I don't know a single white collar worker who isn't using AI for their job. Not like forced, but like "Oh damn, this bot thing can do a lot of tedious leg work for me".
To think that people won't pay $60-$80/mo to continue using it is wild to me. In a white collar environment it pays for itself in a few hours of use.
If you focus on how much value AI brings to people (mostly in time saved), the bubble hardly looks bubbly.
Did Uber die when a trip across town went from $3 to $13? No. It's giving more rides than ever, 10x more than when it was $3.
I'm sure there will be some losers, but unlike the dot-com boom, the entirety of the population already has all the tools needed to leverage AI.
But the question is how much are people willing to pay for AI.
I use AI every day at work, but I only pay $20. That's the most I will ever want to pay. And, so far, it gives me everything I need.
If OpenAI or Anthropic suddenly said "Sorry, the game is up. You'll have to pay $100/month now", I would 100% look into cheaper Chinese solutions.
I suspect the AI subscription (or API) economy is whale economy. You have a small, small percentage of users that are happy to pay whatever it takes - while the vast majority will either use the free tier, and then the next group will pay for the cheapest or next cheapest subscription.
EDIT: And I'll echo what another user wrote here. The VAST majority of office users around the world don't work for tech companies flush in cash. Even adding something like $20 - $100 subscriptions to every user is a serious enough financial obligation that it needs to go through budget planning / boards. Even more so for all the government workers around the world.
To put it into perspective if we consider that US salaries are 3 to 5 times those of other "rich" countries then it's already a 60 to 100 dollar subscription for the next richest part of the world.
The video quotes sales of $2.5 trillion a year to payoff those investments. What workforce you divide it by is a bit up in the air, but let's use 500 millions, which is basically 100% of the workforce of US + Europe + some change. That gives you around $500 a month per employee (from hedge fund manager to flipping burgers at McDonald's).
And there will be competition. I see zero moat right now. The user specific part of the state of the model sits outside of the control of the model (it is basically my code base, or my prompts, all of which I can transfer to any competitor).
But AI use translates directly to time savings (if it works). You only need 1-2 hours of time savings per employee per week to break even on a $100/seat/month subscription.
2. Cell phone usage was always localized. You had local telcoms and that was about it. Deutsche Telekom Germany didn't have to compete all the time with NTT Docomo Japan.
And there are probably 20 other economic differences I'm missing.
anthropic and openai are a part of the ai economy, but not the only. the most valuable company in the world is nvidia, a massive player that benefits from the existance of the ow models.
what im trying to say is that we focus a bit too much on the labs, but the biggest part is in the infra that makes everything possible.
I spent $18k in credits last month, I have 3x 20x Anthropic accounts (for Fable to bypass limits) which runs me another $600ish p/m and then a chatgpt pro account another $200 p/m. The value I got out of it is easily 1-200x what I paid.
1 to 200 is a pretty big spread to between losing 18k dollars and making 3.6 milllion - do you have any actual numbers on the value produced from this 18k investment?
What are you using it for? I have to assume some kind of agentic workload. Also curious to know when (if ever) you would pivot to Chinese providers to save $$$
This is the way it is on Wall Street more each century, and for AI to go public on that exchange it's going to have to go big or go home. Considering the amount of money that has already been spent privately.
There is no alternative pipeline to replenish those reserves, and different people have different ideas about capacity and bottlenecks relative to ambitions and what they are supposed to get for their money.
As has been mentioned in another comment, there is no alternative foundation other than optimism either. The exchange wouln't exist if it weren't originally intended to trade only shares that were all worth holding otherwise. Naturally some worth holding more than others. This is so big it will be necessary to be able to fool way more people with way more money than usual, otherwise those that prevail will have nowhere near their wildest dreams come true.
Naturally AI is never going to fly off the shelf like it could until it starts getting cheaper all the time for huge jumps in performance. Cheap home computers will need to be able to do quite a bit more than they can only do today while connected to a massive AI data center, without ever having been connected to anything outside the home at all. Otherwise AI can not ever be considered "general" any more than computing could be considered personal, until you were no longer reliant on a remote mainframe in a huge out-of-state data center somewhere tied by a thread leading through a squeaky modem over monopolized communication lines. This differential between clunky (clanky?) old data centers' overall computing power relative to the amount held freely within homes & businesses is something that looks like it could be regaining exploitability like never in decades. I know one day Woz jumped right in without needing to be a greedy businessman because there was no possible downside, and he could let just about any dedicated growth leader make as much money as they wanted off his technology. Plus Jobs was no slouch in many ways and Woz never needed to worry with a product that sells itself to begin with, putting Jobs in hog heaven where he could persuasively bring it to the next level almost whenever he wanted like you can do few other ways.
So not just dot-com related hardware & software.
That goes for memory and storage too, people should do the math on how affordable nominal amounts are supposed to be by now. If everything were still normal 16GB of DDR4 would be about $10, at least by 2027, so it hasn't merely doubled in the last year which is the most obvious part, it has skyrocketed to 10x what it would have been. And still rising not falling, so all this is going to have to be reversed for consumers to even afford what they used to be able to do.
For people who didn't want to spend a thing on AI until it's naturally way more capable and constantly getting cheaper like it should be, it's pretty frustrating when it's already been unavoidably costing "indirectly" more than they have been willing to pay if they were getting maximum benefit, when most of them have only gotten more surveillance. One day "indirectly" was just no longer true through no fault of millions of people. And growing as fast as the money stream will allow.
Up until recently AI was way more niche and fewer ordinary consumers were exposed, where now there are millions more aware of its influence and growing fast. But the more aware more ordinary people become, millions more opinions are going to come to the surface and need to be dealt with.
>whale economy.
Thar she blows!
One pervasive opinion is that so far it's made by rich people for rich people, and more so than most those who want to get rich quick are joining the bandwagon. Of course what consumers see in the media is only the "band directors" who are already rich to begin with, they set the example because they now want to get richer quicker and this is the vehicle they have chosen to do that. This is not unexpected, after all they always get what they want when it's things you have to be ungodly rich to do.
