The good news is that this might be the end of Oracle.
AI's economics don't make sense
51–60 of 201 posts
Re: AI's economics don't make sense
#52As it happens, published just this morning is an article from Kelsey Piper that explains in some detail what's wrong with Zitron's takes: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost...
I read that and I found it unconvincing. KP is correct that EZ is, by now, emotionally and perhaps ideologically fixated on AI's approaching reckoning, but that's KP psychologizing about Ed's inner states, which is neither fruitful nor relevant to consider when confronting a reasoned argument (or, in Ed's case, several.)
EZ might have incautiously and incorrectly called the peak several times, but his newsletter is nearly always stacked with citations and insights that, at least to my cursory but frequent inspection, pan out.
His argument(s) have evolved over time, but what of it? That just shows he's not the dogmatist the author wants him to be. Discourse evolves, get over it.
2026 Zitron has a good sense of the scale at which AI is requiring enormous financial complexity and volume to realize, and his basic point is that it isn't sustainable in the medium term.
He is self-evidently correct.
Re: AI's economics don't make sense
#53I've sort of lost some respect for ed that I had early on in the hype cycle - he's still right about some things, but I can see him slowly and subtly retreating from his strong position, held even a few months ago, that these things will never ever be useful for anything and it's all a scam because they don't actually do anything at all except burn money. He would say it like 8 times a monologue. I remember one podcast maybe ~6 months ago he brought a developer skeptic on, and was trying to get him to say it wasn't actually useful for coding, and the dev was like "maybe not as advertised, but I definitely use it and it is useful to me" and he pivoted off the topic very quickly.
It seems he realizes he was wrong about that and has pivoted slowly to, "well, maybe they work sometimes, but the cost isn't justified." Which is a reasonable question! I just find his style of never admitting when he is wrong off putting and the way he presents things as absolute fact, when he's guessing like the rest of us. He was right about a lot, wrong about a lot, it's okay to admit that, I don't think his fan base would care.
Re: AI's economics don't make sense
#54There's a few major problems with the article. The most obvious is that frontier labs are not charging remotely close to the cost of tokens; afaik most estimate north of 80% profit margins. As a reference, providers are profitably providing Kimi K2.6 for $4/1Mtok out. Is that as good as Opus? No, but it's probably at least Sonnet level, so that's ~4x cheaper than Sonnet while still being profitable to serve on the ma…
> afaik most estimate north of 80% profit margins
This seems to be the lynchpin of your argument.
It makes me wonder if I have been living under a rock, because I have never heard of frontier labs making money. AFAIK all AI firms are simply burning money to acquire customers at this stage. Is this wrong?
Re: AI's economics don't make sense
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
lots of words. do you think per token prices will go up or down in the long term? will the price per task trend down or up? what about the price of human labor?
The price of everything will go down. That is the beauty of the free market.
If the price of everything would go down it wouldn't be too concerning and everybody would be on board with the "beauty" of it.
What seems to actually be happening for white collar workers is that the price they can charge for their labor is dropping, but the price of their expenses (housing, food, gas) continues to rise.
Re: AI's economics don't make sense
#56There's a few major problems with the article. The most obvious is that frontier labs are not charging remotely close to the cost of tokens; afaik most estimate north of 80% profit margins. As a reference, providers are profitably providing Kimi K2.6 for $4/1Mtok out. Is that as good as Opus? No, but it's probably at least Sonnet level, so that's ~4x cheaper than Sonnet while still being profitable to serve on the ma…
> afaik most estimate north of 80% profit margins This seems to be the lynchpin of your argument. It makes me wonder if I have been living under a rock, because I have never heard of frontier labs making money. AFAIK all AI firms are simply burning money to acquire customers at this stage. Is this wrong?
>It makes me wonder if I have been living under a rock, because I have never heard of frontier labs making money.
You're confusing the profit from the marginal token and overall profit (basically gross margin and operating margin). The comment you're replying to is calculating that AI labs are probably making a substantial profit per paid token. It's just that so far that profit has not been able to overcome the ongoing R&D and capex costs.
Re: AI's economics don't make sense
#57I'm just flabbergasted at the massive inefficient usage of tokens. What are people doing to spend 500 usd/day in tokens. I just don't understand what you could possibly be doing that would be not complete spagetti at the end if you run something in an autoloop.
It looks like a “People respond to incentives (prices)” situation.
If something is cheaper than alternatives, spending patterns change. People subsidize corn or power and so consumers alter behavior to take advantage of those prices.
Re: AI's economics don't make sense
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
By your numbers, it'd be $120/day per developer * 5 million = $600m per day , not per year. Of course people don't work every day, but even with European-level holidays that number is off by a factor of 240 or so.
Quite right, honestly not sure how I fucked that up so bad but I'll own it. Okay so all we need is every coder + 0.6 million more or so in the United States, subscribed to this for 8 hours a day, and the business model can work. That still feels incredibly optimistic given how split the community at large seems to be about how good this tech is, and it assumes all those developers also all work for firms large enough…
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Re: AI's economics don't make sense
#59There's a few major problems with the article. The most obvious is that frontier labs are not charging remotely close to the cost of tokens; afaik most estimate north of 80% profit margins. As a reference, providers are profitably providing Kimi K2.6 for $4/1Mtok out. Is that as good as Opus? No, but it's probably at least Sonnet level, so that's ~4x cheaper than Sonnet while still being profitable to serve on the ma…
> afaik most estimate north of 80% profit margins This seems to be the lynchpin of your argument. It makes me wonder if I have been living under a rock, because I have never heard of frontier labs making money. AFAIK all AI firms are simply burning money to acquire customers at this stage. Is this wrong?
I’m not exactly sure of the details but I believe they do make _some_ money on inference. But they then have to reinvest it all into training of the next model to stay competitive. So even if inference is positive (I’m seeing inconsistent reported data if that’s the case or not), it is directly spent.
I do not understand how the companies can end up in positive, unless something fundamental changes
Re: AI's economics don't make sense
#60There's a few major problems with the article. The most obvious is that frontier labs are not charging remotely close to the cost of tokens; afaik most estimate north of 80% profit margins. As a reference, providers are profitably providing Kimi K2.6 for $4/1Mtok out. Is that as good as Opus? No, but it's probably at least Sonnet level, so that's ~4x cheaper than Sonnet while still being profitable to serve on the ma…
> afaik most estimate north of 80% profit margins This seems to be the lynchpin of your argument. It makes me wonder if I have been living under a rock, because I have never heard of frontier labs making money. AFAIK all AI firms are simply burning money to acquire customers at this stage. Is this wrong?
People tend to believe OpenAI and Anthropic can make money any time, the only thing they need to do is to stop training newer/better models. Source? Sam & Dario, of course (trust us, bro). It may (if they sell access at API price) or may not be true, but the scenario where training is stopped is simply unrealistic at this point.