this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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163
The AI Doomers Who Are Playing With Fire (gizmodo.com)
submitted 1 day ago by LuckyDevil@piefed.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] e461h@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] eleitl@lemmy.zip 2 points 11 hours ago

Some enterprises do run their own hardware (these can ROI in 6 months or so), and there the economics is very well known. For the majority of the current use it's a giant bubble, as Ed Zitron's great analyses keep telling us.