This makes for company valuations based more on optimism than anything else and once that has eclipsed underlying worth then any unforeseen bottlenecks or financing stumbles become highly magnified.
For one thing there may not be enough momentum to even fully build enough data centers to fulfill some players' plans for recouping such large investments, but at the same time AI's not going to really get good until data centers are not needed at all, which is so ominous there appears to be even more force being applied to encourage people to ignore things like this. Otherwise it could get too shocking.
This disparity in upside just plain instinctively sidelines more ordinary people as it builds, so the number of people who are just going to have to wait for AI and everything associated with it to start getting cheaper all the time becomes a force in itself. It'll be easy to notice without being a finance guru.
> Even adding something like $20 - $100 subscriptions to every user is a serious enough financial obligation that it needs to go through budget planning / boards
I doubt that. In my tiny town in India, office workers use the 1800 INR (20$) plans. 1800 INR/month is like... 4% of the salary these guys get. And since this is mostly MS-office and windows explorer and chrome based stuff in very small, non-tech companies, it pays for itself in literally a day. If they _could_ pay less they would. After all they pirate MS office. But the cheap chinese plans dont have any distribution, whereas OpenAI seems to have effectively marketed to them via IPL ads and such. No one there even knows about deepseek. It also doesn't help deepseek and such are focused on the coding market. No multimodal, office plugins, etc.
For personal stuff, people there use Meta AI - mostly because it is directly available in whatsapp and these days they are pushing it by adding a dedicated button for it right on the home page. Regardless, they still call it "chatgpt". OpenAI brand is unmatched.
Remember that 20$ is a subsidized rate openai is currently willing to provide. Once that goes down you think these guys would be willing to pay token based billing charges ?
It is not going to go away. Rather they have doubled down and opened 399 INR/mo (4$/mo) plans that as of late have GPT 5.6 Luna.
The reason this works is that you get lesser inference time compute used for queries on these cheaper plans which makes it sustainable and this is enough for the tasks these guys do.
And some local telcos are bundling this subscription as well, so most people just get it for "free". For example, I get Google AI Pro for free with my 350 INR/mo telco plan.
These companies have spent billions of investor dollars and they will need to recoup that cost soon. And then show year over year growth on top of that.
Unless they can massively scale down training and inference cost or implement AGI I don't know what their plan is. Just provide a subsidized plan for the next 10 or 20 years? Their costs are directly proportional to the amount of tokens the LLM produces. How is a monthly subscription plan supposed to account for such costs?
They dont need to scale down anything. AGI is a red herring.
Even Deepseek at its absurd prices is a very healthy business. Regarding their return on capex multiple, their CEO said they make a six-fold profit on their compute capex with 10 month recuperation. Because of this, all of them are spending aggressively on compute. Apart from that, user acquisition and data labelling are the major costs that are preventing net profitability right now. High quality data labelling is said to not have a cost advantage in china etc as well and they pay global market prices for this. I can confirm this is true in india too the model companies I know pay global market rates for high quality data.
> Their costs are directly proportional to the amount of tokens the LLM produces. How is a monthly subscription plan supposed to account for such costs?
By limiting the number of tokens you use per month? per week, per hour? And by limiting the inference time compute dedicated to each turn in each session.
> need to recoup
the world economy has shown itself capable of handling decade-scale recouping easily
The main obstacle today in the inference business is the high variability in usefulness/token. This does not need to be solved, but rather only quantified. Innovation is needed to be able to reasonably bound this variance for a reasonable subset of tasks. And we are making progress on this. Naturally though, tasks on the frontier of current capabilities have very high variance. The last couple of years has followed the pattern where tasks no longer on the frontier have reduced variance, but I am not claiming this will continue to be the case generally as the frontier improves.
> Even Deepseek at its absurd prices is a very healthy business. Regarding their return on capex multiple, their CEO said they make a six-fold profit on their compute capex with 10 month recuperation.
That's "theoretical profit" - in some imaginary world where the free subscribers would pay the top tier cost.
> their return on capex multiple, their CEO said they make a six-fold profit on their compute capex with 10 month recuperation
I am not familiar with chineese model companies as much as I am with US based ones so I don't have much to say beyond that the CEO is incentivced to pump up those numbers.
> By limiting the number of tokens you use per month? per week, per hour? And by limiting the inference time compute dedicated to each turn in each session.
If this was so simple I don't know why GitHub copilot went to token based billing at my company.
> This does not need to be solved, but rather only quantified. Innovation is needed to be able to reasonably bound this variance for a reasonable subset of tasks
It's much better to make a business case for them after finding this bound right? Currently I can't use copilot for anything serious since I cannot predict how many credits one request is going to consume.
Your point about non frontier tasks using less tokens makes sense. As you said, let's see if it holds up
Return on compute capex is tied mostly to gpu lifetimes so I don't think it will be different for the American companies, who also charge much more being closed source.
> If this was so simple...copilot...
Github copilot still has subscriptions. They moved away from request based accounting to token based accounting for the usage limits, as did cursor, and everybody else.
I remember the piracy era, and it used to be a joke whether anyone could actually stop it.
Eventually MS dealt with piracy by going after firms, and finally by offering something cheap enough.
Between the legal aspects, and the fact that its MS office, paying Rs 1800 a month is possible.
I’ve been trawling every source I can find to understand what the story on the ground is, and when it comes to productivity it’s a huge mixed bag. The variance in outcomes between independent coders, frontier labs, someone in SV and someone in India is mind-bending right now.
Most firms which talk about their AI plans are not seeing traction, and the AI projects are going to the same place that the ML projects used to go to die.
It’s at the individual level that I am seeing productivity gains, however that isn’t something firms are happy to hear right now.
>Eventually MS dealt with piracy by going after firms, and finally by offering something cheap enough.
Sure, because they realized that selling software at any cost because software has extremely low overhead. Selling 100M Windows at 2 USD was easier and my guess is a wash at that price.
However, AI is not selling software, it's selling hardware usage which is not free and has real cost. If Rs 1800 which is 20 USD is not profitable, then they will not offer it.
