JP Morgan says $650 billion in annual revenue required to deliver mere 10% return on AI buildout is equivalent to $35 payment from every iPhone user, or $180 from every Netflix subscriber 'in perpetuity.'
Very, very, very unlikely it makes profit, which why AI keeps getting overhyped by CEOs.
When you run the numbers, $65/mo turns AI investment into a a 5-7 ROI, which is totally within normal bounds.
Considering there are over a billion unique weekly active users for the major labs, and demand has been relentless, it's a pretty easy sell to get investors on board.
"You pay internet, you pay phone, you pay AI".
If the demand is real and the company just sucked, their users and infrastructure will end up at a competitor: the value for that one company is bigger, but the overall per-user bill remains about the same.
If the demand is fake the infrastructure will be sold off at a big loss, allowing new companies to enter the market with far smaller investment costs, allowing them to undercut the competition, driving down the price users expect to pay for compute, resulting in a race to the bottom between the remaining AI companies in an attempt to attract enough users that their hardware won't sit idle - which in turn makes it far less likely that they'll be able to hit those revenue figures. And a bunch of investors just lost a few billion dollars, of course.
What a giant waste of resources that are missing elsewhere
Even $100 per month per employee will likely turn out to be quite reasonable, if it can make employees more productive by several hundred dollars per month.
I mean I love simplicity, and if economy could be simplified to a big money printer machine directly printing the money to a burner, then it would be so simple, that even a short context window could comprehend the economic cycle finally!