Megan McCarty Carino

He's a senior economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, which has seen postings for software developers and other tech roles pick up in recent months despite ongoing layoffs.

Though much of the hundreds of billions of dollars are going towards steel and silicon rather than staffing.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace.

At a fireside chat at the Federal Reserve last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mused about the future of AI economics.

But for now, it's definitely metered, and it's not all that cheap.

The way it's metered is with tokens.

Max Kan is a tokenomics analyst at SemiAnalysis.

He says a basic conversation with a chatbot takes a handful of turns.

But new AI agents might analyze hundreds of documents, talk to other agents, and keep doing these things around the clock.

And some companies, like Meta, are reportedly token-maxing, says Daniel Newman at Futurum Group.

A recent Goldman Sachs survey of large companies found many are overrunning their AI budgets by orders of magnitude, and AI spending could equal engineers' salaries in the near future.

Ed Zitron is a tech critic who hosts the podcast Better Offline.

He says tech companies had been subsidizing AI.

Now they're increasing prices.

And most businesses aren't really measuring return on their investments, says Brian Jabarian, an economist at the University of Chicago.

The bigger the AI bill, the bigger the benefits needed to justify it.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace.

Music

Right.

So I think one of the first ones that really started raising suspicion was a bet on whether Nicolas Maduro, the former president of Venezuela, would be out of office and right before this military action that captured him.