Rofl, I already went for cheaper Chinese solutions. I can achieve more than I could when I was giving OpenAI 20 bucks a month, and for a fraction of the price.
I have no idea why people still use ChatGPT or Claude.
Most people don't understand how cheap models like DeepSeek and similar are. I have $5 in an account that I use for months. I can get very complex code for less than 50 cents.
Me too. Sinophobia may be the culprit, too many years watching fox or cnn is my guess?
I love chinese phones, cars, cities, people, and now AI models. There is a beautiful world out there to admire if people is willing to open their eyes.
You will spend thousands of dollars on hardware to run those at lower quality (quantized) than the benchmarks where they match March SOTA performance.
Source: I have the hardware to run those locally. I would never recommend it to anyone trying to save money. It’s so much cheaper to pay even Anthropic or OpenAI.
At my $day_job we are forced to use a shared virtual machine for all work activities. The Windows instance has 64gb of RAM, 8 virtual cores of old EPYC CPU and no GPU acceleration. It is also shared between 6 users.
They will not spend extra 20$ per user per month to add compute and increase productivity.
Google funds Anthropic
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Anthropic promises to rent Google's TPUs
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Google guarantees the infrastructure
needed to fulfil Anthropic's promise
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Wall Street lends against Google's guarantee
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Borrowed money buys Google-designed TPUs
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The TPU purchases "prove" demand for Google TPUs
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Anthropic's compute capacity and valuation rise
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Google's investment in Anthropic rises in value
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Higher valuations justify still more financing
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+--------------------------------------+
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DO IT AGAIN
That's like saying my delivery company is profitable because with current gas prices, my margin is 80%. Yea, what about all money you spent to get there? You still profitable then?
As Ed Zitron pointed out, that "quarter" of profitability is EBITDA profitability and comes with plenty of creative accounting. When they do it for a year, we can say "They have found profitability"
Why are you citing old news? Zitron wrote that months ago when Anthropic was reported to have ~30B ARR. Anthropic now has more than double that, at even higher margins.
There's no doubt at this point that Anthropic is profitable.
Because I don't know how you can be so totally and completely wrong for so many years, and still have people lend you credibility. But I definitely do understand how you can rage farm subscription dollars from suckers for years.
$80 per month in a 5,000 people Enterprise is 400k per month which translates to ~5m per year. That is easily in the 8-16% of their total IT budget. I don’t know you, but companies don’t like to increase recurring cost. Is AI good? Yes. Is it clear how it generates enough ROI to justify a material IT cost increase? No. This is the problem now, not how much white collar workers use AI, but what is the productivity narrative of it. Because AI is so generic, there is no clear specialized use case, like when Salesforce invented the CRM for example.
The thing that's a bit different about AI from a CRM is it translates pretty directly into time savings. You only need each employee to save 1-2 hours of work per month to break even with a $80/seat subscription.
It's true that it can easily save 1-2 hours per month, but it only seems worth it if those hours saved are spent doing something else productive/profitable.
It appears that a lot of the time saved is spent either 1) doing nothing instead, 2) waiting for the AI to finish, or 3) increasing the hours spent elsewhere down/up the chain for reviewing, fixing, auditing.
The obvious benefit of anything offering to save time is that now you have time for "higher order work", but often, we use the time saved to be lazy.
After all, that's the underlying reason we used the time-saving, corner-cutting tool in the first place.
People will pay out of their pockets if an AI can free up a few of their hybrid hours a month. And already it looks like the vast majority of white collar AI spend is from individuals, not companies.
I mean, why would you show your hand by using the company AI? Use your AI and take the credit...
The real question is not whether there will be a market for AI, it is obvious that there will be one (as it was obvious the Internet was a gigantic thing in the dotcom boom). It is rather whether the value will be in the models (and if so in which?) or the infrastructure or somewhere else.
Interesting thoughts from Dwarkesh Patel on the future of models [1]. In summary, no moat if a client can switch to a competitor from a dropdown when all models are similar-ish (so models are commodities), but to really compete with humans, AI needs to start "learning on the job", i.e. accumulating experience like an employee (as opposed to the training / inference approach where the model isn't learning after it is released). If your model does that, then you have vendor lock-in as you can't replace an experienced model with a competitor. Then the value is in the model.
As in the 90s, this could go in all sort of different directions, hard to make predictions. And remember the 90s: the value was in the browser (you had to purchase it, eg Netscape), then the browser came for free with the OS (no value in the browser), then the browser was the most important thing in the world as it was control over the default search engine, everyone thought portals was the most important thing to control, so ISPs had their own applications accessing the internet from their own portal, etc - none of those people were stupid.
Not hosting in China will be a moat. Tech (software) never really experienced it, but the rest of Western industry all have stories of getting burned by China and their policy of ignoring IP rights.
I work for a large company and for any LLM I use professionally, whether programmatically or via a UI, I get to pick from a dropdown from Gemini, Claude, OpenAI and the open weight ones. We ain't locked in.
Yeah, and that is completely fine business-wise for all the businesses in that dropdown. Averaged over the whole TAM, they will all make a lot of money. The reason is that the total market becomes _bigger_ with every new model (upto a reasonable point of course, but for 5 models it is obviously true), they don't end up competing for the same slices of the pie.
The core business for each of the 5 will not be companies like yours, but rather few hundred to few thousand companies each who exclusively use their model not for technical reasons, but because they were wined and dined or due to bundling with another service. The other hundreds of thousands of customers are all bonus. This is true for most categories of SaaS not just LLM inference.
If the vendor of a core piece of software that you are already locked into tells you they are raising prices and adding AI inference features, you are going to cancel whatever AI plan you have and use theirs. Or pay the amount anyways (which is even better business-wise for them).
Eventually, semi-random differences that arise in their distribution may end up informing model capabilities as well, and _that_ is when true model-level differentiation may happen. But this is not necessary and if it comes true would just be a bonus.
But pay for who? $50 for a cheaper competitor? $20 for a chinese one? Or just buy hardware and host/co-host for privacy? And to balance the insane spending even your $60-80 example would be hardly enough from that white collar audience.
