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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance. We're always hearing that AI is going to take our jobs, but the word now is, and this is good news for you, it might be too expensive for companies to keep using that. Newstalk's tech correspondent, Jess Kelly, is with us. How are you, Jess? Hey, Jono, how are you? I'm very well.
Now, this is good news because it has been a procession of misery saying AI is going to replace everybody and we're all going to end up on the scrap heap. But the reality is dawning now that if you want to use these large language models and you want to use more than the basic, you have to put your hand in your pocket.
Chapter 2: What is the main concern about AI's impact on jobs?
You have to put your hand in your pocket. And if there is going to be anything that will teach you that lesson, it is that you look at the big tech companies and see that they are facing ridiculous bills for using AI. Is that an official word?
It is, yeah.
I got it from a press briefing. I got it from a press briefing. Thank you so much. I have been looking at what's going on with some of the big tech companies. So we know the big players in this market. You've got Microsoft with Copilot, Google with Gemini, Meta are doing their Lama AI and a few other AI projects as well.
You've got OpenAI, Chachapiti, there's a whole host of these players in town. And a lot of the biggest tech brands, most valuable tech companies in the world have not only been encouraging companies, their staff to utilise AI, but in fact, putting metrics in place to measure how much they're using AI.
And rather than, you know, if you work in a call centre, you might have a number of calls to get through in a day and so on. That's measured in terms of your performance. The tech companies have been using certain tools to measure how often, how many tokens they are utilising in terms of various AI platforms. And what they found is employees are now using the AI for every single thing.
To borrow a phrase of a current friend of ours, back up the truck. What's a token?
So a token is, this is really interesting, right? When you utilize one of any of those platforms that I just mentioned a second ago, it doesn't read the words, it reads the content as tokens. So say you put in a hundred word query into any of these platforms, that equates to around 130 tokens.
That's just sort of the digital currency that they utilize in terms of the processing and the programming of these platforms. So 130 tokens equals 100 words. The platform then ingests and processes and does its AI thing with that content, and then it spits out an answer to you.
And what's really interesting is the answer can use three to five times more tokens as it gives you the response, because again, it's not doing words, it's doing tokens. That's bananas.
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Chapter 3: How much do big tech companies spend on AI?
You don't need to do the boring admin or the whatever tasks that you have to do. Rather than that approach, they were told, you must use this. You must hit a certain quota of tokens per month. That then is forcing them to do it for everything. Should I make a cup of tea? ChatGPT comes back with it. That's a great question. There's many benefits to having a cup of tea. That's all utilizing tokens.
And it's funny because this is almost, although it's ticking the box in terms of the token use, It's also seen, in my eyes anyway, as a bit of a revolt from the tech workers who were saying, utilise this technology and in six months' time it could be replacing you. Like, look at what happens to Meta in the last little while. They are laying off thousands of people.
Now, there is talk about AI washing. Are they using the AI as an excuse just to get rid of people because the AI is not allowed?
I read a very good piece last week that they all over-hired massively during COVID-19. Yeah. And they kind of went, oh, we've too many people now. And we're just going to say, well, AI is replacing them. And in reality, they're just correcting their own mistake. And it doesn't reflect the rest of the world as we all carry about our business.
Well, there's an element of that. But also, don't forget... Like when Elon Musk took over X a number of years ago now, that was in October. That November, Meta laid off people for the first time in its history. And the reason given at that time was over hiring during the pandemic. And this was a correction. Since then, we've had multiple rounds of layoff. And I completely agree.
And we spoke about it on Tech Talk last Saturday. There is an element of AI washing here for sure. But at the same time, they need to get their story straight. I do think Meta in particular, and a lot of these big tech companies are course correcting, not only because of the pandemic, but because of the prevalence and the emergence of AI.
They now need to go from being a tech company to an AI company. And that is going to lead to casualties. So I agree with you in that sense that This isn't a signaler for every other industry and every other sector. Tech has always been its own little ecosystem.
What's happening at the moment is concerning, but I have every ounce of empathy for people working in the tech sector because I left college in 2010 and when I was chatting to people, people were saying to me, oh, you should have done programming. Programming is the future. If you don't do programming, you're going to be unemployed in a few years.
Now it's all the programmers who are being let go because AI can write code in a matter of seconds.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of 'tokens' in AI usage?
100%. It's capitalism reaching reality, I think, and that's what's going to cause the bubble to burst eventually.