Startups Brag They Spend More Money on AI Than Human Employees (opens in new tab)

AI coding startup CEOs writing LinkedIn posts trying to normalize huge spending on AI tools? Nothing surprising here.

> Amos Bar-Joseph, the CEO of Swan AI, a coding agent startup, wrote in a viral LinkedIn post recently

I'm spending more than my salary on AI, about $16k last month.

Employees at most companies are bottlenecked on things other than code, like manual testing or waiting to compile.

Companies like Meta, mentioned in the article, have invested billions into solving these problems with distributed build/test farms and custom review infra.

I'm personally seeing this, because my role shifted from "write GPU test code" last year to "rearchitect our build and review processes" this year as this bottleneck becomes obvious.

It’s like a trucking company bragging about how much fuel they’re using.

"Spending more on AI than humans" tells you nothing about whether it works. Cost per-output is the metric and by that I've watched startups do worse than last year, just more expensively.

Feels like investor signal: "we're AI-forward, mark us up next round"

The example company is selling some AI thing. Feels very much like all the blockchain / crypto people using crypto.

The argument that AI guys are making about the coming mass unemployment goes like this: those companies that are spending on AI rather than humans may have a huge competitive advantage that allows them to take marketshare from human run companies and thus there's less and less demand for human labor.

But, how many businesses/sectors of the economy actually need to compete for marketshare? we assume it's nearly all of them. if that were the case, we'd see AI taking over much quicker.

Tokens have replaced LOC as the dumb productivity metric of choice.

Talking points like this occur when they've shipped nothing and have nothing to show for all the investment.

Cloud computing versus on-prem is often about OpEx versus CapEx.

Is the reported behaviour an example of OpEx/CapEx but with humans?

Are they running their own models or just channeling money to anthropic or google? (answer is unfortunately the latter)

> Our goal is $10M ARR

> Our AI bill just hit $113k in a single month

I would wait until this is sustainable before bragging, but I think I can't expect much of the crayon eaters that post things on LinkedIn.

Reminds me of the Railway CEO bragging that they're spending $300,000 / month on Claude [0], yet their service is getting worse and they're clearly vibe-coding to the point that their SOC2/HIPAA compliance is coming into question. For example they had an issue last month where a breaking change was pushed by a single engineer without any oversight [1].

How many humans could you pay for $300,000 a month and not have quality & reliability degrade like this?

0: https://xcancel.com/JustJake/status/2030063630709096483#m

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581721

We are at this stage in the hype cycle

https://blogs.uca.edu/sherring2/2024/08/02/the-most-expensiv...

i particularly like the idea that "a GTM team" is an organic component of running a business which can be impersonated by a grip of agents, as opposed to a convention that developed as a result of needing to pay a bunch of humans too much money to strategically choose to fuck over customers or sellers in the course of handling each unpredictable product adoption development, lest a poor poor pitiful technostructure be ripped apart by making too little, or too much, money. why don't all these tokenmaxxing people focus on making something BETTER

As someone who was deeply immersed in the crypto / NFT twitter scene in 2021 (yes I was an idiot, moving on…) it bears an uncanny resemblance to the current behavior of AI CEOs and speculators.

You kind of had to be there to understand. When you’re immersed in that stuff, the rational part of your brain takes a backseat, and the primitive social / visual parts start to run the show. You start to develop incredibly warped perceptions of value entirely driven by the predominant narrative and most importantly, price action. When you see prices go parabolic, you start to interpret that as confirmation of the narrative. This generates a positive feedback loop that can lead to unbelievable and insane valuations. And by extension equally insane narratives.

What makes it even more uncanny is that a lot of the same actors (tech CEOs, VCs) are involved in this. Make no mistake - they understand how to leverage mania to their advantage. They go on long soliloquies about how game changing this or that asset is, and how anyone not buying in NOW is “NGMI” (not gonna make it).

This will not end well. I’ll never forget the incredibly insane financial decisions I made - it really felt like being under the influence of a drug.

Why would you brag about something that dystopian while also ensuring people know that you don't know how your product looks from the inside?

This is the worst flex ever, its like going in a vacation and posting about how expensive the flight ticket was.

They don't hate spending (other people's) money.

They just really, really fucking hate the labor force they view as little more than cattle.

Never outsource your core competency.

That reliance on third-party AI is a huge risk, just saying.

2046: The planetary AI brags it spends more natural resources on machines than it spends on humans.

2126: AI brags that it's reached 100% efficiency in Earth utilization after it's eliminated all organic life.