Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart · Tuesday, August 11, 2026
According to an anecdote shared by Adam Taggart, a prominent AI investor's CTO reported compute costs doubling every 45 days with only a 5% increase in productivity. This suggests a significant cost-to-benefit imbalance in current AI initiatives, prompting a 'pump the brakes' approach from some.
“Chemat Palapateya, um, who is, you know, pretty pretty big in AI, um, he mentioned that he talked to his chief technology officer, and said, look, give me a sense of how AI is doing for us right now. And the CTO said, well, basically, my compute costs are doubling every 45 days or so.”
“And Chemat said, okay, that's not very good. How about productivity increases? And he said, nah, maybe like 5%.”
“So basically, Chemat's like, okay, I'm spending more and more for this technology and I'm getting not a lot out of it. So he's kind of pumped the brakes.”