That’s not the argument though. The argument is that conversion rates as per OpenAI are about 5% and to serve the other 95% you need to build significant infrastructure that costs hundreds of billions annually. So for every white collar worker that you know and uses it and pays for it there are 20 free loaders. And mind you, 5% conversion rate is extremely high already as a number per se. It won't magically reach 20% in a couple of years. Chances are it will fall particularly for the enterprise segment due to the advent of the Chinese models.
The reason uber didn't loose that much business is because it replaced the established businesses and left most consumers with little alternative.
That's not the case with AI - unless the frontier labs achieve AGI or some sort of super intelligence that lets them create infinite economic value (at which point, any further discussion is pointless for obvious reasons), the average worker can do most of their tasks with 5% of the api costs using an open source model from China and achieve the same results.
> The reason uber didn't loose that much business is because it replaced the established businesses and left most consumers with little alternative.
The established businesses were awful. There was not a thriving and beloved taxi service in every city pre-Uber. Taxis were bad and very expensive.
Also did you forget that Lyft exists and normal taxis are still available? Taxi services had to improve their business when the ride sharing companies entered the market because they previously relied on their own grip on on-demand transportation to keep prices high and service poor.
Imagine suddenly a new taxi business was able to come into your city and provided taxi rides for 5 cents on the dollar. What would happen?
Edit: now add on top of that that even if uber tried to undercut them again by running losses as they did in the past, that new taxi business would not loose any money if the number of their rides went down because their operating costs simply scale with the number of rides - while uber was loosing money on every ride.
That’s never really how efficiency gains tend to work except in places where entire industries ceased to exist (printers, weavers, clothes washers, etc).
This story had 49 points and 81 comments in about four hours and was on the front page. Then it seems to have disappeared from the top stories feed completely.
People may pay less than they are willing to pay as competition drives the price down. I paid $20/mo a while which I was happy with but I found I could get similar for free so pay $0 now.
I agree that it's working good enough and that it's here to stay: mostly everybody around me uses AI too but...
> Did Uber die when a trip across town went from $3 to $13? No. It's giving more rides than ever, 10x more than when it was $3.
The competition from open-weights models is already putting pressure on how much this can be billed. That's today, with stuff like OpenAI announcing 80% cuts on terra and luna. Tomorrow, in addition to the pressure from open-weights models, there's going to be pressure from chinese hardware: Tencent, Alibaba, etc. are all already working on their own AI chips.
What good would, say, a SOTA open-weights model running on chinese chips (chinese chips located in China or elsewhere btw) do to, say, Meta or Oracle's insane AI investements?
And it doesn't even have to be chinese chips: what good AMD AI chips doing inference by having weights etched on silicon will do to OpenAI and Anthropic?
All the people, especially here on HN, who were explaining six months ago that OpenAI and Anthropic models where so good for coding that coding was solved once and for all can now run better open-weights models than the proprietary ones from six months ago. For a fraction of the price.
If people, instead of paying $20 per month pay $80 per month for their AI subscriptions, what makes you believe that money is going to go to one of these companies participating in this $2 trillion debt?
And really, in which new domain have we seen the first movers being able to keep a lifetime grip on the market without getting their arse handed to them by the competition? Things moves quickly today: I'm not sure OpenAI and Anthropic are the Ford equivalent for AI.
That AI is here to stay is a given. That people may be willing to pay more is likely (even though IMO they won't pay 4x more for something only marginally better). But that the current players are going to stay on top even though the competition closed the gaps to weeks?
How many are the white collar workers? 300 mln? even with $100 subscription each, the monthly revenue for your addressable market rises to $30 bln. If we increase the figure to half of humanity and they are 3 bn, you multiply it upto 10 and $300 bn monthly, $3.5 tn annually.
Now start cutting it down keeping in mind that not everyone is an office worker, does not need $100 plan, has access to cheaper models, could get ai through someone elses subscription or local models. I'm not sure how down it will get, but it can get down a lot and will have to be split among few players. At least for me it does not seem unrealistic that the revenue won't be enough for everyone.
After using it a bit I’m convinced it’s not, as a whole, a bubble.
Bubbles exist around it. Data center construction may end up overbuilding, much like the dark fiber thing during dot.com, since better chips and models will shrink power and space requirements over time.
But the core tech is the most powerful new thing I have seen since discovering the Internet, at least. Maybe more.
A bubble doesn’t mean a technology is useless. It just means it’s overvalued
In the last 30 years, we’ve had multiple bubbles in the tech industry. Every one of them was backed by real stuff that we still use today. They were still bubbles and a ton of people were hurt when they popped.
The railway bubble and the optical fiber bubble left the world with lots of railways and optical fibers. Once their original owners went bankrupt, the assets themselves were quite useful and changed the world.
The cryptocurrency bubble, however, didn't. Not really. At best you can use it to buy drugs. Some of the GPUs may have been repurposed for AI, but not enough to make a dent in AI, and the AI reesarchers who kicked off the AI bubble were having to buy their GPUs for high prices to compete with the miners, not low prices after they went bust, so we can't even say miners helped kick it off.
Many of those assets were useless - like railways from nowhere to nowhere. Only some ended up being used.
And many innocent people ended up being hurt in the process.
Bubbles are not good. They are harmful. The ability yo recoup some of the losses in the span of next 15 years does not make the bubbles something positive.
There's a kind of inconsistency in that he ends the video talking about overpriced stocks and how it's hard to short them but the title is about the $1.75tn in debt which seems to mostly be from professional investors, apparently:
>JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, private equity and credit giants like Blue Owl Capital, BlackRock, and PIMCO, alongside international commercial banks
who probably know what they are doing and read the footnotes.
My guess is that the lending is actually ok because there's a lot of real demand for compute. $1.75 tn is about 1.4% of global GDP which doesn't seem that silly in the AI boom.
The creativity of the financial industry is quite insane. Combined with the scale-at-all-cost strategy in AI companies, this is a ticking time bomb, no doubt.
I think it is easy to forget that a revolutionary technology does not automatically make a viable business model. I think we are yet to see the real winners in this game.
