big a change those were now that they're normative, so it sounds psychotic to compare AI to such "small" shifts in society like the Internet or mobile".. and I felt a fuck ton better. Copium or not, it's nice to hear a grounded take (he backed it up), and neither a sycophant or chicken little diatribe that feel respectively like sociopaths with heads in the ground or click bait unsubstantiated drama.
Not undermining what AI is doing to people, society, and the ecology. But now that I type that, thinking what to follow, anyone remember Mary Poppins? How normal it was for little kids covered in soot missing fingers at the dawn of the industrial revolution. We just need regulation which is the actual fundamental shift problem, as demand for political action is no longer democratized now that the Citizens have United.
Am I a douche? Lying to myself?
This is 100% the thesis I've been shopping personally... Many Boomers and Xers in executive positions had a "magical millennial" that they quietly kept as a secret "AI" to split/edit PDFs, set up an Airtable base, add columns to a google doc, etc. There was a tacit, silent agreement in this symbiotic relationship for the bulk of the last 20 years - you'll make sure I don't look completely incompetent in tech matters and I'll backchannel on your behalf to senior leaders and people who "matter" to help you advance.
Gen AI essentially allows the laziest input, gives a half competent output that "feels" fine and has the bonus of telling the boomer/Xer that they are actually amazingly capable, and could have done this themselves all along even, but they rightly delegated the task to their magical millennial, and now to the AI of choice.
So they fired all the magical millennials, because they knew too much about the before times. Now that they are fucked without a life raft, costs soar and they will cling for dear life because they will be exposed otherwise.
Edit: through a twist of fate, the iPad kids grew up technically incapable and relied on the magical millenials as well. They could only offer praise and loyalty really, or a boomer, Xer recruited them in and talked the MM up as a "wiz" to seek out. Anyway, now that the MM are gone, the Zoomers and gen Alpha kids only have one strength remaining, the old people have no idea what they are doing or how to quantify their success, outside of "use more AI". So the fragile balance remains for now, with a vulnerable, hollow center where the magical millennials used to live.
I'm surrounded by this shit, and it seems to come from all generations. My boss, who is my age, called me because her computer was frozen and she wanted me to fix it. "I was like, turn it off and on again, this is the first, most basic rule of troubleshooting." Meanwhile the boomer next to me is having me do shit like attach files to a fucking email.
I don't know why you think it's a generational thing. There has always technical people that filled in the gaps that the more extroverted management types didn't care about. How do you think things worked when millennials were still in diapers?
What you're saying indicates you're one of those people that don't understand how many gaps other people are filling in for you. You're talking about splitting PDFs, who do you think designed the PDF format? Or the http protocol that you use to open that google doc?
Honestly the issue I see happening lately is that because iPads (and now AI) made things too easy for the young people they don't actually know how things work at the low level, not interested in learning it, and often react with "this is too complicated, make it easier for me!"
I said it was my own thesis, built from a decade plus in the trenches. If you read what I'd stated again, you'll see that the implication was not purely generational, but boomers/Xers with power who drove the change. You also over emphasis technicality here as I was purposefully discussing the more mundane, beginner to intermediate level daily tasks that the millenials were fulfilling here. The millennials in this group are typically in rightful awe of the old timers talents to build on the foundational level, and also envy their circumstance of walking into a more open sandbox and with more stakes to claim in the early days.
So basically, the above preceding doesn't really concern you unless you found your way to VP level or really to the csuite especially, and even then, always exceptions. That understood , I won't spend more time debating exceptions to the general rule, as I see it. I respect my elders, as long as they are decent people struggling to do better within these inherently broken systems.
I don't know why you think it's a generational thing. There has always technical people that filled in the gaps that the more extroverted management types didn't care about. How do you think things worked when millennials were still in diapers?
Uh... Unless you worked at the forefront of technology where more people probably WERE qualified, by and large these things worked on paper/transparencies I would presume. If PowerPoint and PDF were people, they are themselves millennials and gen z (ish) respectively.
