In 2026 we can all agree that AI and agentic development are certainly exciting topics which many see yielding great productivity gains. But as the investor-subsidized pricing of these services gives way to realistic and profitable business models, where will the real costs land?
AI Agents Will Be The Key To Achieving ROI From AI
AI agents are emerging as a crucial type of application for enterprises looking to derive more value from their AI investments in the near term.
AI can cost more than human workers now
When AI labs raise prices, big spending on AI could shift from a flex to a liability.
Environmental Cost of Artificial Intelligence: Carbon, Water, and Land Footprints
AI’s rapid growth drives huge energy, water, and land use, raising environmental and equity challenges across its global infrastructure.
Environmental Cost of Artificial Intelligence: Carbon, Water, and Land Footprints
AI’s rapid growth drives huge energy, water, and land use, raising environmental and equity challenges across its global infrastructure.
Meredith Whittaker on Twitter / X
Now that even Goldman, Sequoia, and other major investors are calling it, it's good to remember that the shakiness of the AI market, and the mismatch between capex and ROI, has been clear for a long time to those of us who look closely at the political economy of AI. https://t.co/dLLNAcW5Sn— Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) July 30, 2024
Why AI agent startup /dev/agents commanded a massive $56M seed round at a $500M valuation | TechCrunch
/dev/agents, a new company by the developers of Android, believes a new operating system is needed to fully realize the potential of AI agents.
How to Develop An AI Pricing Model | Salesforce Ventures
Your guide to developing an effective and scalable AI pricing strategy.
AI's Trillion-Dollar Opportunity: Sequoia AI Ascent 2025 Keynote
Bosses Are Blowing More Money on AI Agents Than It'd Cost Them to Just Pay Human Workers
Some organizings are finding themselves spending more on AI token fees than they do paying human salaries.
Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?
Tech companies are pouring hundreds of billions into data centers, taking on heavy debt, but current revenue is relatively tiny. Critics warn of a new dot-com bubble.
What we can’t measure about AI – yet | Aeon Essays
The costs of transformative innovations are immediately clear: it’s the longterm gains that are hardest to understand
State of AI 2026 | The Industry-Defining Report
Explore how AI is shaping the digital economy in 2026, with 80+ pages of data on ad spend, app downloads, web behavior, user demographics, and so much more.
How Uber uses AI for development: inside look
How Uber built Minion, Shepherd, uReview, and other internal agentic AI tools. Also, new challenges in rolling out AI tools, like more platform investment and growing concern about token costs
"AI makes it cheaper to contribute to Open Source, but it's not making life easier for maintainers. More contributions are flowing in, but the burden of evaluating them still falls on the same small group of people. That asymmetric pressure risks breaking maintainers." also relevant to slop science
Economic incentives is a big problem with AI in open-source spaces. Finding is unevenly allocated, and AI leads to further disparity. Instead of spreading money around the dev community, it'll go to AI companies. Open source thrives on humans. We don't need rockstars, we need resources.
Lucca @ Northsky 💚💜
they should be giving out more of that to the community as grants and focusing on protocol governance and standards and bringing new people into atproto.
