Anonymousabout 4 hours ago
A Goldman Sachs analysis has drawn attention to a striking milestone: at several major technology companies, AI inference costs — the expense of running trained models in production — now rival or exceed total payroll spending. While per-token inference costs have plummeted by as much as 280x since 2022, total enterprise AI spending surged 320% in 2025 alone due to exploding usage, raising questions about whether the payroll comparison signals genuine economic transformation or reflects an accounting artifact in an industry still lacking standardized reporting.