Wall Street makes money from issuing debt, trading debt, and IPOs. They need to get the last two mega IPOs off before the curtain call on this era.
But they can only partially influence the market, they can’t control it. The question is if the market will let them get these IPOs off or if the jig is up.
Here’s an exercise for anyone curious: pull up the median stock in the S&P 500. Look at its P/E. Take 15 minutes and look through the company’s financials and figure out what you think about the quality of its earnings.
Then decide if that P/E is appropriate.
The bubble isn’t in just AI, the bubble is everywhere, and AI is its largest manifestation.
It's a near guarantee that when things shall heat up and the stock market shall crash and people are going to say that "this time it's worse than 1929", we'll hear the brrrrrrrr sound of the money counterfeiters, very likely synchronizing their counterfeiting operations worldwide (US / EU at least) to print ever more money.
And capitalism also works with crashes taking unprofitable companies down. And frauds, eventually, gets companies valuation like Enron and FTX to zero. And people go to jail.
Now I'm not saying OpenAI or Anthropic are frauds. What I'm saying is that, eventually, things revert to what is just.
The late 90s SV tech-bros behind pets.com or webvan for example faked it for 18 months to 36 months or so. At some point when the expenses outnumber the revenues, capitalism does its thing.
I don't know a single white collar worker who isn't using AI for their job. Not like forced, but like "Oh damn, this bot thing can do a lot of tedious leg work for me".
To think that people won't pay $60-$80/mo to continue using it is wild to me. In a white collar environment it pays for itself in a few hours of use.
If you focus on how much value AI brings to people (mostly in time saved), the bubble hardly looks bubbly.
Did Uber die when a trip across town went from $3 to $13? No. It's giving more rides than ever, 10x more than when it was $3.
I'm sure there will be some losers, but unlike the dot-com boom, the entirety of the population already has all the tools needed to leverage AI.
But the question is how much are people willing to pay for AI.
I use AI every day at work, but I only pay $20. That's the most I will ever want to pay. And, so far, it gives me everything I need.
If OpenAI or Anthropic suddenly said "Sorry, the game is up. You'll have to pay $100/month now", I would 100% look into cheaper Chinese solutions.
I suspect the AI subscription (or API) economy is whale economy. You have a small, small percentage of users that are happy to pay whatever it takes - while the vast majority will either use the free tier, and then the next group will pay for the cheapest or next cheapest subscription.
EDIT: And I'll echo what another user wrote here. The VAST majority of office users around the world don't work for tech companies flush in cash. Even adding something like $20 - $100 subscriptions to every user is a serious enough financial obligation that it needs to go through budget planning / boards. Even more so for all the government workers around the world.
To put it into perspective if we consider that US salaries are 3 to 5 times those of other "rich" countries then it's already a 60 to 100 dollar subscription for the next richest part of the world.
The video quotes sales of $2.5 trillion a year to payoff those investments. What workforce you divide it by is a bit up in the air, but let's use 500 millions, which is basically 100% of the workforce of US + Europe + some change. That gives you around $500 a month per employee (from hedge fund manager to flipping burgers at McDonald's).
And there will be competition. I see zero moat right now. The user specific part of the state of the model sits outside of the control of the model (it is basically my code base, or my prompts, all of which I can transfer to any competitor).
I pay the 200 max for Fable daily driving and it’s worth every penny
But AI use translates directly to time savings (if it works). You only need 1-2 hours of time savings per employee per week to break even on a $100/seat/month subscription.
In the US. With how much they've invested in AI they need the entire planet to pay, and pay lots.
What's the capex expenditure of Magnificent 7 just this year? Close to $1tn?
Yeah, they may be over built for sure, I'm just saying the demand is there.
They need it to be roughly as popular as first world cell phone usage for a 5-7yr ROI.
1. Cell phone usage was never free.
2. Cell phone usage was always localized. You had local telcoms and that was about it. Deutsche Telekom Germany didn't have to compete all the time with NTT Docomo Japan.
And there are probably 20 other economic differences I'm missing.
That's not how people mentally price things though, i.e. "streaming is so much cheaper than the movie theaters!", etc
Won't the Chinese providers have to raise their prices as well due to the economics of serving inference at scale?
Buy an M5 max for $4k and you have a portable Deepseek 0731 for life.
But it won't last for life. It will probably last about 4 years so that equates to about 100/mo.
M1 is finishing it's 6th year of life and going strong ...
Have you been trashing the non-replaceabe SSD with constant AI workloads? Do you have any idea how much electricity it uses over it those 4 years?
anthropic and openai are a part of the ai economy, but not the only. the most valuable company in the world is nvidia, a massive player that benefits from the existance of the ow models.
what im trying to say is that we focus a bit too much on the labs, but the biggest part is in the infra that makes everything possible.
I spent $18k in credits last month, I have 3x 20x Anthropic accounts (for Fable to bypass limits) which runs me another $600ish p/m and then a chatgpt pro account another $200 p/m. The value I got out of it is easily 1-200x what I paid.
You make ~2 million dollars a month?
1 to 200 is a pretty big spread to between losing 18k dollars and making 3.6 milllion - do you have any actual numbers on the value produced from this 18k investment?
What are you using it for? I have to assume some kind of agentic workload. Also curious to know when (if ever) you would pivot to Chinese providers to save $$$
Examples like this come up as sub comments very often, but they don’t address the point. Most people will not go beyond $20, forget a 18k.
I use AI daily and pay zero dollars. I get my work done and I stay sharp. A huge mass will always choose the cheapest option.
Absolutely! The opposite end of the preference scale from someone willing to spend 18k a month.
>I'm sure there will be some losers,
This is the way it is on Wall Street more each century, and for AI to go public on that exchange it's going to have to go big or go home. Considering the amount of money that has already been spent privately.
There is no alternative pipeline to replenish those reserves, and different people have different ideas about capacity and bottlenecks relative to ambitions and what they are supposed to get for their money.
As has been mentioned in another comment, there is no alternative foundation other than optimism either. The exchange wouln't exist if it weren't originally intended to trade only shares that were all worth holding otherwise. Naturally some worth holding more than others. This is so big it will be necessary to be able to fool way more people with way more money than usual, otherwise those that prevail will have nowhere near their wildest dreams come true.
