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JB Josh Brown Josh Brown CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, the investment advisory firm he co-founded with Barry Ritholtz.

“This is, to me, going to be the story of 2027: efficiencies in AI per dollar spent. We spent so much of the last three years in a model race. Whose is better? It's about to tip over. Whose is good enough and cheaper?”

The Compound and Friends · October 2026

“This is, to me, going to be the story of 2027: efficiencies in AI per dollar spent. We spent so much of the last three years in a model race. Whose is better? It's about to tip over. Whose is good enough and cheaper?” — Josh Brown, The Compound and Friends

Brown had just read out IBM's CEO saying large enterprises are scrutinizing the real ROI of their AI spending, and noted the labs launching cheaper models. The prediction is his own.

The Compound and Friends · 2026-10-23 Listen to the episode → More from Josh Brown →

Transcript

The Compound and Friends Around 58:59 into the episode
Josh Brown

do the paperwork, though. Yeah. Testamentary stuff. Yeah.

Jill Schlesinger

Yeah. Well, I mean, there is something to be said for a real relationship. It's attention. It's, it's hearing what somebody is saying and valuing it. It's like, I see you. I hear you. So these

Josh Brown

…of their AI spend is. That's the CEO said this yesterday. They are also getting worried if some of the AI spending is completely out of control with no real return. No One and Anthropic are launching more affordable models. OpenAI introduced lower cost mid-range additions to GPT-6 in September. And this month, Anthropic unveiled Haiku 5.5 for Claude, which is better performance at a lower cost. This is, to me, going to be the story of 2027: efficiencies in AI per dollar spent. We spent so much of the last three years in a model race. Whose is better? It's about to tip over. Whose is good enough and cheaper?

Jill Schlesinger

Well, you had someone on recently who mentioned this on the show, and I can't remember. I'm sorry, I've forgot which guest. I believe it was Jensen Huang. Exactly. Who's a good dear friend and our favorite guest? Good friend. You know, I think there's an interesting trend of when it is good enough…

Josh Brown

a private jet. Exactly.

Jill Schlesinger

Exactly. And it's funny. I remember I once talked to someone in the business who was a fintech company. And I remember them telling me, well, I just want you to know, you know, we have the best tracks. We have the best systems. It's incredible. It's like we're the bullet chain of financial…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

More from The Compound and Friends

“It's not really going to replace the thing that the people are actually paying us for. It's so simple. It's attention. Is somebody paying attention to me? … I see all these B2C AI startups that are, oh, we're going to do this agentically. Nobody will pay you for that. That will be zero dollars and Vanguard will do it and Schwab will do it. And there will be no margin and no audience.” — Josh Brown, The Compound and Friends “If just, for example, OpenAI went bankrupt tomorrow. And I'm not making that prediction, but let's just say that it did. I think the U.S. economy would go into a recession. … It's not the same thing as a great financial crisis. The banks are fine.” — Steve Eisman, The Compound and Friends