AI Economics

2 items · chronological order

2026-04-30
Wall Street Journal — Heard on the Street 2026-04-30-1

The Clock Is Ticking for Big Tech to Make AI Pay

The market split the hyperscalers 14 percentage points apart on April 29 — Google up 7, Meta down 7 — on essentially the same balance sheet shape, which means investors stopped pricing Big Tech capex as a single risk factor. The new metric is AI revenue per depreciation dollar, and Google's 16 billion tokens per minute disclosure is the template every other CFO copies by Q3. With $430B in annual depreciation projected within five years against $372B in combined net income last year, the companies that can't show that attachment quality will face structural margin compression, not a narrative problem.

2026-05-06
Kate Davies Designs 2026-05-06-3

Knitting Bullshit: Inception Point AI's "We Can Afford to Be Wrong" as Operator-Disclosed Slop Strategy

Eight employees, three thousand AI podcasts a week, twelve million downloads, zero editorial. Inception Point AI's Head of Product told the BBC the model works because gardening, knitting, cooking are topics where they "can afford to be wrong." That's not a defense. That's the targeting criterion: pick verticals where listeners cannot detect factual error and emotional resonance substitutes for substance, then mine the community's accumulated emotional vocabulary as feel-good filler. The defense is not regulation. It is making error visible. Substance-density scoring at the platform layer is the underbuilt commercial wedge of the next decade.