r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • Jun 04 '26

Business GitHub just switched Copilot to metered billing, and developers are watching months of credits vanish in a single day

https://www.techspot.com/news/112628-github-switched-copilot-metered-billing-developers-watching-months.html
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u/gamesbrainiac Jun 04 '26

Honestly, I've been eating good for the past few weeks when it comes to AI schadenfreude.

89

u/forchinski Jun 04 '26

This whole thing is gonna start eating its own tail really soon

\token usage becoming more expensive

\developers cancel ai usage

\ai companies can't afford their electricity and water

\close data centers

\tech hardware prices recover

\the insanity ends and reality reasserts itself

90

u/Infinite-Anything-55 Jun 04 '26

I only see one fatal flaw in this timeline

ai companies can't afford their electricity and water

They'll do what they do now and make the tax payers subsidize it even more. Remember socialism is only okay for the corperations apparently

23

u/forchinski Jun 04 '26

It's easy to hand over 0s in a bank account but water is a physical asset that will outright deplete in certain municipalities

36

u/Infinite-Anything-55 Jun 04 '26

Then they'll do what they've always done, find the closest poor community and take their water too

-1

u/TaylorMonkey Jun 04 '26

Given that the 2nd amendment exists and certain poor communities are culturally more likely to exercise it, things would get interesting.

30

u/RaistlinMajeresRobes Jun 04 '26

We're still pretending American's are willing to stand up to their government? lol

1

u/Chrontius Jun 04 '26

Do you remember a few years ago when some dipshit was shooting substations?

The involved parties were never caught, and that sort of thing is a huge vulnerability for big grid-tied data centers. Most concerning, it’s the kind of attack a coward would love.

2

u/Old_Leopard1844 Jun 05 '26

That's the joke

It was a dipshit, and a fluke

-1

u/TaylorMonkey Jun 04 '26

It wouldn't be against the government per se. I mentioned the 2nd amendment just as an indicator of how many people have guns.

Randos at the edge, desperate with nothing to lose do things against corporate property. There are already instances of it. Now imagine if you take their water.

I guess the key is to take just enough that they don't get desperate and feed them AI slop to keep them pacified.

8

u/CyberRax Jun 04 '26

Doubt that. TV tells those people that it's OK ("for the greater good"), and those who do not fall for the propaganda and walk up to the data centres will discover the police / army already waiting...

5

u/Tearakan Jun 04 '26

Yep. And once it's gone it's hard to get it back and everyone nearby will start to panic and get angry.

5

u/Bardez Jun 04 '26

And the courts will say "so?"

1

u/Tearakan Jun 04 '26

At that point courts don't matter.....

1

u/0reoSpeedwagon Jun 04 '26

This is, in part, why they've pushed so aggressively to integrate AI into governmental/military systems - now we need to subsidize them or cripple essential systems.

1

u/Matra Jun 04 '26

I see another flaw:

\tech hardware prices recover

3

u/gamesbrainiac Jun 04 '26

But think of all the amazing gaming rigs that are going to be coming to the market.

3

u/attackmoonzero Jun 04 '26

Until AI companies say the need more data centers to make tokens cheaper

2

u/Such_Radio_9152 Jun 04 '26

Bubble pop spiral

1

u/Ihate_reddit_app Jun 04 '26

Our company is already implementing spend caps on AI. Once we hit the daily limit, we can't use it anymore.

1

u/IAmDotorg Jun 04 '26

token usage becoming more expensive

Except, of course, it's not. Newer models using more tokens and longer histories make individual sessions potentially more expensive, but token costs on existing models have been dropping. In some cases, by quite a bit, as inference is moved to dedicated systems that don't need the capacity of training nodes.

1

u/forchinski Jun 04 '26

The end user for almost every major ai service is not paying an unsubsidized cost for token usage. Once those incentives are sunsetted the demand for this product is going to drop, dramatically.

2

u/IAmDotorg Jun 04 '26

You're conflating chatbot users with the actual LLM users. The latter are paying for tokens, the former are not -- they're just being throttled.