By now, it’s clear that the only way the tech industry can justify the cost of AI is if it replaces vast swaths of the human workforce with machines that run 24/7.
The bad news is that this situation has created a world-historic financial market that, by some metrics, is looking worse than the run-up to the Great Depression. The good news is that this future of an AI takeover is looking increasingly unlikely, at least at the industry’s current pace, a fact which is now dawning on some of the biggest rubes and dupes in the corporate world.
According to a new survey from “Big Four” accounting firm KPMG, a significant number of corporate executives are reeling from sticker shock over new usage-based AI pricing schemes. Though enterprises could once count on AI companies to subsidize the price of large language models via flat-rate contracts, that’s no longer a given, as the rising cost of computational power forces the entire tech sector into a defensive posture.
The KPMG report, initially flagged by the Register, surveyed 2,145 senior execs across 20 countries, finding that an astonishing 29 percent of them had no idea where the growing costs associated with AI were coming from.
