To control costs, Apple reduces its employees' use of artificial intelligence
The daily allowance for the company's engineers goes from $300 to $200 for their use of AI. In the background, the soaring costs of technology, from that of chips to that of energy.
Our time seemed to promise the massive replacement of employees by artificial intelligence. Although this time may come, some companies are now forced to ration AI. To control its costs, the tech giant Apple has reduced the amount its employees can devote to artificial intelligence.
Engineers at the world's most valuable company will see their daily AI spending limit drop from $300 to $200, while a further reduction to $100 is already being considered. For non-engineering employees, it could drop to $25 a day, compared to $100 currently. The AI bill is directly linked to the consumption of tokens, the unit that measures the use of the technology.
Apple therefore intends to reduce the volume, in contrast to “tokenmaxxing”, very popular at the start of the year, which encouraged employees to use AI as much as possible to find productivity gains. Meta, Microsoft, Uber, Tesla... But AI now costs too much to support this frenetic practice, between the soaring prices of GPU chips, essential to its operation, and the ever-increasing energy consumption of the latest generation models. Apple is not the first company to ration it internally.
Thus, the consulting firm Accenture has capped certain expenses of its employees at 29 euros per month, while Uber and Tesla have reduced their budget, and Microsoft and Meta have reduced their use of Claude, a model designed by Anthropic. Others, like the British neobank Revolut, the United Kingdom's first start-up, have even moved from the latest generation models to less expensive Chinese models. This is one of the first decisions of John Ternus, who succeeded Tim Cook as head of Apple in September.
This comes as doubt grows over the real profitability of the AI sector, which, at the risk of fueling fears of a financial bubble, has been attracting colossal investments for months. Even letting engineers spend the equivalent of half their annual salary in tokens, as Nvidia boss Jensen Huang suggests? Apple is still a long way from that.
Machine-translated from French
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- Le Figaro5 Nov, 19:39
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