AI compute costs top human salaries

The "AI as a cost-saver" narrative is hitting a wall of reality as the overhead of scaling intelligence explodes.

• –IT budgets are being exhausted early as high-token-count reasoning models become architectural dependencies
• –For elite AI research and engineering teams, compute spend is now the single largest line item, surpassing payroll
• –A new "autonomous business" model is emerging that trades headcount for massive inference spend to achieve speed
• –Pricing pressure from providers like Anthropic and OpenAI is forcing firms to optimize or face shrinking margins
• –Market sentiment is shifting from "infinite growth" to "measurable ROI" as AI overhead becomes impossible to ignore