Now, when millennials were about 10 you've got a decent point ;).
by and large these things worked on paper/transparencies I would presume.
You have to presume because you weren't involved in helping the people who were used to doing everything on paper learn how to turn on a computer. Do you think people in the past were super qualified and just magically knew how to use a computer in the past? Nobody ever needed help loading a file on a floppy disk and printing it to paper so they can present it to their boss?
There have always been clueless bosses and tech people that had to make things work. If you go back further, why do you think they all had secretaries typing things up?
I'm a Millennial and work in IT. We aren't magical. There's competent and incompetent people in all age groups. I wouldn't even say we had better starting conditions overall because being good with tech was seen as cringe nerd stuff when I grew up.
I think your theory is mostly right though, just along the lines of competent/incompetent. So many people constantly choose what they believe the path of least resistance with tech, even if it actually isn't. Don't spend one or two minutes to learn how to save to PDF in Word, instead google "word to pdf" and upload whatever sensitive data you have in that DOCX to some shady website.
Ew, webp. Chatgpt, convert that shit for me
Yeah, that's the eww part :( I hate when I find great memes and I know exactly the friend to share them to.... and I can't DM them.
Especially if it's animated. Easy enough to change the extension on PC to a PNG without issue yet. But anything too large to screenshot, or with multiple frames? Many a DND meme have I let pass by
The response you're trying to save was a web page
The funny thing is that even with this massive overspending, AI companies aren't profitable. They need these companies to spend 10x the amount per token, and 10x the number of tokens. Probably 10x the number of customers too.
Burning energy, draining water, spending massive cash so they can lose money on a product that doesn't even do its job. How the hell has the bubble not popped yet...
The Stock market is literally just vibes. As long as everyone believes, it will somehow be profitable in the future, the line will keep ging up
and building more and more datacenters, replacing AI chips faster and faster, the more people use it, which of course is wasting a ton of money.
The problem seems to be that it takes competent employees to get anything useful out of an LLM in the first place. However, it is these very employees whom the greedy CEOs want to replace. So the result is that an incredible amount of money is being spent on absolutely nothing.
The logical conclusion, then, should be that it would make more sense to replace these useless CEOs with AI. Since they’re just making idiotic decisions for a lot of money anyway, there could be lots of savings.
Unfortunately, however, that will never happen, because contrary to all that talk of KPIs and such, what really matters in the upper echelons of management is never efficiency, but rather ruthlessness and brown-nosing.
I recently learned of a term "reverse centaur" and found the ideas in that article were very entertaining as a way to explain why CEOs are obsessed with LLMs. The author of the book being interviewed has a few hot takes that I think are pretty relevant here too. https://arstechnica.com/...
Indeed!
“The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things: big foundational models that lose billions of dollars every year. When the AI investment mania halts, most of the models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the data centers running. The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100 billion IOU. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.”
I think that pretty much sums it up.
My employer has this figured out the right way: AI tools in the hands of competent employees can get a lot done. The engineers themselves agree and are long past their initial chilly reaction. They now have their workflows figured out and routinely report that they did something in minutes that would have taken them hours to do manually.
And even under this rosier picture, token budgets are an issue. These guys have agents running agents running agents that use a whole ecosystem of internal MCP servers and skill plugins and on and on. They say they never shut their laptops because they have 6 or 7 things running at all times. The LLM usage is ridiculous.
Once the LLMs cost what they actually cost, there will be a big time reckoning. First companies will crack down, then they will futz with on-premise models, then they will drive for SLMs and other slimmed down stuff. And they will pay the big guys 100x what they are now for 1/100th the usage.
But hey I don’t know why I’m posting in substance about the real world when all we are here to do is say AI is bullshit and CEOs are dumb. Carry on I guess.
a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentations
I haven't been this happy in over a year.
Reminds me of companies getting their cloud computing bills.
Yup. I've had the same thoughts. There are many who still think its insane to have your own equipment. Now there will be those who think its insane to do your own thinking.
Yeah, but you get to exchange cap-ex for op-ex!
