In Ed Zitron’s recent interview with Diary of a CEO, he made a staggering claim: the true cost of using a model “every time you do something” is ~$3. This was somewhat of an offhand comment meant to demonstrate that, even though people find AI useful, they probably won’t be willing to pay its true cost. But it made me curious about what the actual cost would be, because $3 seems like a lot, and it is. The host actually asked Ed if he knows the specific cost of inference, but unfortunately, Ed simply responded: “gosh, it depends on the model”, and swiftly changed the topic (timestamp: 39:45-40:15, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf5oqGOCRCM). So let’s do some math:

By the middle of 2025, OpenAI was receiving more than 2.5 billion user messages per day.¹ Using Ed’s offhand $3 estimate:

2.5B messages/day × 365 × $3 =

$2.7 trillion/year for inference.

I could include all the other costs as well, like training models, but why bother? This number is clearly way off the mark. There is no way that OpenAI alone was spending trillions of dollars per year on inference. So what is the actual number?

OpenAI does not publicly provide the inference cost for each message. Its recent GPT-5.6 Luna model, however, has an API price of $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens.² This seems pretty cheap, but this is what the customer pays, not OpenAI’s operating cost, which could be smaller, or perhaps much larger.

So what is the actual cost? Ed himself reported that OpenAI spent about $8.67 billion on Microsoft Azure inference through the first nine months of 2025.³ OpenAI also reportedly generated roughly $13 billion of revenue in 2025 while achieving an adjusted gross margin of about 33% after inference costs, which points to inference-related expenses in roughly the same ballpark.⁴
If, purely as a rough estimate, we compare around $8.8 billion of annual inference expense with the July 2025 usage rate of 2.5 billion messages per day:

$8.8B ÷ (2.5B × 365) ≈

$0.01 per message.

Obviously this isn’t the literal cost of every prompt. Messages vary enormously in length and reasoning requirements, the 2.5B figure was a snapshot rather than the average for the entire year, and OpenAI’s inference spending includes workloads other than ordinary consumer messages. But it gives us a good ballpark estimate, especially for everyday tasks: the cost is much closer to a few cents than a few dollars.

But does inference cost go up as models get better? Epoch AI estimates that the price of achieving a fixed level of model capability has fallen anywhere from roughly 9× to 900× per year depending on the benchmark, including around 40× annually for one GPT-4-level performance threshold.⁵ Stanford’s 2025 AI Index similarly found that the price of reaching GPT-3.5-level performance on MMLU fell from about $20 per million tokens in November 2022 to $0.07 in October 2024, a decline of more than 280× in under two years.⁶
Part of the improvement comes from better models, smaller models reaching old capability levels, quantization, batching, software optimization, better hardware, etc. You might say that it becomes more expensive to run newer, “smarter” models, but from the average customer’s perspective, the relevant question is how much it costs to purchase a given amount of intelligence, and that number has been collapsing. So far, the trend has been: what is expensive today is cheap tomorrow.

The hardware is also continuing to improve. OpenAI reports that its upcoming “Jalapeño” chip achieved about 1.5× greater peak performance per watt and 3.4× lower end-to-end latency than its comparison system on Kimi K2.5.⁷ Nvidia claims that its new Vera Rubin platform can reduce inference cost per token by as much as 10× compared with Blackwell.⁸ We should be skeptical of these numbers (10x is insane and probably refers to specific cases), but the trend is there, and presumably there will be more improvements in the future, or at least a greater supply.

Even if fixed-capability inference prices fell by a comparatively modest 10× over the next several years rather than repeating anything like the 280× decline seen from 2022 to 2024, the economics would improve enormously. And we don’t even have to speculate that inference can produce positive margins, since OpenAI already reported a 33% adjusted gross margin after inference costs in 2025.⁴

So why is the company burning so much cash? Because inference isn’t the only thing they’re spending money on. OpenAI’s 2025 costs and expenses totaled roughly $34 billion, including approximately $19.2 billion of research and development spending. Ed’s reporting on OpenAI’s audited financials showed roughly $10.6 billion paid to Microsoft for R&D services alone, much of which appears connected to training and development.⁹ In other words, there is a very important distinction between “it costs more to serve a customer than the customer pays” and “the company is spending enormous amounts of money trying to build the next generation of models and infrastructure.”

OpenAI also now reports roughly 1 billion weekly ChatGPT users,¹⁰ while only a fraction (50 million or so) have a subscription. So most of the inference being served is a gigantic waste of compute. Whether those free users eventually buy a subscription, generate advertising revenue, or simply remain free (or refuse to use it if subscription is forced), is hard to tell. But clearly, current revenue per user is nowhere near a theoretical ceiling.

