Ed Zitron is one of the most prolific skeptic of the AI Boom. Having just reported OpenAI’s 2025 financial loss, he joins Jack to argue that the sheer size of the losses by the large language model (LLM) companies are unsustainable and the operational costs of training and running LLMs far exceeds the revenue customers are willing to pay. Ed also discusses Meta’s confusing AI strategy, the risk (and fall?) of the tokenmaxxing era, and Anthropic’s suspension of Fable 5. Recorded June 19, 2026. Pieces discussed in the interview: “Exclusive: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, With Spending Hitting $34 Billion”: https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/ “AI Is Slowing Down”: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-slowing-down/ “AI&#x27;s Brokenomics”: https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/ “OpenAI spending hit $34bn last year ahead of planned IPO”: https://www.ft.com/content/e15b0d7e-ff6b-4f16-ba7a-4068feddb828?syn-25a6b1a6=1 Follow Ed Zitron on X https://x.com/edzitron Follow Jack Farley on X https://x.com/jackfarley96Ed’s newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Follow Monetary Matters on: Apple Podcasts https://rb.gy/s5qfyh Spotify https://rb.gy/x56dx5 YouTube https://rb.gy/dpwxez

Ed Zitron: The AI Bubble is Bleeding Cash, Here Are The Receipts

Monetary Matters with Jack Farley

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Monetary Matters with Jack Farley

## Participants

- **Jack Farley** (Monetary Matters)
- **Ed Zitron** (Where's Your Ed at)

## Transcript

[SPEAKER_00] Got a very special conversation. I am speaking to one of the most prolific skeptics about AI. I'm joined today by Ed Zitron, author of Where's Your Ed at newsletter and the Better Offline podcast. Ed, welcome to Monetary Matters. Ed Zitron Thanks for having me. Ed, how about you start off and lay out your view of artificial intelligence and what the return on investment is for the enormous sums that are currently being spent? Ed Zitron So trillion

[SPEAKER_01] plus dollars in the fact we're still debating the ROI kind of says everything. I think if this was a real industry with the kind of TAM that they've been selling us on for the past four years, we wouldn't have that debate. There wouldn't be one. The fact that we're having it, the fact that you have people to this day in the year of our Lord 2026 saying, well, AI is real. I've never heard something real where someone has had to insist upon that. Economically speaking, the vast majority

[SPEAKER_01] of AI companies barely make more than a hundred million dollars a year in revenue. Anthropic and OpenAI account for, I think 89% of all the top. And on top of that, they're all horribly unprofitable. They lose billions of dollars. And the only way that they can reconcile those is by doing some, what I would call wacky accounting. And so in my reporting from earlier in the week, OpenAI spent

[SPEAKER_01] $134 billion to make $13.07 billion. And yeah, their net loss is just a little under $21 billion. They are of, they have, of course, with the FT given comments that suggests that they only lost $8 billion. I think that's laughable. I think that that was a booster key jingling. I think that that was put in there because they have to find a way to reconcile with the fact that they told CNBC,

[SPEAKER_01] they lost $8 billion at the beginning of the year, but it's very clear they didn't. Like put aside whatever fanciful quotes there are, that they lost $21 billion. How much, by the way, you know,

[SPEAKER_00] has Uber or Amazon lost when they were losing tons of money and before they became the giant behemoths? And how does that compare to the, as you say, $21 billion that OpenAI lost last year?

[SPEAKER_01] Okay. So Uber, I believe burned like $32 billion. They're now kind of like messy, gap profitable. A lot of that was sales and marketing. And a lot of that was subsidizing rides, but the level of subsidies they did were just completely different. The Amazon Web Services example is the really egregious one. Between 2003 and 2017, I think it is, normalized for inflation, Amazon Web Services was maybe $53, $55 billion total. And that's all of Amazon's CapEx,

[SPEAKER_01] not just AWS. Just to give you some context, if OpenAI closes all the money they've been promised this year, they will have raised $122 billio...

Ed Zitron: The AI Bubble is Bleeding Cash, Here Are The Receipts

Transcript

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Ed Zitron: The AI Bubble is Bleeding Cash, Here Are The Receipts

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.