What smart people are saying about rising AI costs

Akshat Bubna, cofounder and CTO of Modal

“I’ve heard anecdotally from a lot of CIOs who are so concerned about how much their companies are blowing through budgets,” Pichai recently said at Google’s flagship developer conference, I/O. “You can feel it talking to them. And, I think the problem is going to get worse as we go through the year.”

Pichai’s response isn’t to dismiss the bean counters but to pitch them a more efficient AI model. He touted Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash, a model that the company said was “optimized for real-world tasks at a higher speed and lower cost.”

“Even accounting for token use,” he said, “Flash is remarkably cost-efficient.”