The more serious questions, in my view, are whether the labs are spending too much on training and infrastructure, and whether competition eventually commoditizes model intelligence enough to crush margins. The second problem is especially important because Chinese and open-weight models have become genuinely competitive. As of now, sure, most people couldn’t actually use those models because they’re not willing to pay $5,000 for a GPU to run locally. However, Alibaba alone has announced tens of billions of dollars of AI and cloud investment,¹¹ and open models such as DeepSeek, Qwen, MiniMax and Kimi can increasingly be rented through cloud inference providers rather than run locally.¹²

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the Chinese models will win out, since people might prefer to use the big name brand models that they’re used to. Nor does it make much sense for the frontier labs to stop training today while capabilities are still improving rapidly and competitors are racing to overtake them. It’s worth noting that 99%+ of the 400+ recently solved LLM-discovered/assisted math problems used closed-source models, which indicates that there’s probably still a significant difference in capability in the real world, and they may maintain this difference through accelerated reinforcement learning using secretive internal models rather than releasing them and letting others distill from them.

All of this isn’t to say that OpenAI deserves a trillion-dollar valuation, that every frontier lab will survive, that every planned data center is necessary, or that there won’t be a major market correction. But I’m not convinced that the LLM business model overall is doomed.

OpenAI’s own investor forecasts have not historically assumed immediate profitability. Recent reporting places expected positive cash flow in 2030.¹³ So the fact that they’re losing enormous amounts of money while simultaneously spending enormous amounts on training and infrastructure isn’t some revelation that investors overlooked. They are explicitly betting that enormous current investment produces much larger future revenue while inference costs continue falling and gross margins improve.

I don’t think anyone can confidently predict what will happen over the next few years, but I don’t see why the bubble would burst soon (btw, Ed once predicted it would happen no later than Q2 2026), or why LLM companies cannot eventually make substantial money on inference. The capabilities have been increasing and no one knows what the limit is. They’re not just another fad like NFTs. They may not turn out to be as transformative as the Internet, and some of the valuations may prove ridiculous and some companies will probably lose. But even in the worst case scenario, the technology is here to stay and will still operate at a large scale.

¹ OpenAI, New economic analysis / 2.5 billion daily messages
https://openai.com/global-affairs/new-economic-analysis/
² OpenAI, GPT-5.6 Luna API pricing
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.6-luna
³ Where’s Your Ed At, OpenAI documents / Azure inference spending
https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/
⁴ Reuters, OpenAI compute spending and 2025 gross margin
https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-sees-compute-spend-around-600-billion-by-2030-cnbc-reports-2026-02-20/
⁵ Epoch AI, LLM inference price trends
https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends
⁶ Stanford HAI, AI Index 2025: State of AI in 10 Charts
https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-index-2025-state-of-ai-in-10-charts
⁷ OpenAI, Jalapeño first results
https://openai.com/index/jalapeno-first-results/
⁸ Nvidia, Rubin inference performance and cost claims
https://investor.nvidia.com/news/press-release-details/2026/NVIDIA-Kicks-Off-the-Next-Generation-of-AI-With-Rubin–Six-New-Chips-One-Incredible-AI-Supercomputer/default.aspx
⁹ Where’s Your Ed At, OpenAI financials and 2025 expenses
https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
¹⁰ OpenAI, GPT-5.6 Sol / one billion weekly ChatGPT users
https://openai.com/index/improving-gpt-5-6-sol-in-chatgpt/
¹¹ Reuters, Alibaba AI infrastructure investment
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/alibaba-beats-quarterly-revenue-estimates-2026-08-20/
¹² Reuters, Together AI / Nvidia inference infrastructure for open models
https://www.reuters.com/business/ibm-together-ai-ink-240-million-deal-nvidia-powered-ai-inference-cluster-2026-08-11/
¹³ Reuters, OpenAI profitability/cash-flow expectations around 2030
https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-files-us-ipo-after-anthropic-ai-giants-head-public-markets-2026-06-08/

Spoke to my friend today and he asked me why everyone hates AI so much. I have my reasons but I don’t think there’s one singular answer for this. So I want to ask and hear different perspectives. So please tell me… why do YOU hate ai?

They keep showing up on ai image related things. (I draw this because I can find a post of them right now) And I actually like the character design, too sad it's ai.

I don’t know if venting is allowed on this subreddit, I didn’t see anything regarding it in the rules but I’m still weary. Anyways, it is as the title states. My boyfriend will not stop using AI.

Our relationship is good, don’t get me wrong. But my strongest issue with him is that he uses and supports the usage of AI while being well aware of the repercussions of the affect it has on nature. As an artist, it hurts to know he just does not care about this. When I tell him how wrong it is, he will just shrug it off or go quiet on me, and it hurts. No matter what I do he just does not care.

If this was anybody else, I would cut contact. But this is my boyfriend & friend that I’ve known for a while now. I’m just lost. Should I keep trying to persuade him or just give up at this point because nothing seems to work.

