You're paying more for less AI

The night before Dev Day, OpenAI told everyone on the $200 plan that the plan is back, and it's worth about half of what it was a week ago. Same price, half the usage. If you're on the legacy plan like me, you keep the old quota until your billing cycle ends. Then you're a pleb like everybody else.

That was the warmup. This week I covered a data center stuck in the New Mexico desert, a Dev Day with no new model, and a cheap new Anthropic model that burned through my tokens, and I went in treating them as three separate stories. By the end of Dev Day I'd changed my mind. The AI buildout ran into the physical world, and the bill is rolling downhill onto the people already paying.

Oracle's Project Jupiter is an AI data center campus in Doña Ana County near Santa Teresa, New Mexico. Oracle still calls it "on schedule." It also just sent a force majeure notice. That's the contract clause you invoke when an earthquake, a war, or a natural disaster stops you from performing. None of those happened. What happened is the power isn't there.

The 2.45 gigawatt fuel cell plant that's supposed to run the place is still waiting on air quality permits from the New Mexico Environment Department. The state denied the natural gas pipeline a crossing through a short section of state trust land, and the gas in-service date slid to February 2027, for a campus that's supposed to reach full service in 2028. The $18 billion loan about 20 banks put behind this thing is trading below 90 cents on the dollar in the secondary market. Oracle's plan was always to spend money it doesn't have and make it back when AI takes off. They fucked around with the funding. Now they're finding out.

I learned this lesson the hard way. A few years ago my software team was working on something that flies, out at a testing ground in the middle of the desert, living out of a couple of double-wides. The software was done. The hardware wouldn't even turn on. Twelve hours of debugging later, we found a wire about the size of a pen tip pinched in the housing, shorting out the whole thing. Software people think you can pay people more and tell them to work double hours. Hardware doesn't work like that, and neither does a state air permit.

I like AI and I use it a lot. I still don't want to live next to one of these things, and neither do the people near the site who already buy bottled water because they don't trust what comes out of the tap. That opposition is part of the schedule now, whether Oracle budgets for it or not.

When the data centers slip, the labs fight over the compute that exists, and you feel it. ChatGPT is sitting at 99.65% uptime, and that's after the old trick of splitting the service into a bunch of components on the status page. The normal target for a serious web service is about 30 minutes of downtime a year. Codex was down for almost an hour last week. If Uber went down for an hour, it'd be front-page news. With AI we've just come to expect shitty service.

The speed of GPT-6 Astra fell off a cliff for me too. Pro is turning into the new Plus, and Plus is turning into the new free. The rumored $500 plan looks like the old $200 plan at a higher price. They're boiling the frog slowly so you don't notice.

Then Dev Day. I wanted them to pull it off. I'm not rooting for Anthropic or OpenAI, and competition is what keeps both of them shipping new models. So I sat through the whole stream waiting for a model that answers Opus 5.5, and it never came. We got Dots, an always-on agent product that is basically Grokbot, which a lot of us have been running with Hermes Agent and OpenClaw for six to eight months. We got GPT-6.1 Sol, pitched as "very near Astra level intelligence at a fifth of the price." And we got an ultra fast Astra, eight times the speed at six times the price. I'm already chewing through my $200 plan on regular Astra. Who is going to pay six times the price for this at scale?

The one feature I liked, sign in with ChatGPT, has a catch. Your users bring their ChatGPT tokens to your app, which is cool, until OpenAI watches your API usage light up, learns the market exists, builds a counter product, and puts you out of business two months later. That's how they steal your alpha.

Anthropic dropped Sonnet 5.5 the day before Dev Day, so I ran it on real work: pulling a 10 GB H-1B data set off a Tor-hosted repo, building a website of the ten most interesting findings, and cutting an infographic video from it. It got all three done eventually, which is why the early reviews say Sonnet does everything Opus does for less money. The problem is how it got there.

On the website, Sonnet reviewed its own 29 charts and fixed 21 of them for substantive errors: mislabeled occupations, partial-year data, a data gap. Opus doesn't get things that wrong in the first place. The video took 22 minutes, and most of that was Sonnet finding its own mistakes, fixing them, and re-rendering, including a 14 millisecond sync issue nobody can perceive. It spun up subagents on fool's errands and burned tokens the whole time.

So yes, it's faster per action and cheaper per token. It is not more efficient. When compute gets scarce, every vendor has a cheaper option for you, and you pay for it in retries. You get what you pay for.

At the end of Dev Day, OpenAI ran a feel-good reel of people making art and having fun. Here's what I said watching it live:

"Everybody using this technology is being expected to work 10 times as hard. You're being expected to work 10 to 20 hours extra a week because they're firing people at your company and they're saying you could just make up the difference with ChatGPT."

Follow the bill downhill. Oracle borrowed against a future it can't build fast enough, the labs are rationing the compute that exists, and your plan shrinks in the same quarter your boss cuts headcount and tells you ChatGPT will cover the difference. Everyone upstream gets to call it a delay. You absorb it in extra hours.

Cancel Codex. If you're on an Anthropic plan, use Opus 5.5 for the real work, and keep Sonnet 5.5 on narrow jobs like drafting an email reply. Price your AI by what it costs to get the job right, not by what it costs per token.

If your company is cutting headcount and handing you the extra work, and you're thinking about getting out, I'm now doing one-on-one career coaching. I've interviewed hundreds of people over the years. In an hour we get your resume in shape, put your job search in order, and automate the tedious parts. It's $250, you get written notes the same day, and if it wasn't useful you get your money back. Book a session.

If this was useful, forward it to someone who's paying for two AI plans right now.

- Dr. J