Better Offline - Monologue: Everyone Suddenly Cares About AI ROI

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how AI’s move to token-based billing has revealed that absolutely nobody has a way of measuring AI’s ROI - and how these massive costs might finally burst the bubble.Companion newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/ Axios: AI sticker shock hits corporate America https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs  Uber COO story: https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai-token-spending-harder-justify-2026-5 Please subscribe to my premium newsletter - save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. Joy is essential and it's also elusive. But now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotby. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy,

tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats. Open your free IHeart Radio app. Search Joy 101 and listen now. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby is presented by CVS. Hey, this is Chuck from Stuff You Should Know, and we're submitting our most sciencey episodes for your peer review with our new Stuff You Should Know Doing Science Playlist.

Out now. You want to know about Occam's Razor? Simplest explanation is usually the right one? We got you covered. Wondered what chaos theory is ever since the first time you saw Jurassic Park. Well, come on down. So distill a nice pot of tea, everybody, turn down the gas on your Bunsen burner,

and slip into your most comfortable lab coat and listen to the stuff you should know doing science playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is. getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is, getting a new one put up in its place.

I'm Akela Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 is about both of those things. As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslave people. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media. Hi, Mimo Moed Zitron and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue.

It's a triumphant week here at the Zitron household. As I mentioned earlier in the week, Uber C.O. Andrew McDonald said, and I quote, that its AI costs were becoming harder to justify and that the link was not there between spending money on AI tokens and creating more useful features. In the days that have followed, the AI industry has been embroiled in a conversation that mostly comes down to one thing. Hey, does anyone have any way to measure the ROI of AI? Didn't fucking think of that one, did you fellas? I don't know. I want to come up with that before I spent all the fucking money, but I don't know. I don't run a fucking business. That's because

up until recently, most companies have been able to pay for a subscription with subsidized token rates, meaning that for every dollar of their subscription, they could burn anywhere from three to $13 worth of tokens. They just had rate limits, whatever they did, just ate into the those rate limits. And they didn't really think about the token cost. In fact, every one of these companies deliberately obfuscates that information. You can find it through CC usage, which you need to the command line interface, and there's also slash usage with Anthropic, regardless. As a result of all of this, nobody was really measuring the actual positive outcomes of AI services, or even how much a particular task would burn in tokens, which means that with the advent

of token-based billing for enterprises, everyone is just guessing about how much their annual budgets should be based on virtually no useful information. Imagine you're doing something for years, years and years, and you're claiming it it's the future and it's going to change everything, it's going to change your business and other businesses, it's the future of your revenue and their revenue. Oh my God, it's so amazing. But not once did your clever MBAR say, why don't we make sure it actually is? No one did that. Not one of them. Not one of these fuckers. I've been checking all week. We've talking to people all week. In truth, though, measuring ROI is pretty difficult for a lot of knowledge work

because it requires you to actually know what a person does for a living and what doing a job is like and what the outcomes have said job are and what the actual good results at the end may be, which is a lot to ask for middle managers and CEOs who mostly go to and from lunch and explain why other people's work is actually theirs. And I want to say, if you're a middle manager hearing this, more than likely, I'm completely correct about you. Most middle managers are fucking scum. They exist only to steal work from people and nag them and harass them.

If you're not one of those, great. You shouldn't be offended by this. This is not about you. But if you are, you're probably one of the people who's going to email me, in which case, wee, we're going to cry to someone else. I don't give a shit. But the lack of measurement of both task cost and ROI as executives are already crying for mercy. An engineer at a popular payment processor recently told me that their organization has in the last week

burned over $1.5 million in anthropic tokens with one user, one person, burning over $100,000 in that time period. Over at Zillow, engineers have burned through 95% of their annual cursor budget in less than five months, much like Uber's CTO revealed to Laura Breton over at the information that it had burned its entire annual token budget by the middle of April. Axios' Maddie Mills reported that a consultant advising a CFO at an unnamed company said that an organization had spent $500 million in the space of a month on Anthropics tokens. Jesus fucking Christ! Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! I'm sorry, I know I'm ranting, I guess that's what I do on these monologues, but you spend half a billion dollars.