Naturally AI is never going to fly off the shelf like it could until it starts getting cheaper all the time for huge jumps in performance. Cheap home computers will need to be able to do quite a bit more than they can only do today while connected to a massive AI data center, without ever having been connected to anything outside the home at all. Otherwise AI can not ever be considered "general" any more than computing could be considered personal, until you were no longer reliant on a remote mainframe in a huge out-of-state data center somewhere tied by a thread leading through a squeaky modem over monopolized communication lines. This differential between clunky (clanky?) old data centers' overall computing power relative to the amount held freely within homes & businesses is something that looks like it could be regaining exploitability like never in decades. I know one day Woz jumped right in without needing to be a greedy businessman because there was no possible downside, and he could let just about any dedicated growth leader make as much money as they wanted off his technology. Plus Jobs was no slouch in many ways and Woz never needed to worry with a product that sells itself to begin with, putting Jobs in hog heaven where he could persuasively bring it to the next level almost whenever he wanted like you can do few other ways.
So not just dot-com related hardware & software.
That goes for memory and storage too, people should do the math on how affordable nominal amounts are supposed to be by now. If everything were still normal 16GB of DDR4 would be about $10, at least by 2027, so it hasn't merely doubled in the last year which is the most obvious part, it has skyrocketed to 10x what it would have been. And still rising not falling, so all this is going to have to be reversed for consumers to even afford what they used to be able to do.
For people who didn't want to spend a thing on AI until it's naturally way more capable and constantly getting cheaper like it should be, it's pretty frustrating when it's already been unavoidably costing "indirectly" more than they have been willing to pay if they were getting maximum benefit, when most of them have only gotten more surveillance. One day "indirectly" was just no longer true through no fault of millions of people. And growing as fast as the money stream will allow.
Up until recently AI was way more niche and fewer ordinary consumers were exposed, where now there are millions more aware of its influence and growing fast. But the more aware more ordinary people become, millions more opinions are going to come to the surface and need to be dealt with.
>whale economy.
Thar she blows!
One pervasive opinion is that so far it's made by rich people for rich people, and more so than most those who want to get rich quick are joining the bandwagon. Of course what consumers see in the media is only the "band directors" who are already rich to begin with, they set the example because they now want to get richer quicker and this is the vehicle they have chosen to do that. This is not unexpected, after all they always get what they want when it's things you have to be ungodly rich to do.
This makes for company valuations based more on optimism than anything else and once that has eclipsed underlying worth then any unforeseen bottlenecks or financing stumbles become highly magnified.
For one thing there may not be enough momentum to even fully build enough data centers to fulfill some players' plans for recouping such large investments, but at the same time AI's not going to really get good until data centers are not needed at all, which is so ominous there appears to be even more force being applied to encourage people to ignore things like this. Otherwise it could get too shocking.
This disparity in upside just plain instinctively sidelines more ordinary people as it builds, so the number of people who are just going to have to wait for AI and everything associated with it to start getting cheaper all the time becomes a force in itself. It'll be easy to notice without being a finance guru.
Until then gamble at your own risk :\
> Even adding something like $20 - $100 subscriptions to every user is a serious enough financial obligation that it needs to go through budget planning / boards
I doubt that. In my tiny town in India, office workers use the 1800 INR (20$) plans. 1800 INR/month is like... 4% of the salary these guys get. And since this is mostly MS-office and windows explorer and chrome based stuff in very small, non-tech companies, it pays for itself in literally a day. If they _could_ pay less they would. After all they pirate MS office. But the cheap chinese plans dont have any distribution, whereas OpenAI seems to have effectively marketed to them via IPL ads and such. No one there even knows about deepseek. It also doesn't help deepseek and such are focused on the coding market. No multimodal, office plugins, etc.
For personal stuff, people there use Meta AI - mostly because it is directly available in whatsapp and these days they are pushing it by adding a dedicated button for it right on the home page. Regardless, they still call it "chatgpt". OpenAI brand is unmatched.
Remember that 20$ is a subsidized rate openai is currently willing to provide. Once that goes down you think these guys would be willing to pay token based billing charges ?
It is not going to go away. Rather they have doubled down and opened 399 INR/mo (4$/mo) plans that as of late have GPT 5.6 Luna.
The reason this works is that you get lesser inference time compute used for queries on these cheaper plans which makes it sustainable and this is enough for the tasks these guys do.
And some local telcos are bundling this subscription as well, so most people just get it for "free". For example, I get Google AI Pro for free with my 350 INR/mo telco plan.
These companies have spent billions of investor dollars and they will need to recoup that cost soon. And then show year over year growth on top of that.
Unless they can massively scale down training and inference cost or implement AGI I don't know what their plan is. Just provide a subsidized plan for the next 10 or 20 years? Their costs are directly proportional to the amount of tokens the LLM produces. How is a monthly subscription plan supposed to account for such costs?
They dont need to scale down anything. AGI is a red herring.
Even Deepseek at its absurd prices is a very healthy business. Regarding their return on capex multiple, their CEO said they make a six-fold profit on their compute capex with 10 month recuperation. Because of this, all of them are spending aggressively on compute. Apart from that, user acquisition and data labelling are the major costs that are preventing net profitability right now. High quality data labelling is said to not have a cost advantage in china etc as well and they pay global market prices for this. I can confirm this is true in india too the model companies I know pay global market rates for high quality data.
> Their costs are directly proportional to the amount of tokens the LLM produces. How is a monthly subscription plan supposed to account for such costs?
By limiting the number of tokens you use per month? per week, per hour? And by limiting the inference time compute dedicated to each turn in each session.
> need to recoup
the world economy has shown itself capable of handling decade-scale recouping easily
The main obstacle today in the inference business is the high variability in usefulness/token. This does not need to be solved, but rather only quantified. Innovation is needed to be able to reasonably bound this variance for a reasonable subset of tasks. And we are making progress on this. Naturally though, tasks on the frontier of current capabilities have very high variance. The last couple of years has followed the pattern where tasks no longer on the frontier have reduced variance, but I am not claiming this will continue to be the case generally as the frontier improves.
