This feels predictable. AI is one of, if not the most invested in yet unprofitable industries in the history of humanity.

The last few years have been the beta and the tech demo. But that is not paying for itself yet. US companies are competing with (and falling behind) Chinese state-sponsored companies. OpenAI in particular, a company whose revenue doesn’t even cover half of their operating costs, has extended themselves into owing more than a TRILLION dollars to the entirety of big tech who are building chips and data centers on these IOUs, and will need to be paid sooner or later. The bills will come due.

Other corporations are already paying massive bills for licensing, tokens, training, and infrastructure changes to accommodate this shift to AI while laying off massove chunks of skilled workers on the idea that AI is cheap and will get cheaper over time. But that is simply not the case. This is the “first taste is free” part of this deal. Once they have companies deeply invested in AI and have destroyed the fabric of the labor economy in favor of it, that price is going to skyrocket because OF COURSE IT WILL.

Maybe at some point this will all level out. AI bubble will pop. Prices will sky rocket. Companies will try to backpedal, which will be slow and difficult, they’ll end up paying AI companies huge sums while they work to decouple themselves after just forming the bond, they’ll also end up paying stupid money to professionals who are suddenly in high demand, and many companies won’t survive the chaos. But the ones that do will settle into a new equilibrium.

AI will eventually get cheaper (but probably never this cheap again, at least not in the near future), and it will probably be a permanent fixture in our lives and work to some degree. But it’s usefulness and cost effectiveness will be limited in scope, with specialized purposes. It will not ultimately be the great labor replacement companies think/thought it would be, even as stupid and short sighted as that desire is in the first place (if 30% of the global work force is unemployed, how do you think that will effect your revenue, morons!?). But that also is assuming that the coming chaos doesn’t turn out so bad that AI is permanently legislated into oblivion after the chaos it’s about to cause.