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https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/


It could be, but it doesn’t look promising - and the fact that it’s pretty much impossible to know what the actual costs are is, in itself, very telling.



When you use these services, the company in question then pays for access to the AI models in question, either at a per-million-token rate to an AI lab, or (in the case of Anthropic and OpenAI) whatever cloud provider is renting them the GPUs to run the models. A token is basically ¾ of a word.




As a user, you do not experience token burn, just the process of inputs and outputs. AI labs obfuscate the cost of services by using “tokens” or “messages” or 5-hour-rate limits with percentage gauges, and you, as the user, do not really know how much any of it costs. On the back end, AI startups are annihilating cash, with up until recently *Anthropic allowing you to burn upwards of $8 in compute for every dollar of your subscription*. OpenAI allows you to do the same, though it’s hard to gauge by how much.

Certainly part of the sales pitch. But so far it turns out humans are more efficient (cost less). I think the appeal to companies is the control (and the cost while it’s so heavily subsidized by the industry pushing it. The appeal to the major AI investors and execs is to… privatize the profits and socialize the losses. They will golden parachute themselves and leave the people with their mess.

Except it’s not profitable at all. It’s a huge bubble waiting to collapse.

Yes & they last longer

Don’t forget the part where taxpayers bail out the billionaires!

Hmm just good old late stage capitalism there, I think. The CEO recently said legalizing war crimes would be good for business and seems to have a cocaine problem to boot. No doubt fueled by the same investor groups though.

Prediction: the bubble is real but financiers will find ways to kick the bull down the road until they can force enough adoption & ad insertion to not lose out. The other option is that we pay it, of course. Takes on which is worse?

Cloudflare, AWS, and other recent major service outages are what come to mind re: AI code. I’ve no doubt it is getting forced into critical infrastructure without proper diligence.


Humans are prone to error so imagine the errors our digital progeny are capable of!

Indeed. Seems every week Plex takes some action to enshitify their service more and more.

Utilities beholden to investor groups have been price gouging customers long before AI came along. We need governments that can competently govern and regulate.