> Even Deepseek at its absurd prices is a very healthy business. Regarding their return on capex multiple, their CEO said they make a six-fold profit on their compute capex with 10 month recuperation.
That's "theoretical profit" - in some imaginary world where the free subscribers would pay the top tier cost.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/01/deepseek-claims-theoretica...
> their return on capex multiple, their CEO said they make a six-fold profit on their compute capex with 10 month recuperation
I am not familiar with chineese model companies as much as I am with US based ones so I don't have much to say beyond that the CEO is incentivced to pump up those numbers.
> By limiting the number of tokens you use per month? per week, per hour? And by limiting the inference time compute dedicated to each turn in each session.
If this was so simple I don't know why GitHub copilot went to token based billing at my company.
> This does not need to be solved, but rather only quantified. Innovation is needed to be able to reasonably bound this variance for a reasonable subset of tasks
It's much better to make a business case for them after finding this bound right? Currently I can't use copilot for anything serious since I cannot predict how many credits one request is going to consume.
Your point about non frontier tasks using less tokens makes sense. As you said, let's see if it holds up
Return on compute capex is tied mostly to gpu lifetimes so I don't think it will be different for the American companies, who also charge much more being closed source.
> If this was so simple...copilot...
Github copilot still has subscriptions. They moved away from request based accounting to token based accounting for the usage limits, as did cursor, and everybody else.
I remember the piracy era, and it used to be a joke whether anyone could actually stop it.
Eventually MS dealt with piracy by going after firms, and finally by offering something cheap enough.
Between the legal aspects, and the fact that its MS office, paying Rs 1800 a month is possible.
I’ve been trawling every source I can find to understand what the story on the ground is, and when it comes to productivity it’s a huge mixed bag. The variance in outcomes between independent coders, frontier labs, someone in SV and someone in India is mind-bending right now.
Most firms which talk about their AI plans are not seeing traction, and the AI projects are going to the same place that the ML projects used to go to die.
It’s at the individual level that I am seeing productivity gains, however that isn’t something firms are happy to hear right now.
>Eventually MS dealt with piracy by going after firms, and finally by offering something cheap enough.
Sure, because they realized that selling software at any cost because software has extremely low overhead. Selling 100M Windows at 2 USD was easier and my guess is a wash at that price.
However, AI is not selling software, it's selling hardware usage which is not free and has real cost. If Rs 1800 which is 20 USD is not profitable, then they will not offer it.
Rofl, I already went for cheaper Chinese solutions. I can achieve more than I could when I was giving OpenAI 20 bucks a month, and for a fraction of the price.
I have no idea why people still use ChatGPT or Claude.
Most people don't understand how cheap models like DeepSeek and similar are. I have $5 in an account that I use for months. I can get very complex code for less than 50 cents.
Me too. Sinophobia may be the culprit, too many years watching fox or cnn is my guess?
I love chinese phones, cars, cities, people, and now AI models. There is a beautiful world out there to admire if people is willing to open their eyes.
[dead]
You can now, as of this week, run locally models with the same performance of a SOTA model of March this year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229621
The FAFO day of Anthropic and OpenAI arrived.
You will spend thousands of dollars on hardware to run those at lower quality (quantized) than the benchmarks where they match March SOTA performance.
Source: I have the hardware to run those locally. I would never recommend it to anyone trying to save money. It’s so much cheaper to pay even Anthropic or OpenAI.
Not many people have $10k of specific hardware lying around
At my $day_job we are forced to use a shared virtual machine for all work activities. The Windows instance has 64gb of RAM, 8 virtual cores of old EPYC CPU and no GPU acceleration. It is also shared between 6 users.
They will not spend extra 20$ per user per month to add compute and increase productivity.
Anthropic has 80%+ margins on inference.
Google has 30%+ margins on compute.
Both parties have discovered a literal money printer. The payback period is <2 years.
At those unit economics, anyone not borrowing aggressively here to create more money printers is a moron.
>Anthropic has 80%+ margins on inference.
That's like saying my delivery company is profitable because with current gas prices, my margin is 80%. Yea, what about all money you spent to get there? You still profitable then?
Yes, actually. Anthropic has gross margins of 40%+, hit $75B ARR last month, and (as of this quarter) is profitable.
As Ed Zitron pointed out, that "quarter" of profitability is EBITDA profitability and comes with plenty of creative accounting. When they do it for a year, we can say "They have found profitability"
Why are you citing old news? Zitron wrote that months ago when Anthropic was reported to have ~30B ARR. Anthropic now has more than double that, at even higher margins.
There's no doubt at this point that Anthropic is profitable.
Because again, we haven't seen further reports. As always, we are debating financials on a company that doesn't have to disclose them regularly.
This[1][2] Ed Zitron, or another one?
Because I don't know how you can be so totally and completely wrong for so many years, and still have people lend you credibility. But I definitely do understand how you can rage farm subscription dollars from suckers for years.
[1]https://www.wheresyoured.at/bubble-trouble/
[2]https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/
$80 per month in a 5,000 people Enterprise is 400k per month which translates to ~5m per year. That is easily in the 8-16% of their total IT budget. I don’t know you, but companies don’t like to increase recurring cost. Is AI good? Yes. Is it clear how it generates enough ROI to justify a material IT cost increase? No. This is the problem now, not how much white collar workers use AI, but what is the productivity narrative of it. Because AI is so generic, there is no clear specialized use case, like when Salesforce invented the CRM for example.
The thing that's a bit different about AI from a CRM is it translates pretty directly into time savings. You only need each employee to save 1-2 hours of work per month to break even with a $80/seat subscription.
It's true that it can easily save 1-2 hours per month, but it only seems worth it if those hours saved are spent doing something else productive/profitable.
It appears that a lot of the time saved is spent either 1) doing nothing instead, 2) waiting for the AI to finish, or 3) increasing the hours spent elsewhere down/up the chain for reviewing, fixing, auditing.
The obvious benefit of anything offering to save time is that now you have time for "higher order work", but often, we use the time saved to be lazy.