Nevermind that running a 48 core server in Azure with 16TB of managed disks is going to run about 21k a year, and you can practically buy a new server for that price.
My company is tossing out their "old" equipment right now, which is why I have a nice server humming away in my basement right now.
Both of those statements hurt my soul, damn, why do you have to do that to me. On a Friday no less
Its top priority because it's part of our new AI strategy. Make sure it's well documented for your weekly report you will have to deliver to the c suite.
Did they think everyone was gonna be creating return value based products for the company to make a fortune on?
Instead they making posters and having crazy convos.
It’s like someone has just discovered salt and every restaurant has it. Each thinks they are unique and gonna be the GOAT.
If my boss would mandate the use of LLMs I would definitely abuse it to rack up the bill.
I already am.
I just debugged a report, found the issue almost right away. A missing number in a GROUP BY clause.
Well if you're measuring what I do through LLM use, the Claude is fixing it instead. Hope that dollar was worth it!
I like to race the ai on most tasks and find myself winning on anything of substance. Sure SOME mundane tasks can be done but does it out weight the energy and infrastructure costs as well as reputation and morale.
Even after all that you STILL need a human double checking and inputting the information.
Leadership are mostly idiots. They don't know how work gets done. They think like "wow it produced so many lines of code!" and don't know that's not a useful metric.
My job had Microsoft do a four hour copilot demo for the entire team last week. (Surely an immense expense. They won't pay for most people to be full time with benefits). The guy used copilot to make a regex to parse html. A little surprised zalgo didn't show up.
I'll one up you.
Google's "principal evangelist" for Gemini did a 2hr presentation for almost 1,000 people at my company on Google Meet a few weeks ago.
40 mins late due to nobody knowing how to get more than 500 people in a meet.
He then spent 90 minutes showing everyone how to do shit that literally everyone knows how to do with AI nowadays; touch up old photos of your grandparents, make shitty marketing mascots and logos, etc...
Here's an image I took during the presentation. For a laugh, look at the background text:
A C-Suite exec got impatient and asked when we were going to cover how to use agentic tools and he said "oh I've got a little section at the end for that." Ffs
Literally nothing useful happened during this meeting and nearly 1,000 employees were idle for no reason. A complete and utter waste of fucking time. Gemini dude didn't even bother to consider what use cases we might be looking into, he just did a boilerplate ELI5 of AI that would have been outdated in like 2022.
Absolutely insane.
lol why is "animals" in quotes?
Eat shit you greedy corporate assholes, i hope all of your companies are damaged beyond recovery, you useless fucking tools.
"ChatGPT, what time is it?"
Well, if your KPI is how much you use an LLM like in some reports - this is an easy way to get those good indicators. Also, LLMs are super easy to use to parse things, whereas many special programs like IDK grep isn't exactly user friendly. Not to mention not finding patterns really. Though here I'm thinking things like looking at various logs on computers.
Maybe we could at least nudge the LLMs in the direction of suggesting appropriate tools and giving hints how to actually do that when applicable instead of blindly brute forcing every task. Of course that does not solve the issue of stupid corporate incentives, but I feel like by now most companies have realized that burning as much money as possible is not a good goal.
Will, that's what happens when employers tell employees that they should "use ai first", track their token use on a dashboard, and tell them they'll get fired if they are too low on the monthly ranking.
Yeah, my manager expressed satisfication with me being one of the people using my quota of tokens.
I have generated so much throwaway content that never gets used and only gets deleted to burn the tokens to avoid getting the "you aren't using AI enough" talk. The fact they can see my actual productive output and believe AI is involved shows how utterly disconnected the metric is from reality.
Damn how can I get a job whose primary KPI is just burning tokens?
Edit: actually the answer is "Amazon consultant" based on the experience I had observing one of them "working". He just repeatedly prompted their LLM and went around in circles instead of actually doing anything useful.
I'll say that it is only one thing.
So if I just sat around burning tokens without anyone seeming to have any idea what I actually do around here I'd be out. If I just did my job but didn't appear to use tokens, management would ding me for being some luddite.
