AI bubble heads and doomers seize on Sam Altman’s remark that AI costs are a ‘huge issue’ for some companies

• Sam Altman talked about innovation importance of budgets – and brought out AI skeptics about X.

• Altman said people are “completely happy” with their AI spending, but it has become a “big problem” lately.

• Some online commenters warned of a bubble. Others said it was a sign that the token was being misused.

Sam Altman said AI budgeting has recently become a “huge issue” for some companies, driving AI bubble watchers and doomsayers crazy.

during a Tuesday corporate eventAltman referenced memes like “My company spent my entire 2026 budget in Q1.”

“This has suddenly gone from an issue that was never brought up at the beginning of this year (people were perfectly happy with the amount they were spending) to a major issue,” Altman said.

Reader reaction was high. Some said it was a warning of dark times or a failure in the AI ​​business model. the word “balloon” has been brought up frequently. Others said this was par for the course, a normal phase where people learn what to actually spend their coins on after a certain trial period.

Commentators by Gary Marcus Michael Burry got involved. Here are some of the most interesting reactions.

Some say it’s a dark warning

Ed Zitron, one of the Internet’s leading AI bubble stimulators, wrote: in x That OpenAI is “absolutely prepared.”

“This is the language of losers,” Zitron wrote. “You can’t live in a bubble for four years saying, ‘yeah, our customers have a big problem with how expensive our business is.’ You just raised $122 billion!”

Programmer Eric S. Raymond (often referred to as ESR) I agree with this “the bubble is bursting.”

“Make no mistake, this is a very useful technology and uptake will continue, even accelerate,” Raymond wrote. “But we see that overinvestment in data centers is not sustainable; the business model of large providers is not working and VC money is floating on it.”

Academician and author Vivek Wadhwa wrote this looked like an artificial intelligence researcher Gary Marcus he was right: “AI revenue models are booming.”

Marcus himself commented: death of tokenmaxxing “It was a potentially very serious problem for all three major IPOs.”

Michael Burry, “Big Short” investor Skeptical turn to artificial intelligencealso referenced the story in x.

Others say this is a misuse of the token

As Tokenmaxxing madness diesSome engineers wonder: Are we spending the right way? Altman’s comments may be less of a dark warning and more of a rational cost-benefit analysis.

Google software engineer Patrick Toulme commented this “Getting value from agencies is still very difficult for most engineers, so they end up just burning tokens.”

“80% of the economic value of LLMs comes from 20% of tokens,” chief strategist at BCA Research Peter Berezin wrote. “There is a long tail of questionable token usage that could be greatly reduced without too much negative impact on efficiency.”

Kun Chen worked at Meta at Microsoft. and Atlassian. He wrote that AI spending is “driven by FOMO,” so some disruption is “inevitable.”

Yet he remained optimistic.

“I am optimistic that real demand will gradually increase again,” Chen wrote.

Duckbill chief cloud economist Corey Quinn took a more ironic approach. wrote that Altman was I’m starting to realize He said the tokens OpenAI sells could be expensive.

“He is truly the Copernicus of his generation,” wrote Quinn.

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