Post #3121860

On some issues, absolutely. He flagged the issue with flat rate subscriptions not making any sense for the underlying token pricing and usage by users, and predicted that a lot of the AI startups that act as some kind of subscription middleman would feel the squeeze and eventually impose rate limits/quotas, degrade the quality of their offerings (i.e., push users towards cheaper models), or fail. I think that's a pretty good summary of what has been happening at the user/pricing level with Perplexity, Lovable, and Cursor. Microsoft's Copilot plans are also seeing a lot of changes to pricing and rate limits, as well as model choice, in ways that user complaints have gotten louder in the past month or two. He was a skeptic on Stargate right out of the gate, and I think that external visibility into how that loose collection of projects under that banner has been going over the past year shows that something inside is fundamentally wrong. That isn't necessarily an indictment of the broader AI ecosystem as a whole, but Zitron's most pointed financial criticism has been directed at OpenAI and Oracle, and the costs of data center construction. Those criticisms have looked especially prescient this calendar year (and generally fits into my preconceived notions that building physical stuff is slow and expensive and that we Americans aren't very good at keeping megaprojects on schedule and under budget). I'm a money guy. I don't have any special expertise in industry trends and how money will be spent in the future on industries where I'm not an insider (i.e., AI), but I find Zitron's accounting of how money is being spent in the present to largely seem accurate. So that's why I'm in this thread asking people about how they see the present and the future of spending/pricing/volume, to see if those projections of revenue needed are actually feasible.