5 articles tagged with Economics
AI agents are cheap to build and expensive to run. As autonomous tasks stretch to hours and billions of tokens, the recurring bill — not the build — becomes the number that decides which agents survive contact with a budget.
In one week Meta cut about 8,000 jobs to fund AI infrastructure and Microsoft offered its first-ever buyouts to 8,750 people. The layoff is no longer a distress signal. It is a funding mechanism.
OpenAI killed Sora because it burned a million dollars a day. Disney lost a billion-dollar deal overnight. The AI industry is learning a brutal lesson about inference economics — and the gap between what is technically possible and what is commercially viable is wider than anyone expected.
The insatiable demand for compute, memory chips, and energy is creating a cascading cost crisis hitting consumers through record smartphone prices, rising utility bills, and a fundamental reshaping of the global electronics supply chain.
A massive NBER study of 6,000 executives reveals that nearly nine in ten firms report zero productivity gains from AI — even as global spending hits $2.5 trillion. History's Solow Paradox is repeating, and the implications are staggering.