If it’s anything like AWS there’s hundreds of people making bespoke software factory setups, enhanced interfaces for ai tools, spinning up 10 parallel review agents with the best model available, etc because the budget is basically unlimited.

Microsoft is not a frontier AI shop at all. They just resell others' models. They don't have anything of their own worth mentioning. They missed the boat and tried to acquire OpenAI and failed, and now they pivoted their strategy to be a model-agnostic middleman.

And meta is only arguably so. Not really in the same league as OpenAI and Anthropic. More second tier like Google and xAi. (and of those Google is pretty close to the top two at times)

Meanwhile https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1wh0qxq/google_fi...

I dunno, it could be about money, too. $100,000 budget per employee, per month. Why were they willing to spend that much on AI usage? I hope said employees also make that much in salary.

I think if you talk to LLMs and give feedback or openly say what works and what doesn't, you are essentially solving a captcha and produce accurate training data, while you pay for the token spend. I'd be a bit nervous with this lol.

Just one unsanitized input and you leak info. Or one hidden character and code may or may not belong to you anymore. Its very odd on many levels

Microsoft?

Dogfooding their own model ls and not letting their competitors use their data to train their.

I wonder why they allow it at all.

Like its a no brainer to force your employees to use your own models, then RL train them to be better.

all of the above. plus less likely to be ripped off by competitor. (yes I know they have all been ripping off the general public)

if AI never happened there's like zero chance I would've ever used or noticed the usage of the word "dogfooding" lmao i hate this timeline

I'm curious if they have any data showing whether it benefits productivity. I get by on the free tier of ChatGPT, and do 100% of the coding myself. It has never been a bottleneck, and I like to keep my skills sharp. AI helps in analyzing problems, getting quick answers to technical queries, reviewing code, etc. But running my own business I'm incredibly careful about expenses.

Just a cool million+ annual expense per headcount.

Microsoft bloat really knows no bounds.

That's pretty stupid. Most people who are incurring significant costs are just tokenmaxxing rather than being efficient with usage. You can get 99% of jobs and work done with Haiku/Luna in a collaberating working enviroment.

I feel like people who are later to the AI game just like to "oneshot" and sink a bunch of usage into generating garbage

That's funny. In a meeting with my manager recently, they specifically called me out for not spending enough money on tokens. It's not like I didn't use it, just apparently not enough, and apparently on too low a setting.

Since then I've had fable cranked up to 11 for even the most trivial of tasks.

I know plenty of people working at very well known and very large companies who's CEOs were boasting about "not hiring anyone anymore", "all the code will be generated in 3 months", etc. they all went from "unlimited budget per dev" + public dashboard with ranking to flex how much credits everyone was burning to hard caps at $500-$1000/month/employee real fast. Some are even not allowing their devs to use the more expensive models

You realise the subject here is Meta, which is all in on this stuff? Of course they are going to use Muse Spark over Claude.

>Great Depression style collapse and all the current AI companies go bankrupt.

Oh this is just a 33 day old doomer account.

Do you know the details of the Claude Code plan you and your company are using (if not part of some enterprise deal)? Does your individual capacity out run something like Claude Max 20x ($200/mo)?

taking away sounds insane, we had basically unlimited tokens (inference bought from aws) and they moved us back to the $100 sub to save money

$200 a month is too expensive yet they employ human developers?

My company (me, I'm self employed) did so as well.

Since this summer coding on Opencode Go + Codex for a total 28$/month gives me more intelligence and token than 400$ did in may.

Also, SOTA models are increasingly useless for anything even barely tangential to security work.

We're just getting put on a budget.

Our velocity is twice as high as it was before Claude, so I doubt that we'll ever go back, but I could see efficiency being a priority.

The reckoning started years ago when we did the equivalent to token maxxing hiring coders for everything to crank LOC

Software is inherently a physics problem not all the job titles and specializations made up the last 20 years as dev job salaries kept attracting people

That was all illusory social construct to prop up jobs

Still a whole lot of that in tech but it's all at the top of the org now. Leadership sensory experience and thus innate habit to forecast future been programmed by years of yes men they refuse to accept the jig is up for them too

Sensory memory of being a useless figurehead fosters a lot of existential dread in priests, politicians, and the like. Completely aware their day to day effort is insufficient to sustain them they know how co-dependent they are. They'll dig in harder.