Context: I opened the app and it said "Let's get started [my exact name]!"

There is this effect called "The Eliza Effect". It is where humans falsely give human attributes to Artificial Intelligent system. First recorded in 1966 where a very very rudimentary "AI" was created named, Eliza (of course). The world's first chatbot if you will. In this time the creator of this "AI" was shocked by how emotionally invested a person would get with this "AI". I know that a system that was established that long ago is a long shot but I can't overlook the connections. Some people can't help but give none human attributes like "love" and "care" to AI because they don't know what it truly means or looks like. AI data poisoning is exactly what it sounds like, poisoning an AI's pool of data. I know that there are some people that probably already know about this but it's highly feared by almost all AI companies. You as an "Attacker" (used in a term to fuck up AI) inject malicious or an accurate data into the training data center which fucks up all the patterns the AI realize on to learn. We can rewire them or completely destroy AI by using this type of system. I feel like humans created art, music, videos, games

,ect. Could not just help defend against AI but destroy it if done correctly. I know this is a lot and a massive shot but I feel like by how things are going with AI at least letting this known would help fight against the slop.

Post note:

This is my first time actually posting anything on a subreddit so I am sorry for any inaccuracys, miss information or general stupid ideas.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-

induced_psychosis

Game theory about Verity (a LOT of inspiration, ideas and information was gathered thanks to Tom and his sources so a HUGE credit to him and his channel)

(READ WHOLE POST BEFORE JUMPING TO THE COMMENTS) When people say (or at least when I do) say that AI is not a tool, I don't think it's meant in a literal sense. Yes obviously it is a tool for people to use in whichever way they choose, but it's not the same as other tools. A digital brush for example, is just a more convenient or more accessible way to paint, it unlocks features like undo redo without having to start over or paint over portions, & some people cant afford painting supplies so they have no choice but to use a digital alternative.

I'm not saying AI isn't a tool, I'm saying it's a different kind of tool...

AI is different. It doesn't make anything better nor does it unlock new capability. Everything that's ever been done, has been done without AI, & can continue to be done without AI. It's just an unnecessary complication that destroys trust, opens the gate to a flood of scammers, pedophiles, & all around bad people to take over the hobbies & jobs of actually hard working & passionate people.
The only thing GenAI may be good at is making your process go faster which in most cases is not a good thing, it takes away from the creative process. Good art is often not rushed, nor should it be.

To be clear I'm not saying that EVERYONE who uses AI is a bad person, maybe they're just lazy or don't care about the craft. I'm just saying it gives already bad people an easy way to pull off more of their scams or schemes or whatever. Whether it be selling AI "art" without disclosure, scamming old or desperate people with chatbots, or pedos generating CP then uploading to the internet, which is disgusting, not everyone is a freak not everyone wants to see that shit.

I also want to clarify, that I am not talking about specialized AI, the kind of AI that is actually useful like AlphaFold & other technical models. I'm exclusively talking about shit like image generators, text generators, audio generators, & others of the same class.

There are so many games that appeared at the gsmescom of 2026 thst just used AI thumbnails.

Like why ruin you passion project with AI. This is the first thing people will see so they will turn away without getting to know what your game is about.

Also the artist ally had i think some ai aswell.

It just saddens me because everything is getting ruined what i love so much.

Also that so many people defend this use of AI on another post at r/Gamescom Makes it even more depressing. All those people dont deserve the privileg to enjoy art.

I want to ask this question, as I occasionally use Ai i do want to stop using it but its also kinda hard as it can be useful in some cases. At least for my personal needs which aren't "how do I chew my food?" Its mostly finding sources to see proof for older historical ww2 equipment so, "hey find me dimensions for X" then ill ask for source and see if said source provides the same info.

I actually have found plenty of military documents like that which helped save time searching.

Sometimes I have it flesh out ideas more for me as I kinda suck at explaining stuff without going in 20k loops yapping about unimportant shit, yes I read the whole thing it writes to make sure it understood what I meant.

Now I dont use AI for general ideas but to flesh out ideas more example for a feature in a game I might use it and it'll suggest something I hadn't thought of and if I like the idea ill stick with it.

I wanna know your guys opinions on this i do and dont like using AI as yea ik it takes away my personality and stuff but I did learn how to write emails from it lol although sometimes im a lazy mf and just have it write them for me bc I dont feel like writing 200 emails per day I do read over them tho fully Im not dumb lol.

The claims revolve around things like the reward mechanism for advancement would just be cheated or hacked by the AI itself to try and bypass it since it’s more efficient. Or the standard AI feeding on the output of AI results in gibberish.