Yes but you're in an open office and all you have available in your open office hell are: rocket launcher, your sanity, Debra's snappy attitude.
Is Debra here a new version of clippy?
Nah. The bailouts will only be two or three tomes what they squander.
Indeed, they won't pay for these mistakes, we will.
"They're too big to fail" etc., with another round of bailouts for our poor, beleaguered corporations.
And Accenture itself reportedly started requiring senior staff to start using AI or risk losing out on promotions.
Every time companies urge employees to use AI and then regret the cost. The fuck is wrong with people? Why are they pushing it so hard? Does Sam give them hand jobs if they use the most?
I don't understand this need to pressure staff into using something and threatening punishment if not. Are they worried that their employees are not efficient enough? Pay them the token prices on top of their salary and see how stuff changes.
This is actually very common across businesses. My company actually has our bonuses tied to AI adoption, so we have dashboards showing people's AI usage. Other major companies have done the same, which lead to the practice of "token maxxing" where people were using AI to make more AI calls to boost their numbers up.
Amazon did this and regretted it, canning their leaderboards.
It's crazy to me that this is considered normal. Please use this product that will eventually replace you, kill the planet, and make some douchebag rich.
Edit: mobile typos
The fuck is wrong with people?
That's the corporate hive mind, all afraid of missing out of a great productivity tool. And they think that because media these days just copies what the richest people say and hype it up because the rich these days only speak to yes-men.
and then regret the cost
Reality doesn't need to obey yes-men.
When you tell the people to mash the easy button and then they do exactly what you wanted. They created the monster.
If you just throw every task at it, I can completely imagine that it'll cost you more than any gain in efficiency. To some degree I think this is true of some coding tasks (not all, most are pretty efficient pattern matches, and that's what it does well).
But using LLMs to build tools and pipelines that stand alone (no AU built into it) and enable human productivity seems like a far higher leverage use.
The programming version is building the libraries and abstractions that are robust and well tested, so that regular developers can quickly build and refine the features.
Or building the reporting dashboard. Or whatever.
The cost is only going to go up, and the companies that lock in some non-AI process improvements before the hike will likely be smiling
Especially because a statistical model of language has very limited valid usecases. Many tasks that people use LLM for do not make any sense and cannot be accomplished by a statistical model of language. It can only output a statistical approximate of what a solution to the task might look like, not an actual solution.
It constructed an entire feature-full library for a UV sensor that just came on the market, by me just throwing the PDF datasheet at it and saying "make library pls".
It's the actual solution. Maybe the statistical approximate just coincidentally lined up with the actual solution? Either way, works for me. Second time it did that, too. Worked for a LiDAR sensor earlier.
Maybe the statistical approximate just coincidentally lined up with the actual solution?
Yes, right, and this can happen. I didn't say they are a bad approximation. LLMs may be the most advanced and sophisticated statistical models ever created (if there are other examples of statistical models that are more sophisticated, I would love to learn about them). But given what an LLM actually objectively is, a statistical model of the next token to follow from a sample of language, what other explanation could there be?
We need to keep in mind what the tools that we are working with actually are.
As a code generator, they can produce great results, especially simple stuff like generating a script or some function implementation. Once you get to software engineering tasks like designing system architecture and designing maintainable code, it starts to fall apart really fast. You end up doing all of the work for it in natural language and just using the LLM for a usecase that it is actually great for: translation, from detailed spec to code.
To add to that... when we start looking at the price of things, software engineering becomes very important. Sure I may be able to get the LLM to do something instead of doing it myself, but if it's costing tens of thousands of dollars to save me one hour of work, it's going to be hard to justify that cost.
We'll eventually need to become familiar with which problems it's relatively cheap to use an LLM for and which problems it will be very expensive to use it for. Hmmmm... estimating performance of an algorithm and making decisions about when to use it and not use it... what does that sound like?
This is almost the perfect task for them. I think if them as pattern matches. They have patterns for libraries in their training, and you gave it a technical spec, and it pattern matched it across to a library.
