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Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron, and I am not a car.

Better Offline. Yesterday, Business Insider O'Donnell had 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. Yeah, just going to throw a basketball through a hoop real quick.

After three long years of hammering it home, I have finally been proven right. AI's outputs

and efficacy do not match up with its ruinous costs. When organizations have to pay the actual

token costs of AI versus using subsidized subscriptions, they're forced to measure the actual

return on investment from AI and are immediately balking at the results. They're squealing for

mercy. They're saying, honey, I can't afford it. Now, to give you some context, Anthropic only moved

organizations to token-based billing

sometime in Q1, 2026. This is at most four months of having to pay the true costs of their AI

token burn, and they're already squealing, they're already begging for mercy, they're already saying,

sir, no more tokens. AI has a revenue ceiling and an economic mismatch with its customer base.

It's time to accept it.

Every time you've heard somebody say that AI is real, it's here, and it's transformative,

you've heard from somebody paying a monthly subscription to a service

that allows its customers to burn anywhere from $3 to $13 worth of tokens

...