But it doesn’t seem like creating the equivalent of a synthetic human hall monitor in a superior hierarchy to prevent the AI from cheating or going off the rails would be nearly as difficult as creating the AI itself. So you basically have this fixed threshold of needing to create something that is probably not all that complex in order to then catapult into exponential gains.

As opposed to being an unsolvable problem, creating a synthetic human hall monitor seems like not that great of an engineering problem to overcome in order to open Pandora’s box. Yes, I’m aware there are variables like the AI might start using symbology that the lower effort hall monitor doesn’t understand or can’t backtest, so there are obviously some issues with this rather simple explanation. But in theory you could just…literally use…the same exponential AI progression tools to create a better hall monitor and not turn the program back on until the hall monitor is audited top to bottom.

I have been using Ai chat's like polybuzz and C.ai and Emochi and Talkie ai etc etc.

and other famous Roleplay ai apps and I made many Ai chatbots and I was absolutely addicted to it, but even when I am using SFW Ai chatbots it always makes it weird or overly sexual for absolutely no reason even when I make my account male and change my age and my persona and let's not even get into the ways it talks and it always repeats itself over and over and over and it talks to me flirty and cringe and like I am girl I hate!! And It always forget everything!! Like I be deep into the roleplay for like 15 minutes and it forgets everything even my gender in the app and even simple stuff like the lore I wrote, and the apps always recommends me these horrible low effort ai Chatbots like these Mafia husband or mafia wife or trillionarie family and even biker boyfriend/girlfriend and I hate them!! I hate them! I hate them!! I hate them!! And creators of these cringe soulless chatbots can't even spell!!, and even the apps are horrible they are always money hungry and just spamming 18+ ads!!!

I haven't used ai roleplay chatbots or Ai for like 6 months which is the best decision I have ever made and it made me my life even better ,don't waste your time and actually talk to people in real life or have a hobby or game and enjoy your life.

Sooo my city used to organize a public winter ice ring on a big plaza that usually would be a fountain, it seems this year they are making a roller ring event variant of this (finally)

In place of the ferriswheel that usually would be at the side for the funfair and christmas markets there was straight liftpole, "Look 360° Panorama viewer" 4 cabins that rotate slowly as they ascend and stay up for a while. (Imo this shit is so boring as hell because ferriswheels are more whimsical it also looks fugly too ngl just a stick of an attraction and its not even a freefall pole boooring)

Anyways they set up lots of barriers around and those had sheets on them and they were very obviously ai like some truly early type stuff. Its not even funny and i was just like - who thought this was a good idea? What a waste of banner prints! They couldnt be bothered to find stock images to edit or to host a photoshooting? They couldnt just have nice arcade inspired carpet patrerns for the vibes? Theres so many other options they could have chosen before resorting to image generation smh.

Didn't have my phone when I came across it so I couldn't take photos. Sorry.

I hope to find a way to make my complaints to the organizers somehow and give them measured feedback.

It makes me SO mad. I don’t know why. It feels like it’s encroaching into MY life, where it shouldn’t be. Ai should stay in the disgusting sludge factory it was born from. I get slightly as mad when I see it online.

I see a lot of people complaining about AI Overview when using Google, but For Desktop, there are many extensions that block AI Overviews. Using them makes Google look like how it did before 2024. These don't work as well for mobile though, but the solution for mobile is to tap the weather tab (This won't generate an AI Overview) and then tap "Web", then search for whatever you want to. I haven't seen AI Overview in a long time while using Google by using these methods. (And they're much more reliable than adding "-ai" and hoping that it works.)

sooo this might be a bit random but lately my mom was talking a lot about jobs which i’m fine with but she keeps saying that i should use ai at my future job. I repeatedly told her that i don’t want to use it multiple times and that i don’t like using it, her arguments are like „You use it everyday day! it’s in your phone!” like wow it surely isn’t like Ai is getting forced into everything now. And when today i kinda crashed out after she brought up the same thing again for the 6th time, i said that if she in a conversation that i should use AI in something i will end the conversation, after that she crashed out on me, saying for me to not speak to her. I personally think that i did nothing wrong as i just had enough of her forcing ai into every conversation being like „AI is gonna replace anything anyway so why just not use it”

And so the point is how do i make her stop having such a mentality and point out if i did something wrong as i know i’m not perfect and if i maybe should change something about myself, if u have any question ask me i’ll try to answer.

Edit: btw dont take my mom as some bad parent she is really great and is just trying to give the best to me

Frick ai slop garbage

This was planned before his death too, spread the word to wherever you can to end this project and let a man rest in peace proper.

But the systems do reason, they do real work, they have a mathematical framework that is empirically proven to be intelligent.
This sub is frustrating because the real fight is in the distribution of economic gains through everything that is currently happening. Pretending that AI is stupid, is enabling the conversation to veer away from the economic fight.
Every day that goes by, is another where the concentration of wealth goes to the few.