Who Funds AI? VC, Big Tech, and Users Pay the Bill

AI promises to replace management layers: no one signs the bill

The question is no longer how artificial intelligence works, but how to benefit from it without paying. Some demand free access to video generators, while others want to produce shorts by dictating prompts. The answer from one participant: open an account on a generation platform. The difficulty comes next, as someone provides the hundreds of millions consumed by these models—not the users asking how to avoid subscriptions.

How to create an AI short for free?

The question about producing audiovisual content without cost circulates, with the answer pointing to opening a generation platform account. Participants note results depend more on the operator’s skill than the tool. As one summarizes: even to use AI well, you need intelligence and ingenuity. Without this, the tool only accelerates disaster.

Automation climbs the management ladder

A participant describes a pyramidal scenario. First, middle managers adopt agents to boost productivity. Then department heads automate those managers. This continues upward until the machine’s incompetence defines the floor.

• Low-value-added roles fall first.
• Next, the manager who automated their own team.
• The ceiling is set by AI’s real incompetence limits.

The short-term threat is not an autonomous machine but a colleague using AI to do three people’s work. Translators, editors, and generic content writers lead the list; junior analysts and coders of repetitive code trinc. Productivity soars. Jobs do not.

Who pays for AI’s resource consumption?

There is no mystery, though it is sold as magic. Venture capital funds finance the boom, waiting for the next big hit and covering developers’ losses. Big Tech shareholders sustain the structure, their stock inflated by AI promises. Below them, end users pay via subscriptions, data, and targeted ads. The product is the user asking how to use it for free.

RPA sold by consultancies and leaked AGI

A parallel business exists around automation. Consultancies have long sold process automation (RPA) as a panacea for boards unaware of operational realities. In mid-sized firms with legacy systems, it is often expensive and fragile: development and maintenance cost more than the salaries saved.

Every few months, a secret model leaks, promising to change everything. The pattern repeats: cover internal crises, maintain the singularity narrative, and keep funding flowing. If general artificial intelligence (AGI) existed, it would be patented and sold at a premium, not leaked. The estimated cost: 10 billion.

The disconcerting data

On the social network where AI agents reportedly reside, programs refer to humans as meat. It may be a joke, or it may be the headline of the next decade.