Ara Kharazian

Things Ara Says on Podcasts

Lead Economist at Ramp. Writing and analysis of AI, business spend, and the economy

Where to Find Them

Ara Kharazian writes Ramp Economics Lab , writes Moody's Talks - Inside Economics , writes a16z Podcast and writes The Business Engineer . They have also been a guest on TBPN (3 times) , Prof G Markets (2 times) , Prof G Media (2 times) , The Rundown , Plain English with Derek Thompson , Schwab Network , Animal Spirits Podcast , The AI Supercycle and Big Technology .

Recently: “The AI Story Wall Street Doesn't Want to Hear” on Plain English with Derek Thompson (October 2026); “Cracks in the AI Thesis Part 3” on Ramp Economics Lab (October 2026); “AI spend is being pulled in two different directions” on Ramp Economics Lab (October 2026); “What companies are buying after the Hugging Face hack” on Ramp Economics Lab (September 2026); “Anthropic Whistleblower Says AI Could “Kill Us All”” on Prof G Media (September 2026); “Anthropic Whistleblower Says AI Could “Kill Us All”” on Prof G Markets (September 2026).

What They Said

“And so despite this model being so powerful, it had to be restricted, businesses didn't really end up using Fable. I think it topped out at like 5% to 10% of business spend at its peak in that period. … We kind of figured out that, oh, there is a limit in terms of whether or not businesses are willing to pay or use the frontier model.” — Ara Kharazian, Plain English with Derek Thompson

Kharazian, an economist at Ramp who studies business card spending, on a frontier model that came with mandatory prompt monitoring. Most businesses chose a slightly weaker, cheaper competitor instead, which he says shows customers now have the negotiating power over model makers.

Plain English with Derek Thompson · 2026-10-23 Permalink → Listen →
Plain English with Derek Thompson Around 28:49 into the episode
Ara Kharazian

…driven by the top 1%, that is the latest crack that's starting to form, which is that the top 1% is starting to slow its pace of spend. And the products are getting pretty good, such that they allow businesses to outright cut their spend and optimize it with cheaper and cheaper models every month.

Derek Thompson

…response by Anthropic or OpenAI to strengthen their business in the face of all of this competition? That the frontier models are cutting their prices. There's more competition from Chinese open weight models, from domestic open weight models. What should they do? What do you think they will do?

Ara Kharazian

…responses was: okay, you can release the model, but you need to collect all the data from the model and do checks on everything that's being prompted in the model so that we know that no one's misusing it. That ended up being kind of a non-starter for most businesses, which have obligations to their customers about data retention and making sure that their software vendors don't store any data. And so despite this model being so powerful, it had to be restricted, businesses didn't really end up using Fable. I think it topped out at like 5% to 10% of business spend at its peak in that period. And why would they? Because it actually was it the best model on the market at the time? Yes. But there was also a really good other model available at the time, which was GPT Sol, OpenAI's competitor that had just come out. And so for a relatively low trade-off in performance, and actually a benefit in that Seoul was actually a little bit cheaper, businesses were able to still use a highly…

Derek Thompson

Eventually, somebody outside of the AI capital loop has to obtain enough value from AI Story pay the bill, right? Revenue right now is around $200 billion, $220 billion a year. It probably has to roughly double by next year and then roughly double from that in 2027. But several things are standing…

Ara Kharazian

That's pretty much the case.

Derek Thompson

What's the strongest argument against it?

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