Despite spending $3.4 billion on research and development, the company has already exhausted its planned AI budget just months into 2026.
This, and the rest of the article, does does not seem to support that they spent 3.4B on AI. The text implies that the R&D budget for the entire company is 3.4 billion (which sounds vaguely reasonable given that market cap), and the portion of that which was earmarked for AI is already spent. I have no idea what the AI spend is there (although I assume it's not small), and the article doesn't provide any number either.
Those are extremely different things (unless there's evidence that 100% of R&D is spent on AI) and that headline seems to be intentionally misleading.
Based on my direct experience of similar budgets, you are exactly correct. AI coding tools don’t incur costs like this. AI costs are dominated by runtime and offline inference as part of business- and customer-facing workloads.
AI isn’t cheap, but what is especially not cheap is trying to get results that exceed ~80% in quality. Developers can tolerate gaps, customers won’t.
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This, and the rest of the article, does does not seem to support that they spent 3.4B on AI. The text implies that the R&D budget for the entire company is 3.4 billion (which sounds vaguely reasonable given that market cap), and the portion of that which was earmarked for AI is already spent. I have no idea what the AI spend is there (although I assume it's not small), and the article doesn't provide any number either.
Those are extremely different things (unless there's evidence that 100% of R&D is spent on AI) and that headline seems to be intentionally misleading.
Based on my direct experience of similar budgets, you are exactly correct. AI coding tools don’t incur costs like this. AI costs are dominated by runtime and offline inference as part of business- and customer-facing workloads.
AI isn’t cheap, but what is especially not cheap is trying to get results that exceed ~80% in quality. Developers can tolerate gaps, customers won’t.