Maybe ‘Steal Underpants by Blowing a Fortune on AI Tokens’ Is, in Fact, Not a Good Business Plan

elseif has not written about this yet · Daring Fireball describes it this way

Joseph Cox, writing for 404 Media (paywalled, sans gift links, alas): Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing “soaring token spend,” according to the audio. [...] It also undercuts the narrative that superpowered engineers generating mountains of code are behind the AI boom. In many cases it is non-technical staff burning through tokens for non-specialized tasks. [...] At one point in the meeting, Kwak and Eduardo Salamanca de Diego, senior manager of product management at the company’s Center for Advanced AI, start presenting about what is described as “token ops.” Kwak says he knows people aren’t using slides these days, but he has some. As he appears to be preparing to present, Stuart Henderson, Accenture’s client group lead, interrupts. He jokes he hopes Kwak didn’t just convert a PDF into images and then into Markdown files. “I’m learning that’s one of the big token chewers,” Henderson says. “Turning PDFs into Markdown: is that right?” T