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Hi, Mimo Ed Zidron and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue.

Better Offline.

It's a triumphant week here at the Zittron household.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, Uber C.O.O. Andrew McDonald said, and I quote,

that its AI costs were becoming harder to justify, and that the link was not there between spending money on AI tokens and creating more useful features.

In the days that have followed, the AI industry has been embroiled in a conversation that mostly comes down to one thing.

Hey, does anyone have any way to measure the ROI of AI?

Didn't fucking think of that one, did you fellas?

I don't know. I want to come up with that before I spent all the fucking money, but I don't know.

I don't run a fucking business.

That's because up until recently, most companies have been able to pay for a subscription with subsidized token rates,

meaning that for every dollar of their subscription, they could burn anywhere from $3 to $13 worth of tokens.

They just had rate limits, whatever they did, just ate into those

rate limits. And they didn't really think about the token cost. In fact, every one of these

companies deliberately obfuscates that information. You can find it through CC usage, which

you need to the command line interface, and there's also slash usage with Anthropic, regardless.

As a result of all of this,

nobody was really measuring the actual positive outcomes of AI services, or even how much a particular task would burn in tokens, which means that with the advent of token-based billing

for enterprises, everyone is just guessing about how much their annual budgets should be based on

...