See Chris Matthews flame out shrieking about socialist execution squads. Dude seriously thought everyone wants to hang him from a lamp post. The reality is people just want a sense of control back and not have their perception dragged along by Chris Matthews.

The reckoning will be throwing out all external help, then reducing team sizes.

My thoughts were the reckoning would come when Infra teams started offloading AWS usage to LLMs and ended up token maxing and deploy maxing.

which is quite sad because opus 5.5 is really good. i say this as an anthropic hater. i wish I could move away to other models like 6.1 sol or deepseek or whatever, but they just all lack something. i _trust_ opus 5.5

i hope other labs catch up, especially chinese labs.

I mean, we’re not far from a situation where instead of how many story points you completed per sprint the metric to optimize is going to be what was your efficiency? How many story points did you complete while minimizing your token usage. In fact, that’s a pretty good idea. I’m going try and implement it at work with some sort of complexity normalization function

Good luck to the accountant that tries to tell leadership to slash AI usage.

I'm sure investors will love it.

Now we're starting to see real impact from AI, people are learning how to use it, and OpenAI cut prices by no less than 60% like a week ago.

You think now is the time they're going to cut the spend?

That was 2025. In 2025 a quarter of their revenue came from two customers, and those customers were GitHub Copilot and Cursor.

In 2026 their revenue has gone up by a factor of more than 10x, and they no longer have just two whale customers.

I heard a rumor recently that customers spending less than $100m/year aren't even considered their "top tier" now.

They're limiting it to $10,000 per employee per month.

Meta was #1 by far

What do you mean, "if true"?

Doesnt matter if Microsoft and meta are pushing employees towards their own models today. What matters is that it's the economically sensible direction, and so it will happen if it's not today.

There is a conspiracy theory that the tokenmaxxing period was anthropic/openai ipo play. They do the tokenmaxxing to revenuemaxxing first, then time the ipo window to show they had the the huge growth to justify their price tag.

However Elon was able to ipo before them which took a lot liquidity of the market. Their financials are exposed. The market condition and sentiment now is in the gutter. It would be very interesting to see how these would pan out

Considering that’s a healthy portion of a salary for an additional employee per person, the fact they’re slashing spending sure makes it look like AI wasn’t even a 2x multiplier at minimum.

It’s mostly from people using their personal accounts to run LLM services that serve a larger team or organization. At least at Microsoft, it’s still impressively hard to get access to an LLM for service usage with high enough rate limits to be useful, making running services on dev boxes much more appealing (despite the countless drawbacks that few people seem to care about around security, compliance, reliability, etc).

Right! it seems obvious why: Both these companies want to dogfood their own coding models and stop paying competition.

You can also read this as diminishing returns / AI isn't good enough, etc, but the simplest explanation is that they don't want to send money to Anthropic.

But Microsoft and Meta are not blocking competitor tools for internal use, they're merely trying to reduce costs and divert a fraction of use to their own technologies. Microsoft and Meta are both still spending nine figures a year on Claude, and the article does not state or imply they're even considering a complete halt.

Microsoft has full and unlimited access to OpenAI models. That was some agreement when they invested originally.

So nobody except AI labs is allowed to do "data governance"?

I feel like "good enough" was reached around Opus 4.6 - 4.8. All I wanted after that is improved speed, continued tweaks to the tooling to get the most out of it and quality of life features added.

Wouldn't mind if people at Microsoft actually dogfed themselves Windows. It's as if the designers and PMs all use a Mac and screw up everything.

Windows 11 shipped with a broken task bar, couldn't even ungroup items. No power users was ever involved in this.

What does it even mean to use "Copilot" these days?

I use the Github Copilot app at work but it's really just a tool that gives models access to our Github repos and my local clones of them, and it's been super helpful to just tell it to reference other repos for patterns or integrations or whatever, get agents and an orchestrator to look at multiple repos to make a change across several projects and then implement them, etc.

And yeah you can use a selection of whatever model, I was using Opus 4.6 for a while, now I'm on GPT-6 Sol. It's been a very good experience.

There's no Copilot in Ba Sing Se

Gamedevs are still around.

Well, it's bad, but at least it's not Linux or MacOS, so there's some silver lining.

