Monologue: AI Can't Afford To Slow Down

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2:10Greetings and salutations. I am Ed Zitrom, and this is Better Off Lime, and your Better Off Lime monologue.

2:20Better Off Lime. Been a funny week for me. Went on Bloomberg, did an interview cleanly covering the highlights of my AI bubble thesis, didn't say fuck shit or bugger even once. A bunch of people loved it and now everybody is, for some reason, mysteriously talking about the lack of return of investment on AI. That's because everything I said has come true. back in september 2024 i talked about the subprime ai crisis and said that when companies adopting llm-based services were forced to pay the actual real cost of tokens they'd start to freak the out now clamuel clamantha clammy sam altman himself has added an unfortunate comment to the mix purpose this insider altman said at a recent event that roi had now become a meme quoting somebody saying my company spent my entire 2026 budget in q1 can you make this more efficient adding that the company was, and OpenAI in this case, I mean, was exploring other ways to deliver more value for less spend.

3:17I love how casual he says this too, just like, yeah, you know, just people are blowing their entire yearly budgets in a few months, but it's fine. He also said that at the beginning of 2026, the issue with spend never came up and people were totally happy with the amount they were spending, but now AI costs were, and I quote, a huge issue. Well, that's probably because OpenAI and Anthropic moved their enterprise customers from heavily subsidized monthly subscriptions to token-based billing in Q1 2026. Hmm, I wonder if it's that. It could be, I guess it could be that. But put differently, nobody actually paid what AI actually really cost, and now they're having to, and they're screaming like they stepped on a mousetrap like Tom and Jerry.

4:00They're freaking the fuck out. Journalists are freaking out too. Everyone's writing pieces that discuss the debate around the return on investment on AI, as if it's a normal and sane thing that we're four years in and still debating whether there's roi debating whether this is all actually worth it did anybody fucking check no and i must be clear that these companies cannot under any circumstances slow down both open ai and anthropic have sold investors on a vision that both of them will make around 200 billion dollars in annual revenue each by the end of the decade those data centers are being built under the belief that they and probably multiple other anthropic and open AI sized companies will a exist and b have the money and c be able to spend that money on compute and both of them have made a combined 1.1 trillion dollars in compute commitments across google microsoft amazon oracle core weave cerebrus and even fucking spacex both companies lose billions and billions of dollars i'd probably say like tens of billions of dollars if i really had to guess their only hope is to keep growing to such an astonishing level that midwit investors in the recently led poison keep feeding them cash under the auspices of some sort of theoretical profitability.

5:13The only way to keep that con going is to keep on growing, and it's become very obvious that both companies are bonking their heads against the ceiling of their customer spend. To make matters worse, earlier in the week Sam Altman talked to CNBC's David Faber on the subject. When asked about these spending problems, he said that he assumed that the industry will figure that out pretty quickly samuel credenza methuselah formaldehyde altman you just raised 120 billion fucking dollars you are the ai industry you are the one that's meant to work this out that's your job you can't be four years into this no it loads refused cash dump and still shrugging your shoulders like the kevin james meme and saying i'm just a little guy i can't do everything i'm a birthday boy i'm a little birthday boy give me 100 billion dollars because it's my birthday.

6:01You cannot do that, Sam Altman. You can't do that. That's crazy, man. And it's very clear that OpenAI is, to quote drill, cooked on the pit Memphis style. The Q1 2026 non-GAAP operating margin was negative 122%. They lose billions and billions and billions of dollars a year, and Chad GPT's growth has stalled at around 905 million weekly active users. We are approaching the end of this farce, and these companies cannot afford to slow down a little, even a little, not a touch. And as Goldman Sachs' Jim Cavallo said in a recent podcast, and I love this quote because it's, Jim is very smart and he's been ahead of this, but it's so simple.

6:42At some point, you've got to make money as you make investments in a business so you can generate returns. People are just quoting that like, damn, brother, shit, why don't I think of that? Hey, you invest money in, I thought you just invested money in businesses because it felt good. Because it made you feel good inside. It made you feel warm and fuzzy. I didn't know. What do you mean a return on investment? What do you mean? You're talking about I put money in this for a reason. You're crazy. Jim Covello, you're so crazy. But four years in, companies are spending more than ever on a product without a clear return on investment.

7:18It's obvious at this point. However many use cases the mildly mold-poisoned people in AI are dancing around about, no one can seem to actually say what it means or why it matters. Or indeed, even if all of these people claim they're writing all their code with AI, what that actually changes. Doesn't make the software better. Oh, I'm so close to Tucker Carlson voice. Doesn't make the software better. Doesn't seem to make anything better. It just seems to make our apps worse. but folks we're reaching the end of this era and i am currently working on a massive story bigger than both of my huge exclusives from last year and one you will not want to miss i am really excited about this technically there's two but i know one's going to come in one's pretty big one's ginormous but before then i'm taking a week off i'm getting my wisdom teeth out i do need a break so i'm going to rest up you should rest up too and keep on laughing at these oafs burning billions of dollars on software that doesn't have a return on investment.

8:20Zitron out.

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