Google just announced that starting April 15th, individual users on your team can buy AI add-ons for their work accounts with their own money. First up is the usage limits on Gemini. Now, as far as models go, I don’t know if Gemini would be the one I’d be willing to pay for, but I certainly have thought that I would pony up forty bucks a month to have access to good LLMs and tools inside of my workspace.
So my first reaction was, oh, that’s cool. I would have plunked down my money for that without a second thought.
And then my second thought was: wait, why was that my first thought?
That’s a little messed up. There is something deeply sort of effed up about employees volunteering to pay for the tools they need to do their job. Generally speaking, it’s not how it’s supposed to work. Your employer gives you the stuff you need to do the things they want you to do. That’s part of the deal. Nobody shows up to the warehouse carrying their own forklift.
But here I am, somebody who has been experimenting with using LLMs to automate all kinds of things in my life, including work I do that I think is intellectual grunt work that I should be able to pass off to a minion. And my honest response would have been that hey, if I could pay for more of this, that would be a relief, not an annoyance, and the small price would be a very small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.
I feel like that should bother me a lot more than it does.
Google is billing it as simplifying access and maintaining administrative visibility, and for what it’s worth, yeah, sure, your admins can see who’s buying what. The organization controls the base tier, nobody’s losing anything here, that’s fine I suppose. But the subtext is that you’re not giving people enough of the tools they need, and instead of fixing that, you’re letting them swipe the credit card. Next up on your employee review: did you really do your all for the company? Did you buy enough extra tokens to do your job? Where’s your real commitment here, Steve? You can see that as part of everybody’s favorite one-on-one with their manager.
And unfortunately, we see this a lot in education. You hear stories about teachers buying their own classroom supplies, parents being expected to come up with money for markers and such. I know when I started working in education I firmly decided that I would not be that teacher, and yet here I sit. Developers frequently buy their own IDE licenses. The institution comes up and sets a floor, calls it a ceiling, and the people who really care about what they’re doing just quietly pony up the dough.
Still, if I wasn’t getting the kind of AI I need, I’d buy it. Doing the kind of work I do, I think I probably spend a hundred bucks a month in AI fees already. I’m a little weirded out by that. I’m a little okay with it. And I guess sitting in between those two tensions is kind of where we wind up.
Leave a Reply