You fuck nuts have no idea what you did that, did you? None of you do. None of these companies do. They don't have any idea while they're doing this. Executives only do this when they're very sick. We've got to give them some cat milk or maybe take him to the vet to finally deal with the problem ourselves. But the AI industry doesn't really have a response to all of this, other than to say that somebody could theoretically make a way to measure ROI in the future based on some metrics that nobody can explain. I've read thousands of words now of random Twitter posts, most of AI generated, of course, by people that don't realize that it's obvious, say these huge posts. And they always like, yeah, you know, the next thing in AI, it's going to be tokenomics measurement and extrapolation of ROI measurements from there. They're just saying, yeah, at some point, maybe we need to know

why we're doing this. Not just because we all love AI. It's like the end of it. So the beginning of death of Stalin when they're all standing around being like, he looks great. Everyone's just like, yeah, of course, we all love AI. Of course, we all know. this and we all know that AI is the most special and beautiful thing and it's changing my life and you're of course my life as well yes it's so amazing but like do we have a way of measuring if it's actually doing that and no one does not a single one of them does you see the problem is they don't want to face that everybody should have measured ROI from the beginning and only avoided doing so because subsidized subscriptions allowed everybody to ignore the problem right up until

it was too late. Anthropics supposed explosion of growth appears to have come entirely from experimental revenue, organizations that have no way of measuring costs or return on investment run by business idiots who don't know what real work is, directly incentivizing workers to use more AI right up until their CFO says, hey, I just saw we spent tens of millions of dollars on this. Is it producing anything of value? Like, can you just, can one of you? And what's in saying is, I would expect, never in my wildest dreams did I think that it would be everyone. I thought that there'd be a couple of organizations who could be like they have a messy metric, they've hammered out, they've really, they bone smashed it like clavicular, but with metrics.

Oh, we're going to make this look good and then we'll be able to say this number went up. I thought they'd have a few. I thought they'd have some sort of weird metric that they came up with. They don't. I've to be talking to this fuckers all week. I've been asking them. And no one does. In fact, at one company, they were literally saying, yeah, the way we measure someone's AI use and whether it's good or not is how many pool requests they've done via AI and pull crest being someone's going to email and be mad about this, calm down. The thing that you do when you say, hey, here is the change I want to make to this code or this thing. This is the plan. Do you agree? Yeah, they're measuring the percentage of those written by AI. That is a positive metric. That's what they're measuring. I didn't think no one. would have any idea, though. I truly didn't. It's so funny. It's so fucking funny. It's the funniest thing.

I'm right. I've been right about this four years. I've been saying four years that when organizations pay the actual cost of AI, not subsidized subscriptions that allow you to burn effectively as much as you want, they bought and start asking questions. All of these people who have been talking about how amazing AI is are now going, well, you know, we need to have very difficult to do. We need to measure somehow, and the value of AI has been entirely framed around unsustainable, unprofitable, impossible to measure tools that beguile imbeciles and those that don't want to think about reality. To be clear, Open AI also appears to be moving most businesses towards token-based billing by giving them $1,000 in credits to use on Codex to soften the blow.

Fucking Sam, nobody does it better. Nobody does it better than Clammy Sam Altman. Clammy Sam, glamie Sammy, we love clammy. $1,000 just for you, honey. You can use it. Whatever you want, please pay me. And that's the thing. Open AI broken business as well, but there's no real

solution here. There's none. And I think the next three months are going to be illuminating and probably feature pullback across a ton of organizations as they ask questions they should have been asking since fucking 2023. It's insane.

