Ideas / Better Offline: The Skeptical Counterweight
The Subprime AI Crisis
Ed Zitron
Zitron argues that subsidized AI services conceal their underlying costs and may look very different when customers face the actual bill.
The episode asks what happens when services priced to encourage adoption must recover the cost of running them. Zitron’s answer is a market whose apparent demand depends heavily on subsidy and whose customers may reconsider once the real price arrives.
The analogy is intentionally alarming. Its useful core is simpler: unit economics do not become optional because the product can write a limerick.