The Brutal Math of Scaling AI

Episode 49 unpacks a week where three companies answered the same question in three different ways: what does AI actually cost, and who pays for it. Anthropic shipped Claude Sonnet 5 at $2 per million input tokens, close to flagship Opus 4.8 quality, betting most work doesn't need the expensive model to get expensive-model results. Meta started renting out its spare AI compute as a new business called Meta Compute, chasing the same cloud dollars as AWS and Google. Tesla went the other way, capping employee AI tool spending at $200 a week months after ranking engineers by how many tokens they burned.What's Covered* Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 launch and its near-Opus pricing bet* Meta Compute: turning spare AI infrastructure into a product* Tesla's $200-a-week cap on employee AI tool spending, and the Grok exceptionSources* MacRumors: Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5* TechCrunch: Meta, like SpaceX, looks to turn excess AI compute into cash* Electrek: Tesla caps employee AI spending at $200/week Get full access to The AI Vaults at theaivaults.substack.com/subscribe