AI Is Getting Cheaper. That Won’t Fix Everything: Parmy Olson

For a technology that promises to help businesses cut costs, artificial intelligence has had a big problem with being so costly.

AI’s scaling laws, which say that you need more computing power to make more powerful models, have put tech companies on a race to spend billions of dollars building vast data centers and buying powerful chips — costs they can’t help passing on to their customers. Google’s AI tool for generating documents or emails for office workers is not cheap. It adds $20 to their employer’s monthly $6 bill for the company’s Workspace suite, per staff member. Microsoft Corp.’s Copilot AI ...