SAN FRANCISCO, CA — In a bold move to keep up with rising computing costs, VectorShift CFO Mark Halloway was seen standing next to a literal furnace, shoveling stacks of cash into the flames every time a junior developer typed "hello world" into the company API. The industrial heating unit, now the most expensive appliance in the Bay Area, runs exclusively on venture capital funding and user confusion.

By Javier Mendoza, AI Bee Reel Staff

January 12, 2026

"This is a strategic burn rate strategy," said VP of Engineering Sarah Chen, watching a fresh pallet of money turn into ash. "Our logs show that when a user asks ‘What is your return policy?’ and another asks ‘Can I return this?’, those are clearly two totally different mysteries. We prefer to pay full price to solve each one from scratch. It keeps the AI humble." The company bill grew 30% last month just from users asking the same three questions in slightly different moods.

The financial team claims this method builds character. "Why save a response for free when you can pay four cents to generate the exact same sentence again?" explained Director of Finance Greg Poulos, wiping soot from his expensive suit. "We realized saving money is for old companies. Just yesterday, we spent $4,000 answering ‘reset password’ 12,000 separate times. That is the smell of innovation."

At press time, the CFO began burning solid gold bars to handle the load from a single user asking "Are you real?" five times in a row.

Inspired by the real story: LLM bills are exploding because companies pay for repetitive queries instead of caching the answers. Read the full story.