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.
The fun part about this is that tokenmaxxing is basically allowing (even encouraging) employees to waste company resources.
That is their “better” world. Their “better” world encourages their workers to waste their money.
Our company is like that and I don’t have the slightest problem with it.