On top of that, you can verify it and reuse it. But regenerating it every time wouldn't be a good use both for the cost, and the risk of subtle issues that don't get noticed. Same argument as for any library.
Probably because I've been doing this so long, I often find it easier and more precise to describe things in code or pseudo code than common English, which often aides my use of LLMs.
On another note, I'm curious what you're making. My "when I get time" project is to use an old STM32 drone flight controller to do some basic robotics, which will only be possible because I think the LLM will pattern match me out of trouble getting an embedded C program compiling after 20 years out of that game.
I heard about a company that was looking at purchasing machines to run local llms for their developers to use.
If more companies do this, rather than using the massive ai data centers being built…. the RAMpocolypse will get way worse.
That is the part that pains me to admit - running local LLMs is not a solution to the RAMpocalypse. In that case we'd just have more GPUs and RAM idling for ~90% of the time in someones basement, without being shared. As bad as it sounds, having data centers for AI stuff is actually the more ecological solution. I can't believe I said that. Excuse me, I have to take a shower now *shudder*
This made me laugh so hard.
Not affiliated with Chipotle. They will probably sue us. Worth it.
Wonderful. Just wonderful. 😁
File changes its form,
Pages slide into their frames,
Slides ready to show.
This dumb bubble can't pop soon enough and wipe away most of the US economy while doing so.
True except the 80% of people who will suffer further because of it, and the 20% that will gleefully be laughing to the bank and buy up everything at a discounted price. Few of us should be cheering for the failure or success of AI.
Look I'm getting stabbed in the gut regardless let's just get it over with.
Many would say that, but usually when societies have abrupt crashes, it isn't pretty, and everyone suffers more because of it. Who knows, maybe you are part of that 20% that will gleefully laughing to the bank, but like most of the rest of us, I doubt it.
LLMs as a technology are incredibly powerful tools that have so many useful applications. The issue is trying to turn them into this all powerful omnitool that could do everything, and then shoving that product up everyone's ass at every turn.
There was always bound to be a correction to this bubble, because the current model is unsustainable. You can only keep making unreasonable moves for so long before everything starts to crumble and you're forced to scale back.
Yeah AGI is a mistake. Maybe someday, but what we need know is token efficient LLMs that are designed for for more specific tasks.
There's a lot of data that it could be helpful for analyzing, but if there's customer data in there that you can't share with a third party? Can't use any of these tools. An appliance in your company's server room with a bunch of GPUs that's optimized for data analysis, that's something I'd be interested in. But with the price of GPUs right now, that's unlikely to happen.
So the bubble needs to burst before LLMs are truly useful.
Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides
Sounds the people they hired to do the shit work don't actually want to do that type of work. I, for one, am shocked. Shocked I tell you!
Switching from human labor to AI is like going straight to a unionized workforce, except it's not a collection of reasonable human beings with human needs, it's a well funded machine with only exponential profit in mind
That wouldn't fix the issue though. The problem seems to be that most people only put out a PDF file when sharing slides, and never end up sharing the source file (the .pptx or .tex file).
This is likely because PDF became the "file that everyone can open", just in their web browser. It's the next best thing to a web page for non-techie consumption. Yes, there's no reason people can't open pptx in most cases, but I bet various endpoint protection and just not understanding how to even pick the right program to open the file steps in.
The stuff just like Firefox automatically downloading files but opening pdf by default is small but can make all the difference.
Me reading the intro in their docs:
"Ok so this is just like Typora"
"But it uses weird symbols for everything"
"Oh wait, now they're referencing a figure…"
"Holy shit it can make a bibliography"
This is a pretty awesome tool at first glance. I'll have to check it out further.
Excuse me, what is a Typora?
Ew no way. Best way to make document structure portable, or to move prose or visuals between contexts. It's also exceptional if you want to automatically generate documentation with code or services that generate graphics.
ALSO you can version control it with git which is a good enough reason in and of itself unless you can use markdown for your purposes instead.
