AI + ML
Stuck with an AI bill for tens of thousands of dollars? You're not alone by a long shot
KETTLE Hopefully you haven't had reason to notice yet, but there's a rising problem with AI services on Google Cloud, AWS, and other platforms sticking their customers with bills in the tens of thousands of dollars. This week's episode of the Kettle focuses on two such stories that The Register published this week, one concerning Google and another involving AWS. In both cases, cloud customers using AI incurred massive bills without any prior notification from their provider and not a lot of help to resolve the matter with any sense of urgency. Tune in to this week's episode to hear host Brandon Vigliarolo chat with O'Ryan Johnson and Richard Speed about their stories, what's causing these massive bills, and how you can avoid a similar situation at your own organization.
You can listen to The Kettle here, as well as on Spotify and Apple Music, or read the transcript of the latest episode below. It's been lightly edited for clarity.
Brandon (00:01)Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of The Register's Kettle podcast. I'm Reg reporter Brandon Vigliarolo, and this week I'm joined by my colleagues Richard Speed and Kettle newcomer O'Ryan Johnson to talk about a recent spike in cloud AI API abuse that's sticking customers with some massive charges. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars that Google is seeming to...try hard not to refund. Guys, thanks for coming on.O'Ryan Johnson (00:29)Great to be here.Brandon (00:30)And O' Ryan, welcome again to your first Kettle episode. Glad to have you here. So in this case, this one is primarily based on an exclusive you published this week about compromised Google Cloud API keys. And from what I read, it seems like cyber criminals are using those keys to run all the AI inference they want on most expensive models that Google has without paying a dime. So walk me through what exactly this story's about.O'Ryan Johnson (00:33)So there were a couple parts of this. One is the API abuse. But then there was this policy by Google that kind of threw gasoline on the fire. So if you're a developer and you've created an API key for your projects, if your project uses Maps, you'll create an API key. And for years, the advice from Google was put that API key on the front end of that, make it public so that when users are using your site, it links back to your project.