I was, I would, as I sound completely insane myself. as I sound completely crazed. But people were calling me crazy in 2024, being like, yeah, you know, when businesses pay the real cost, they're not going to, people were acting like I was a fucking lunatic. Well, who's crazy now? Would a crazy person laugh like this?

Ha ha ha ha. Anyway, there are no real solutions here, though. Folks, there are no real solutions. While somebody theoretically could move their workloads to Deep Seeker or a cheaper model, it's unlikely that there are inference providers that can support that much traffic or even provide that much stability. You have to remember a big organization is putting a lot more pressure on Deepseek than, say, a casual code, someone who's just running their own GPU.

And you have to do far more than just turn on GPUs. You actually have to build for an organization that would be theoretically spending millions, a massive inference stack that cannot crap out. It's one of the reasons people pay Anthropic and OpenAI, even though Anthropics barely stable. I also don't have any substantive proof that Deepseek V4 or other models can replace an opus, I was about say opeth there, not editing that, or codex model, even if they are dramatically cheaper. We have no proof of this, and despite the conversation, no one's doing it, not heard it, not heard anyone say this. Also, in the end, if nobody can measure the ROI of AI in general,

why would they spend anything? Now, AI boosters are currently either completely ignoring this subject, which is what's happening with the obvious ones, or they're going to answer by saying, that we're in the early days and that there are weekly breakthroughs that will solve these problems. Been a lot of fucking weeks so far. Been a lot of them. Got like, what, like 400 of them? 450? Coming up in 500 weeks?

But this is a problem that needed to be solved yesterday and neither Anthropic nor OpenAI has an answer for bringing down costs, let alone those of their customers. Even if they were magically profitable overnight. Even if they were, they're not. They're not profitable in inference. Their customers are spending too much money. Their customers do not have cost control. That makes it very hard to budget for how much you'll spend.

Basic business stuff. Basic stuff. I'm not innovative in my thinking here. You know, it's like that tweet that was like, yeah, walking around a college campus, looking into a business school class and it's like profit is revenue minus costs. It really is that, except these people have been ignoring that for years. and making people feel stupid for asking those questions. I also must be clear that these companies cannot slow down.

Anthropical Open AI project to have over $350 billion in combined annual revenue by 2030, and they're going to need it because between them they've made over $1.1 trillion in compute commitments. If their revenue growth is entirely based on dim-witted executives allowing a no-it-loads-refused compute dump for no apparent return on investment, that is not a stable, sustainable, or even a growth business. It's a grift, targeting a society-wide executive ignorance of production itself.

I look forward to telling you more about it next week. I've had a lot of fun this week. We've got Paul Kodroski coming back on the show on Tuesday. Actually Wednesday, sorry, 12 a.m. E.T. Wednesday, I should really know that by now. It's been years. And then, yeah, I'll have another monologue for you. It's been a lot of fun.

I hope you're enjoying it. Zitron out. Joy is essential, and it's also elusive. But now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotby. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats. Open your free IHeart Radio app. Search Joy 101 and listen now. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby is presented by CVS.

Hey, this is Chuck from Stuff You Should Know, and we're submitting our most sciencey episodes for your peer review with our new stuff you should know doing science playlist. Out now. You want to know about Occam's Razor? Simplest explanation is usually the right one? We got you covered. Wondered what chaos theory is ever since the first time you saw Jurassic Park. Well, come on down. So distill a nice pot of tea,

everybody, turn down the gas on your Bunsen burner, and slip into your most comfortable lab coat and listen to the stuff you should know doing science playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. June is Black Music Month, and on the Drink Chams podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Sway Lee. Do you realize how legendary you are?

I appreciate that. I'd be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got, like, so much more to do. Like, Prince, he dropped, like, 30 albums. We dropped, like, five right now. Like, that's the rate we gotta be going. Yeah, that's a good attitude. No matter the era, Drink Chams brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations.

Listen to Drink Chams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is, getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is, getting a new one put up in its place. I'm Akela Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 is about both of those things.

As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslave people. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.