Monologue: AI Can't Afford To Slow Down

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how the “does AI have ROI?” debate is coming at the worst possible time for two companies that can’t afford to slow down thanks to their $1.1 trillion in compute commitments. Newsletter: AI Doesn’t Have ROI https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-doesnt-have-roi/ Ed on Bloomberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbKDmkJPVvI The AI industry's profit problem is getting bigger, says Goldman Sachs' equity research chief https://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-ai-boom-profit-problem-semiconductor-chip-companies-investment-2026-6 Bloomberg: AI’s Bills Are Bigger Than Ever, And Coming Due https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-06-04/the-ai-boom-s-next-test-is-the-roi-worth-the-cost Axios: AI sticker shock hits corporate America https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs Uber COO story: https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai-token-spending-harder-justify-2026-5 Please subscribe to my premium newsletter - save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:10Ed Zitron?

  Greetings and salutations. I am Ed Zitron, and this is Better of Lime and your Better of Lime monologue.

• 2:23Ed Zitron?

  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.

• 2:39Ed Zitron?

  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 fuck out. Now, Clamuel Clamanther, Clammy Sam Altman himself, has added an unfortunate comment in the mix. Purposely 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. I love how casual he says this too, just like, "Ah, yeah, you know, just, uh, people are blowing their entire yearly budgets

• 3:23Ed Zitron?

  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. They're freaking the fuck out. Journalists are freaking out too. Everyone's writing pieces that discuss the debate around

• 4:05Ed Zitron?

  the return on investment on AI, as if it's a normal insane 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 OpenAI and Anthropic have sold investors on a vision that both of them will make around $200 billion 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 OpenAI-sized companies will A. exist and B. have the money and C. be able to spend that money on compute.

• 4:46Ed Zitron?

  And both of them have made a combined 1.1 trillion dollars in compute commitments across Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, CoreWeave, Cerberus, and even fucking SpaceX. Both companies lose billions and billions of dollars. I'd probably sell 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 lead poison keep feeding them cash under the auspices of some sort of theoretical profitability. The 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

• 5:31Ed Zitron?

  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." You cannot do that, Sam Altman. You can't do that. That's, that's crazy, man. And it's very clear that OpenAI is the, quote, "drill-cooked-on-the-pit-Memphis style."

• 6:11Ed Zitron?

  The Q1 2026 non-GAAP operating margin was negative 122%. They lose billions and billions and billions of dollars a year and ChatGPT's growth has stalled at around 905 million weekly active users.

• 6:26Ed Zitron?

  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's Jim Cavill 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. At some point, you've got to make money as you make investments in a business so you can generate returns. And people are just quoting that like, damn, brother. Shit, why don't I think of that? Hey, you invest money in an awful, 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.

• 7:10Ed Zitron?

  Jim Cavill, you're so crazy. But four years in, companies are spending more than ever on a product without a clear return on investment. It's obvious at this point. However, many use cases, though mildly mold poisoned people in AI are dancing around about. No one can seem to actually like say what it means or why it matters or indeed, even if all of these people claim that writing all their code with AI, what that actually changes doesn't make the software better. Doesn't. Oh, I'm so close to Tucker Carlson voice those. 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'm currently working on a massive story bigger than both of my huge exclusives from last

• 7:55Ed Zitron?

  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 oaths earning billions of dollars on software that doesn't have a return on investment. Zitron out.

• 8:27Speaker 02

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• 9:31Speaker 00

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