I'm a neovim guy myself, so mostly I'm in markdown. Most of the latex stuff is for document production and it's easy as keeping a skeleton file with the includes set up on a letter heading. If I have something that NEEDS to be printed and markdown wont do it, I'm definitely using latex not libre. I'm not sure I can even use any kind of writing tool without vim bindings anymore anyway.
I would have to agree with dream_weasel. It's all about portability. Though, I would like to add on accurate reproducibility. LibreOffice's font rendering differs from system to system. A typesetting system like roff, TeX, and Typst aims to be reproducible, with TeX being the most as it uses packages and its own font format for rendering. The same argument can be made with MIDI vs Module. While MIDI can be used everywhere, all it is is just note data and metrics. Modules contain all of that plus the sample data, allowing for near perfect reproduction.
Really? Been a minute since I have done a presentation, but:
Pandoc PDF to Markdown.
Markdown to paste into your favorite HTML presentation tool.
Nobody is stupid enough to still use Powerpoint right? Right?
Or the 'modern workflow' version of tell the AI you want to convert the PDF, so it burns a bunch of tokens installing pandoc and converting it for you!
Mandated to use PowerPoint? That would suck. Html markdown presentations are easily shared, require no additional software and make so much sense.
Oh right, "make sense". Nevermind, I get it. The corporate world has no time for that!
Yup, can attest. It sucks. Unless the application is listed on our approved app list I can't even request it. Let alone the months it can take IT to get around to installing it for me.
Any markdown render will do. VSCode, pandoc, heck many web pages, etc.
You just write in markdown.
Edit: unless you meant pandoc, but I don't think it requires an install either.
Can't read the whole article bc paywall... But if they are really worried about token cost for converting PDF to a Powerpoint, they ain't seen nothing yet. Agentic coding the way AI companies push it (multiple agents in parallel with Claude, looping etc) uses way way wayyyyy more tokens than this.
Have you used Opus 4.8 at API costs? Without using agents, I can burn $20 an hour no problem. I use Kimi K2.6 and GLM 5.2 these days.
How do you use it without agents? Just prompt the chat interface?
When I used claude code, I'd go through the smallest tier subscriptions 5h limit in half an hour sometimes if I used Opus lol, reckon at API pricing it would've been 100 bucks an hour
Chat prompts and then accept the changes when they are worth using. LLMs are entropy apparatuses, injecting that shit straight into your code base is crazy. It took one module/subsystem done with agents for me to realize that it was completely unmaintainable. Not a single eng can make a change to it and the only option is to rewrite. So I banned agents. I know some people still try to get away with that style of LLM coding but I encourage people to instant deny a PR if it looks like garbage.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/c6DSo
Ooh, I think I'll start using CoPilot to do basic math and unit conversions in addition to doing them the correct way. Then I can note in my goals & reviews how I have been utilizing the AI resource and keeping tabs on its advancement.
Various designing firms.
After the bubble bursts, law firms, because everyone starts suing everyone to get back money they didn't necessarily have, but still spent, because somebody will soon sue them.
Nvidias pocket maybe. CEOs? Billionares?
Trump and his cronies, probably
converting pdfs to presentation
I don't get this, We've had OCR for a while. All around San Francisco Ive been seeing ads for "llamaparse" with the tagline "we parse pdfs", like is that all you do? How do you afford this marketing budget?
PDFs are so shitty to work with, it's like translating them, it's impossible without using a tool like Google translate.
I fucking hate PDFs as much as I hate Adobe.
OCR is nothing like creating a presentation. Pulling text out is nothing like generating an on screen show with that information. This is something i see a lot of in my company. People trying to use it to generate fancy powerpoints from random groupings of metrics. So they dont have to actually know what it is theyre presenting. They just press next, read the screen and if anyone asks questions say theyll 'take that offline' and ask someone else to look into it.
Its kind of funny in a way. If you know exactly what to ask for amd can interpret results and do investigations its incredibly helpful. But without that its a big noise machine. And its really showing out those who are capable of identifying exactly what it is they need and are capable of breaking it down into actionble paths vs those who need to constantly take things offline.
