AI is a money pit — here’s why investors don’t mind

Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard, but if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest-growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels, and in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel, with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS.

More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com slash decoder. Hello and welcome to Decoder. This is Alex Heath, not Neeli Patel. I'm deputy editor at The Verge and I'm guest hosting a couple of episodes of Decoder this month as we head into the holidays, and I'm very excited for what we have coming.

I'll be back later this month with an exclusive interview with the CEO of Chipmaker Arm, so stay tuned for that. And if you want a sneak peek, be sure to check out Command Line, my weekly newsletter about the tech industry's inside conversation. But today we're talking about a topic I've been focusing on a lot lately. It's at the heart of the most ambitious and most costly gamble the tech industry has arguably ever made. That is, of course, artificial intelligence, and specifically the idea that one day soon, big companies across all kinds of industries will be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI products.

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