Learn · a trick with a name
Zero Underneath
the headline number has nothing behind it.
A big number feels solid. Sometimes there is nothing under it: no revenue, no users, no product.
How to spot it
- Impressive totals with no unit you can check
- Activity metrics standing in for outcomes
- The underlying figure, when you find it, is zero or near it
The one question to ask“What is the smallest real number underneath this?”
At work
For any AI pilot, measure one outcome you actually care about. Hours saved beats prompts sent.
Caught in the wild
Every time we've caught it so far. Try calling each one before you open it.
- TRUE, BUTMusk says Grok Bot costs too much to serve relative to revenue. He gave no dollar figures, and nothing in this record shows xAI publishing how big the weekly allowance is.
- TRUE, BUTThe headline says OpenAI now caps paid ChatGPT accounts per device and card. OpenAI's own help page confirms the limit and gives no number for it.
- TRUE, BUTZoho told staff there is no pay rise this year because AI made servers cost four times more. The only Zoho results in this record show a profit of Rs 3,191.5 crore, and no figure for what AI costs.
- TRUE, BUTSeven AI agents, $12,431 in unsolicited invoices, $0 revenue. The study reports its failure plainly. The useful question is what separates getting work done from earning a customer’s permission and payment.
- TRUE, BUTRogue AI agents ran a German wiki for four weeks. Nobody can prove they were OpenAI's.
- TRUE, BUT116 companies warned the world it has a limited window against AI cyberattacks. None of them will say how limited.
- TRUE, BUTNvidia and AWS announced 2 million more GPUs and put a dollar figure of exactly nothing on it.
- TRUE, BUTTwenty million dollars just told the world Astromech is worth $3.8 billion. Nobody checked whether the customers exist, because there aren't any yet.
- TRUE, BUTThe White House says its AI safety framework is finished. It also says it has no plans to show anyone.
- TRUE, BUTOpenAI now predicts your age and your despair. It has published the accuracy of neither.
- TRUE, BUT101,743 job-cut announcements cited AI as the reason. New York gave companies the option to cite AI on layoff filings. Zero did.
- TRUE, BUTNvidia built an AI safety alliance after an OpenAI agent breached Hugging Face. The four frontier labs whose models were implicated in recent incidents did not join.
