Companies told us AI would replace human workers and cut costs. Turns out the math doesn’t work. An Nvidia VP just confirmed that compute costs for his team exceed what they pay their employees. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. And a startup CEO ran up a $113,000 monthly AI bill, with a four-person team.
This episode breaks down exactly why AI is costing companies more than the humans they laid off, what “tokenmaxxing” is and why engineers are doing it, and whether any of this spending is actually returning anything. Because at some point the ROI question stops being awkward and starts being a board-level emergency.
I really think a lot of CEO’s out there thinking “Wow, this is so cheap” and really expect it to stay like that.
With employees, they get to just deny raises and laugh all the way to the bank. But when your ‘agents’ are owned by another company who’s also trying to make a profit, when they jack up the price 20% you don’t get to just be like “oh, times are tough, CEO needed a new yacht, sorry”. And the more you cut out people, the more specialized ‘agents’ you’ll need to purchase because genuine creativity will be gone.
Has AI spontaneously invented\created something that hasn’t existed? Has it been able to take a real working process and find ways to improve it (like, looking at CPU/GPU architecture and improving it)?
Yes, AI has created great things, but most of those AIs are not what people think they are. LLMs are one branch, and the one that gets most hate. But there are others.
For example look at what they: https://leap71.com/ did.
This is the type of AI I’m ok with. This is useful stuff. This is the kind of AI I want to learn how to do.