Is AI’s Business Model Starting to Crack? Merryn Talks Money

In this episode of Merryn Talks Money, Merryn Somerset Webb and Steve Hou, head of research at Silicon Data, delve into an emerging issue in the economics of artificial intelligence: token prices are falling while the cost of compute needed to produce them is rising. They discuss what this mismatch could mean for the valuations of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, whether demand can justify the enormous sums being invested in AI infrastructure and what happens when everyone has armies of AI agents working on our behalf. 00:00 Revisiting "Situational Awareness" 02:15 The company tracking AI costs 06:07 The changing economics of AI 12:03 AI Tokens and Memory 16:33 The data center shortage 19:25 Real-world demand for AI? 27:12 AI: bubble or boom 34:00 Why are companies paying for AI's impact? Sign up for the Merryn Talks Money newsletter: https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/merryn-talks-money Sign up for the Money Distilled newsletter https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-distilled Watch Bloomberg Vodcasts: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe4PRejZgr0MS0Tqk_zQl1LVVTdWuH2Di Subscribe to Bloomberg Podcasts: https://bit.ly/BloombergPodcasts Visit us: https://www.bloomberg.com/podcasts Visit our other YouTube channels: Bloomberg Television: https://www.youtube.com/@markets Bloomberg Originals: https://www.youtube.com/bloomberg For coverage on news, markets and more: http://www.bloomberg.com/video