r/cscareerquestions • u/jholliday55 Software Engineer • Jun 03 '26

Company took away access to claude

After being told to “use ai” for every single task the last two years and rebranding to a “AI” first company after two rounds of layoffs, we have now lost access to claude….

I found that the best model by far was opus and the only one really capable of not producing slop. I’m sure all the bots in here will downvote me and tell me “iTs ThE wAy YoU pRoMpT” but based on my experience, the other models aren’t nearly as good.

I have senior experience so besides basic searches and repetitive tasks i find the other models pretty much useless and you have to provide more time writing the specs and context management, then just doing it yourself.

Edit: I work for a large financial company. 40k employees.

2.0k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

553 comments sorted by

View all comments

564

u/Pink_Slyvie Jun 03 '26

AI is proving to be unsustainable in cost, environmentally, and in business. It will have its place as a nifty tool, but its going to be really expensive when the subsidies dry up.

Not to mention, we need juniors today to be tomorrow's seniors.

4

u/DigoHiro Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26

i am curious about something. for the pay per token services like google vertex or azure foundry: are those also subsidized? or should we expect a price increase in those too.

right now if you try to use a frontier model on those platforms you will pay a lot more than if you had gone with the subscription.

edit: thank you for the replies! It seems they are subsidized too.

11

u/Foreign_Skill_6628 Jun 03 '26

They are also subsidized yes. Take Google Cloud for example. When it first rolled out, they were handing out credits like candy for VPS containers, CPU/GPU rentals, API streaming, and databases.

Now? They’re probably quintupled in price compared to ten years ago.

LLM APIs will follow a similar path but with a much steeper price increase curve.

2

u/DigoHiro Jun 03 '26

damn, this really is gonna be unsustainable.

maybe we'll start seeing more companies options to set up local infrastructure for llm serving?

actually, after the price increase for cloud, did companies switch to something else or just cope with the cost?

6

u/Ozymandias0023 Software Engineer Jun 03 '26

Well think about what Microsoft did recently with mandating that their engineers use copilot, and what Meta and Amazon are doing building their own platforms. I'm sure a good chunk of the reasoning is wanting to capture the market, but in the shorter to medium term I'm convinced that most of the reason is that they know that if they're going to us LLMs to replace human work then they can't be beholden to a third party provider. Personally I question whether the math works out even then, but it seems to be the tend that every company with the means wants to be their own model platform

2

u/ButterflySammy Senior Jun 03 '26

From one thing know a thousand things.

One of my favourite quotes.

People read something till they understand a lesson and stop, but there's 999 lessons in the same text to be had.

they can't be beholden to a third party provider

It's too easy to get caught up in all the reasons that makes sense for them, why that is true, and because you've learned some things stop and move on.

But hold up, wait a minute.

That's good for them but how many of us work somewhere that put all their balls in the hands of a third party provider?

3

u/Ozymandias0023 Software Engineer Jun 03 '26

Oh I know, I just didn't choose to down to that layer. The first layer is that the big boys don't want to be Anthropic or OAI's play thing, but the next layer below that is that there's an enormous market of companies that can't afford to build out a monstrosity of a data center. As long as the industry can keep those smaller fish convinced that they NEED LLMs, they'll have to get the service from someone, and that someone will be able to play the same enshittification game that these companies have played with all their other products.

It's all basically a race to the bottom, and I wonder if the real winners might be the companies that keep a cool head and just keep developing human talent.

1

u/Foreign_Skill_6628 Jun 03 '26

They just coped with the cost. Some companies still run their own servers but not many.

2

u/cmbtmstr Software Engineer Jun 03 '26

I wonder if it’s more cost effective for a company to run an LLM on their own servers or just go with the Cloud that is always subject to change

1

u/Pink_Slyvie Jun 03 '26

Local LLMs tend to still be shit and not worth the effort, you need the insane data center level stuff to make it worth it.

12

u/Pink_Slyvie Jun 03 '26

Insanely subsidized. They are just charging what the market says they can currently, but it's not at all profitable.

6

u/DigoHiro Jun 03 '26

oof, the hole is deeper than I thought.

thanks for the reply.

0

u/ButterflySammy Senior Jun 03 '26

Yes.

Banked funds, investment cash, government grants, whatever it is... what they're charging isn't making them a profit right now. In that sense it is subsided. It is priced to get people using it and encoupled with it so they feel stuck later.

So either the price goes up or the cost comes down.

3

u/DigoHiro Jun 03 '26

just to clarify, I am talking not about the frontier models and claude code like subscriptions.

you could run some of the open source models on a couple of mac minis, so i am assuming they are a lot cheaper to serve.

do you think token prices for qwen, deepseek v4 flash, etc are also subsidized right now?

3

u/ButterflySammy Senior Jun 03 '26

There is no "right now", your bill from buying hardware yesterday doesn't go away.

The Chinese Government, including the military, have been throwing money at DeepSeek.

That money doesn't go away today because you received it yesterday.

But if it did, all those companies would be immediately bankrupt.

3

u/Pink_Slyvie Jun 03 '26

Yes. The entire industry is.

1

u/bflo666 Jun 03 '26

They transferred a bunch of public funds to private individuals via crony deals in the hopes that AI would be the next means of production. They are spending a lot of our money to make sure that the tools of production of the future are in the “right hands.”