Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart · Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Ed Zitron argues that despite massive spending and talent investment in AI, there's no concrete proof of significant productivity improvements across the economy. He notes that many companies' AI revenue relies heavily on a few hyperscalers and AI companies that are not yet profitable, creating a precarious economic situation.
“We have not had any proof that there is a massive productivity improvement on this. We've not seen it across the economy, we're not seeing non- outside of semiconductors, stocks, we're not seeing growth in revenues because of AI, other than from hyperscalers that are circulating their own money back into themselves using AI compute revenues and anthropomorphic Google, sorry, anthropomorphic and open AI.”
“As far as LLMs themselves, it's still not clear what the business model is. Because the majority of people that use LLMs are using them in the substatistic fashion.”
“It isn't AI. It's compute-based automation, writ large. It's the most vulgar version of script kitty stuff I've ever seen.”