Brad Olson
speaker
45 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 29 May
Brad Olson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There's lots of queries that were happening at companies that were costing lots of tokens for these essentially useless or, you know, queries that could have been free.
I think in the beginning, companies were just wanting to encourage all their workers to use AI.
to try to think about how to do work and measure things that they could do better.
And that was kind of like phase one.
And now they're confronting the cost of widespread, uncontrolled experimentation and rethinking things that ended up being very costly.
As we know, something may start in a very well-meaning way, and then the incentives that exist can become kind of perverse.
And if employees hear, use AI at all costs, and we're going to grade you on your AI use, then all of a sudden, employees can be like, sure, I'll use AI as much as you want.
And then you're not really discerning between a good use and a bad use.
I spoke to a startup founder named Matan Grinberg.
He runs a company called Factory, which automates coding.
One of the companies he was consulting with, which he just said was a financial institution, had racked up huge amounts of charges from very simple queries like the weather.
It's not a great use of tokens to spend a lot of model energy and computing energy being like, what is AI?
You know, very basic queries like that.
Some of them have basically made certain advanced models and capabilities available only to a small subgroup.
So one example was Microsoft.
And to be clear, Microsoft said, we didn't do this because of cost.
They don't want to send a message to the market that, like, they're scrimping on AI.
So there was this group of employees that had access to a program called Claude Code.
And then they stop making that tool available because those employees have access to a Microsoft tool that does similar things.
That's the kind of steps I think companies are taking, trying to help employees be like, okay, you don't need to use Opus.
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