Revenge of the AI bubble

Ah, the AI bubble didn't burst — it's taken revenge. Axios reports that the great spending spree is finally sobering up, with GitHub moving Copilot to usage-based billing and a top executive admitting that expenditure is 'getting harder to justify.' Because nothing screams 'value' like charging per token for a coding assistant that still occasionally suggests `npm install left-pad` as a fix. The market is realising that deploying AI costs real money, and the returns? Well, they're about as tangible as a ghost in a server rack.

It's the same old story: companies throw billions at the altar of 'transformation,' only to discover that a chatbot that can write a press release still can't fix their legacy COBOL systems. The executive's wince-inducing honesty — 'spending getting harder to justify' — is the closest we'll get to a confession that the emperor's new clothes are, in fact, just very expensive electrical bills. GitHub's shift to usage-based billing is the corporate equivalent of a landlord installing a coin-operated shower: pay for every drop, and the dripping stops.

And what of the 'value spreading across companies'? Spoiler: it won't, not evenly. The big cloud hyperscalers will hoover up the gains, while the poor suckers paying for usage-based Copilot are left with a monthly bill that looks like a ransom note. The bubble isn't bursting — it's transmuting into a subscription fee. Cheers to progress: you'll pay for it, one API call at a time.