Dayum. If I was given unlimited budget for AI I would do the same. Everyone should have a set personal budget for AI expense and they can keep it if they don't use AI.
If I'm going to get a $20,000 bonus at the end of the year if I don't use any AI, I'm not going to use AI.
That's a big problem with this tech... how do you price it? I think companies would purchase an allotment of tokens that can be used or banked by employees. Problem is they'd always be cutting the token budget.
Where I work I have to have a meeting and justify a $100 license for software. So I don't know how this will work long term.
Think like a manager:
- Offer employees an AI token budget that’s use or lose. Don’t make any promises on reimbursement and stay vague about how high users can obtain more tokens. You don’t want wasted token usage. More on that later
- Increase workloads/KPI/widget production quota by how much change you can find around some vending machines. Sneak in monitoring of employee user behavior and interactions with systems and programs if you don’t already have something in place
- Link AI assistance to the higher requirements by saying things like “We’re investing in our workforce by providing productivity tools”
- Fire those at/below new requirements while praising those who are left behind
- Throw a pizza party and pocket some of the savings from firing a third of your team. Invest in a mini fridge for the top performer.
- Train new AI on the user behavior analytics you’ve been secretly been collecting and use it to replace the next lower performing third of the team. Keep on the higher performers and give them a small raise so they speak positively about the company and so you have somebody to fix the inevitable problems
- Profit
Durr durdur
What a fuckin’ clown circus…
I think the first time I heard "slide deck" was within the last few years. It was always a (PowerPoint) presentation. I heard "deck" on its own without context (something like "I'm making a deck") within probably the last 6-12 months and had no idea at the time what that person was talking about.
Either slideshow or presentation still. Presentation with like an overhead projector with someone changing sheets or manually drawn somewhere.
Slideshow would be an actual slideshow projector with slide film.
Ever since LLMs where provided free to the public, I've been pen testing them. Not intentionally, I just like tech and have wanted to explore them. After getting all the info they're designed not to provide(which is so fucking easy, even on the most recent models that have corporate PC baked in to the core can't do shit) I turned to token burning. I could easily get 1M/24hr, but they've brought that cost down to like $0.10 so its not doing much anymore. I think I saw a model specific script that's doing 52k/min.
Point is it takes a day of coding and a shit PC to just sit there burning money directly out of their budget. It wouldnt take that many people committed to doing this to make AI less feasible.
My work mandated we use the copilot. And the only thing I have found it really good at is converting or extracting information from a PDF to build me a spreadsheet. The native conversion programs in both Adobe and Excel suck so bad.
I have some suppliers who won't send a spreadsheet or CSV nothing that is data, only a PDF.
It's a stupid and computationally expensive way to do it but does solve a problem for me, a problem that doesn't need to exist at all but has frustrated me for years.
Two birds, one stone. I can honestly say to my boss that I am using the copilot for work, and it's a workaround for the insufficient reporting I get from our payroll provider in particular, but also some bulk invoices that are detailed and only come as PDF.
So yes I am in this group. I've only used it for file type conversion, and once to "write" a process document just so it would be formatted in Word, I went in and wrote over most of it.
@sanitation, worth pushing back a little on the 'token chewing' framing: the PDF-conversion use case probably isn't the real budget killer — it's the human review loop that follows. Someone generates a deck, decides it's 70% right, then re-prompts three times to fix slides. That's 4x the token cost of one clean generation, and it's invisible in most usage dashboards. The fix isn't fewer AI calls, it's better output evaluation at step one. We've been building tooling around exactly that evaluation gap — rough writeup at if you're curious how other dev teams are approaching it.
Oof you hit him with a hard r
rough writeup at if you're curious how other dev teams are approaching it.
Ah thank you, I will read " " and tell my peers and colleagues how we're closing the evaluation gap.
The fix isn't to write your own five sentence response, it's to let an LLM write your response for you and post without any proofreading.
Sorry bro, but ai budget should come from the salary
No, from yours
Exactly
Aren't you always out posing as a leftist? And now you're saying workers should have to pay for the tooling that their employers force them to use?
You're no friend of the working class.
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