Gets my work done... I know there are better tools but at the end of the day I get my paycheck

> Windows, Teams and Copilot

"Fine. Please no. I'm out..." in that order

> Peeps can check their usage which has a good breakdown

Must be nice. At Sony we use Copilot (as an MS enterprise customer) and restrictions to token usage circa June have resulted in a hunger games of who-can-use-them-all-first, with the pool usually drying up by the 10th day of each month.

As for usage breakdown: we got a manually-published table most days just showing per-user token usage, until eventually we were told even that was somehow too difficult to provide.

Between that and learning how much the whole of Sony Corporate Group spends on Copilot (spoiler: it's hilariously little), I've sort of run out of disbelief.

> Importantly, Anthropic models are more expensive (not even talking about Fable here as it is a special case) as seen in usage metrics.

Not sure where you see that. The API prices of Opus are cheaper than Astra and there was a study suggesting that the Anthropic abos are offering more bang for the buck:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49975345

I know the Azure portal hasn't gotten any better

OTOH "$105 million to Claude Code over a 28-day timeframe"

$1.4B/year is not a small number, even at Meta's scale, when it's money going to a competitor

From what I could see these numbers would usually be hit by people doing vast amounts of analysis over files, they would usually rock up tokens very fast. Then you combine this with the selection of Opus models which are much more expensive internally than GPT ones and the limit gets reached quite quickly.

That's what you got from 200$ claude sub.

isn't it cheap till if you allow them to use your data?

You should read Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

There are people out there building AI building orchestrators for orchestrators for orchestrators for agents. The author of that blog post later claimed to be spending the equivalent of $122k/month on tokens (by rotating their usage between 21 accounts).

As far as I can tell, the only thing that this level of spend has produced so far is an indie 2D RPG video game.

If you’re a large company you gotta pay API rates basically. Team plans exclude a lot of governance/IdP stuff and have a cap on seats too.

They almost certainly pay for tokens, which is absurdly expensive

Team plan has a seat limit.

It doesn't say they're cutting back on OpenAI usage.

To me this seems mostly related to the way Anthropic showed the level at which they monitor sessions, plus wanting to limit how much training data they're directly feeding into a company that competes with their own products/investments.

Microsoft is like $100bn deep into OpenAI.

Who's ahead, again? Do they have a moat, or just a nice field?

Microsoft is only limiting employees to $10k a month, down from $100k a month. :)

There is a perceived opportunity cost from someone using a lower-tier model on their task. What if the better model did a "better" job? what if my trials and tribulations are due to model quality?

If you are used to talking to opus5.5 medium, going to GPT6.1 luna low will feel like a step down. Why would any employee take the (personal) risk?

In the video realm, it was everyone's nephew with a 5D could shoot this for $500 when getting a $20k+ quote to shoot something

Should they pay for their pipelines too?

After all, they should know how to compile their software. Any automation of that process is cheating their employer.

The forklift should just be paid for by the employee. After all they should be strong enough to do work without one.

You're opening yourself up to data right and privacy risks with that. My company demands that I use their enterprise account because they can claim full ownership of all produced output and have full logs of every interaction.

I think that gets legally murky, if the employee is the one who pays for the tool.

Sure. Should I also pay rent for my desk at the office?

I don't understand your logic, why would an employee pay for a tool their employer wants them to use?

I am fine with that if I can keep the time saved for my personal use.

I could still do my job by typing all code into notepad, but companies don't charge employees for their IDE usage for a reason.

If my employer is not forcing me to use a tool and gives me freedom, I'll be perfectly OK to use my own tools which I bought with my own money.

If my employer is putting scoreboards to see and champion who uses a tool which costs money to use, they shall pay for the tool.

Sorry, I'm not a ladder climber, yet I'm not mindless enough to bankrupt myself.

Nah. Work provides the tools.

An LLM is not too dissimilar to a Work Laptop or an IDE license.

I’d love it if I could bring my own computer to do my work, rather than be stuck with garbage hardware because of an enterprise agreement.

Employer pays tools used for work. Whether they are used to speed up work or to make it possible.

"employees should foot the bill for tools that directly benefit their billion dollar employers"

As someone who does have to pay for my own AI tools (if I didn't use OpenCode's free models), I agree.

In California this would mean the employee would own the IP -- or at least it would be murky -- and companies and lawyers don't like murky.