this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Weird take. Typical playbook in SV is to push a free product to gain market dominance for a few years. Also 2% is a common paying user percentage for almost every freemium biz model, and 3%+ is actually considered pretty good
Do those freemium models usually include a $37,500,000,00 overhead?
…per quarter
Yeah... They're lightyears away from breaking even.
Weird take, because you just said a string of words which are not related to what is actually happening here. Ed Zitron has the real skinny.
You have to consider that for most servers, the marginal expenses per customer are close to negligible, that's why you can make a profit even though only 3% of users pay you. But AI is so wasteful, that even the paying users are subsidized. Basically, the demand is not sufficient to support profitable monetization.
Typically, the free product they push doesn't cost them trillions of dollars.
That model works when free users are costing a couple of cents in server resources, not hundreds of dollars.
The issue is there are currently hundreds of companies trying to push the exact same freemium model. And they all have very similar use cases, features, performance and user interface. So why exactly would users ever stay once the price goes up? Or are they hoping like with free games a very small number of users provides a very large revenue stream? Cause with them burning billions every month, I really don't see that happening any time soon.
There won't be that many of them in a few years when consolidation happens. The theory is this is a turning point in all of society, so high investment is seen as warranted. Meanwhile, the price of inference and infrastructure is going to continue to reduce, while corporate adoption will rise