Ian Tonge

#Digital #entrepreneur into #socialmediamarketing, film and video, stand up comedy and the occasional English cooked breakfast.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Microsoft just banned its own engineers from using AI.

The tool was literally costing MORE than the humans it was supposed to replace.

They lied to you about AI adoption and now the whole narrative is blowing up:

Microsoft gave thousands of engineers access to Claude Code six months ago and encouraged them to use it.

Engineers loved it and adoption exploded. But then the invoices arrived.

Token-based pricing means every query, every code review, every debugging session costs money. At scale across 100,000 engineers, the numbers became so large that Microsoft issued an internal order to cancel nearly all Claude Code licenses by end of June and force everyone onto their own cheaper tool instead.

The company that invested $5 billion in Anthropic just told its own people to stop using Anthropic's product because it costs too much.

Uber's story is even worse...

Their CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information that the budget he planned for the full year was "blown away already" by April.

Uber had rolled out Claude Code in December 2025. By March, 84% of their 5,000 engineers were using it with 70% of all committed code coming from AI systems.

Heavy users were burning $500 to $2,000 per month each. Naga himself spent $1,200 in a single two-hour demo session.

The company had even built internal leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used. They literally gamified the spending and then ran out of money.

Now look at what Nvidia's own VP of applied deep learning Bryan Catanzaro said to Axios last month. Direct quote:

"For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees."

This is a VP at the company that SELLS the chips saying that using AI is more expensive than paying humans.

Think about what this means for the entire AI narrative.

Every CEO on every earnings call for the past two years has said the same thing:

AI will make us more efficient, reduce headcount, and cut costs.

The stock market rewarded every company that said it.

Fired workers, stock goes up. Announced AI adoption, stock goes up.

But the actual companies deploying AI at scale are discovering the math doesn't work. The MORE employees use AI, the HIGHER the bill.

Goldman Sachs forecasts a 24x increase in token consumption by 2030 as companies adopt AI agents. Gartner just published a report showing that even though individual token prices will drop 90% by 2030, total enterprise AI costs will go UP because agents consume exponentially more tokens per task than basic tools.

Meta built an internal dashboard called "Claudeonomics" to track which employees use the most AI. Amazon started pushing engineers to "tokenmaxx," their internal term for consuming as many AI tokens as possible.

Both companies are spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure this year alone.

And Microsoft, the company that bet its entire future on AI, just told 100,000 engineers to stop using the tool they liked best because the per-token bills got out of control.

The companies building AI are telling investors it saves money. The companies using AI are finding out it costs more than the humans it was supposed to replace. And even the company that makes the chips just admitted it through its own VP.

This is the gap nobody on Wall Street is pricing in.

$725 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year across Big Tech. And the first companies to actually deploy these tools at scale are already pulling back because the economics don't work.

What do you think?

[Ian Tonge @IanRTonge]

@_adishj MOSAIC

[Ian Tonge @IanRTonge]

AI + yacht rock = magic ⚓️🎶
“Sailing Away (from the Algorithm)” by Sunset Mirages is what happens when Nano Banana meets 70s soft rock and takes it way too seriously (in the best way).
Watch till the end. Trust me. 🎥 by @EricKerArt
#AI #yachtrock #generativeart #SunsetMirages

[Ian Tonge @IanRTonge]

Me: "I have nothing to hide."
Also me: uses @WindscribeCom to hide IP, encrypt traffic, and disappear like a digital ninja
🕵️‍♂️🍜 Trust issues? No. Just VPN issues.

[brett goldstein @thatguybg]

Sora's video quality seems impossible so I dug into how it works under the hood

it uses both diffusion (starting with noise, refining towards a desired video) and transformer architectures (handling sequential video frames)

read on 🧵

[Ian Tonge @IanRTonge]

Further adventures in #AI: This is fun. An AI #deepfake debate between @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS , guided by user contributions. However, seems to make Trump more intelligent than real life? Enjoy on Twitch:
https://t.co/sx1XKnEfKv

[Ian Tonge @IanRTonge]

Almuerzo and the super-sandwiches of Valencia https://t.co/27ia7iaKoO via @bbc_travel

[Ian Tonge @IanRTonge]

@Roolockwood Bin Day!

[Hasan Toor @hasantoxr]

ChatGPT's days may be numbered.

Google dropped a massive upgrade to Google Bard.

Here are 10 new features they unveiled that can take on ChatGPT:

[Ian Tonge @IanRTonge]

Exciting news that CEO of @Argonon, @JamesBurstall's new book #TheFlexibleMethod finally dropped here in #Valencia. Thrilled that #IRTMedia was appointed to support the #digitalmarketing effort for the book's UK launch - now a No 1 bestseller on #Amazon
https://t.co/U07ZGir9lH

[Vipin @SocialWithAI]

Websites for Creating Contracts with Clients 🚀

• Shake
https://t.co/bkm3ZrFS8a

• Docracy
https://t.co/IlaKQ8ebjl

• Rocket Lawyer
https://t.co/D244cQkDDU

• PandaDoc
https://t.co/rP3HxZJroy

• HelloSign
https://t.co/3zyxq9mrBq

• Docsketch
https://t.co/1Fd4FK8O5x

Save!!

[Ian Tonge @IanRTonge]

@SimplyRedHQ https://t.co/SKXDbXkDUw

[Jeff Bullas @jeffbullas]

Why Email Is Essential to Your New Omnichannel Marketing Strategy #omnichannel #digital https://t.co/L6EDBBGmwE

[Darrall Macqueen @darrallmacqueen]

Heartfelt best wishes to all the @BAFTA Kids’ Award nominees ahead of Sunday’s ceremony.
Can’t wait for a #lovelylittlefarm reunion and good luck to our Directors, Jack Jameson and Matt René.
#BAFTAcyp

[Kim Garst @kimgarst]

3 Killer Tips to Dominate Facebook's News Feed with Video https://t.co/4jk9oNavKj

[Darrall Macqueen @darrallmacqueen]

⚡️Welcome to our brand new Twitter channel for all the latest news about leading UK production company Darrall Macqueen that creates high-end #TV that families love! https://t.co/uL9duqSbQ2

[Mashable @mashable]

Will it be chaos? We'll find out, we guess. https://t.co/uEDE35X3UA

[Mashable @mashable]

Instagram is dropping a "new" feature. https://t.co/mxvhLjPPzq

[Samuel (Sam) Pavin @SamPavin]

According to HubSpot, marketers now say that social media is the leading channel for marketing.

44% of marketers said that social media was the top marketing channel for 2022.

[The Independent @Independent]

🚨BREAKING: Facebook has completely overhauled how you use it with unexpected redesign https://t.co/Mg3RsfjRb7