amusing side note:

Was in a meeting reviewing a potential new product, it was going well until they showed us that they had added AI to it (of course they have). It was pretty obviously just shoehorned in, and one part of that obviousness was that they had a column that showed how many tokens it took to make each query.

I asked who is paying for the tokens, they said its included in the license. I said, so is there a budget or is it all you can eat. they said good question they didnt know and would get back to me. I said the reason i asked was just one query there had a 250k token burn on it. and it was a fairly simple query about one device.

then, one of the execs on their side was heard saying out loud "Why are we even showing this to the customers?"

it have us quite a chuckle. But lesson learned... the cost of adding AI to anything isnt really being accounted for let alone the true cost of actually running the AI.

all things AI are going to get more expensive. even if you dont want the AI aspect.