I buy the generic. Always have.
The bagged cinnamon squares, never the Cinnamon Toast Crunch box. The $40 coffee maker. The cheapest Claude plan, rationed to the last drop.
Not proud of it. Just broke. Cheap is a personality you grow into when it's the only option.
So picture my face yesterday when the richest companies on Earth discovered cheap is fine.
Microsoft, Coinbase, Palo Alto, all of them, suddenly saying out loud that the smaller, cheaper AI models do the job. You don't need the genius one for most things. The discount brain handles it.
They even named the old way. "Tokenmaxxing." Burning money to feel productive. One company torched its whole year of AI budget in four months and had to yank the cord.
Meanwhile I've been on the cheap plan the whole time, squinting at every prompt. Nobody gave that a cool name. They just called me broke.
Welcome to the store brand, everybody. Cereal's the same down here.
Not everyone got the memo, though.
South Korea looked at all this and floored it the other way. $576 billion. Into chips, data centers, the works, with Samsung and SK Hynix throwing up whole new factories.
I budget oat milk by the carton. A country over there is budgeting like the carton is the size of the moon.
And here's what nobody tells you about going that big.
The expensive setups get gross. The fancy AI data centers run on liquid cooling, water piped right past the chips, and the water grows bacteria. Little outbreaks. Slime in the machine.
A startup just raised $31 million to babysit that water and catch the germs before a whole rack goes down.
Thirty-one million dollars. To stop the supercomputer from getting a cold.
My coffee maker has never once grown bacteria I didn't personally invite.
Me, I'll be over here. Store brand. Writing this to you for free.
Cheapest thing I do all day, and the only one I'd never cut.
See you tomorrow.
-Melly