After all, that's the underlying reason we used the time-saving, corner-cutting tool in the first place.
People will pay out of their pockets if an AI can free up a few of their hybrid hours a month. And already it looks like the vast majority of white collar AI spend is from individuals, not companies.
I mean, why would you show your hand by using the company AI? Use your AI and take the credit...
> when Salesforce invented the CRM for example
Huh? If that was not a joke, here is the history of CRM:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_manageme...
> Using it, people that FDR met were impressed by his "recall" of facts about their family and what they were doing professionally and politically.
Hmm. Today that'd be creepy.
The real question is not whether there will be a market for AI, it is obvious that there will be one (as it was obvious the Internet was a gigantic thing in the dotcom boom). It is rather whether the value will be in the models (and if so in which?) or the infrastructure or somewhere else.
Interesting thoughts from Dwarkesh Patel on the future of models [1]. In summary, no moat if a client can switch to a competitor from a dropdown when all models are similar-ish (so models are commodities), but to really compete with humans, AI needs to start "learning on the job", i.e. accumulating experience like an employee (as opposed to the training / inference approach where the model isn't learning after it is released). If your model does that, then you have vendor lock-in as you can't replace an experienced model with a competitor. Then the value is in the model.
As in the 90s, this could go in all sort of different directions, hard to make predictions. And remember the 90s: the value was in the browser (you had to purchase it, eg Netscape), then the browser came for free with the OS (no value in the browser), then the browser was the most important thing in the world as it was control over the default search engine, everyone thought portals was the most important thing to control, so ISPs had their own applications accessing the internet from their own portal, etc - none of those people were stupid.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iewm45atodE
The moat is in sales, the model and its quality is largely irrelevant. Gross margins will be high enough for moats to not matter that much.
Not hosting in China will be a moat. Tech (software) never really experienced it, but the rest of Western industry all have stories of getting burned by China and their policy of ignoring IP rights.
I work for a large company and for any LLM I use professionally, whether programmatically or via a UI, I get to pick from a dropdown from Gemini, Claude, OpenAI and the open weight ones. We ain't locked in.
Yeah, and that is completely fine business-wise for all the businesses in that dropdown. Averaged over the whole TAM, they will all make a lot of money. The reason is that the total market becomes _bigger_ with every new model (upto a reasonable point of course, but for 5 models it is obviously true), they don't end up competing for the same slices of the pie.
The core business for each of the 5 will not be companies like yours, but rather few hundred to few thousand companies each who exclusively use their model not for technical reasons, but because they were wined and dined or due to bundling with another service. The other hundreds of thousands of customers are all bonus. This is true for most categories of SaaS not just LLM inference.
If the vendor of a core piece of software that you are already locked into tells you they are raising prices and adding AI inference features, you are going to cancel whatever AI plan you have and use theirs. Or pay the amount anyways (which is even better business-wise for them).
Eventually, semi-random differences that arise in their distribution may end up informing model capabilities as well, and _that_ is when true model-level differentiation may happen. But this is not necessary and if it comes true would just be a bonus.
But pay for who? $50 for a cheaper competitor? $20 for a chinese one? Or just buy hardware and host/co-host for privacy? And to balance the insane spending even your $60-80 example would be hardly enough from that white collar audience.
That’s not the argument though. The argument is that conversion rates as per OpenAI are about 5% and to serve the other 95% you need to build significant infrastructure that costs hundreds of billions annually. So for every white collar worker that you know and uses it and pays for it there are 20 free loaders. And mind you, 5% conversion rate is extremely high already as a number per se. It won't magically reach 20% in a couple of years. Chances are it will fall particularly for the enterprise segment due to the advent of the Chinese models.
The reason uber didn't loose that much business is because it replaced the established businesses and left most consumers with little alternative.
That's not the case with AI - unless the frontier labs achieve AGI or some sort of super intelligence that lets them create infinite economic value (at which point, any further discussion is pointless for obvious reasons), the average worker can do most of their tasks with 5% of the api costs using an open source model from China and achieve the same results.
> the average worker can do most of their tasks with 5% of the api costs using an open source model from China and achieve the same results.
Are you also going to tell me that everyone will be switching to their favorite Linux desktop distribution over Mac & Win because it's "free"?
> The reason uber didn't loose that much business is because it replaced the established businesses and left most consumers with little alternative.
The established businesses were awful. There was not a thriving and beloved taxi service in every city pre-Uber. Taxis were bad and very expensive.
Also did you forget that Lyft exists and normal taxis are still available? Taxi services had to improve their business when the ride sharing companies entered the market because they previously relied on their own grip on on-demand transportation to keep prices high and service poor.
Imagine suddenly a new taxi business was able to come into your city and provided taxi rides for 5 cents on the dollar. What would happen?
Edit: now add on top of that that even if uber tried to undercut them again by running losses as they did in the past, that new taxi business would not loose any money if the number of their rides went down because their operating costs simply scale with the number of rides - while uber was loosing money on every ride.
> Imagine suddenly a new taxi business was able to come into your city and provided taxi rides for 5 cents on the dollar. What would happen?
I literally lived through this situation. It was not 5 cents on the dollar. The taxis continued to exist then and continue to exist now.
If you need fewer workers due to the increased productivity, then the number of white collar workers (the TAM) won't be as large as anticipated.
That’s never really how efficiency gains tend to work except in places where entire industries ceased to exist (printers, weavers, clothes washers, etc).
How sure are we that isn't the case here?
Mods, can you explain what happened here?
This story had 49 points and 81 comments in about four hours and was on the front page. Then it seems to have disappeared from the top stories feed completely.
People may pay less than they are willing to pay as competition drives the price down. I paid $20/mo a while which I was happy with but I found I could get similar for free so pay $0 now.
Your base premise is flawed. I know plenty of white collar workers who do not use AI for their job.
I agree that it's working good enough and that it's here to stay: mostly everybody around me uses AI too but...
> Did Uber die when a trip across town went from $3 to $13? No. It's giving more rides than ever, 10x more than when it was $3.
The competition from open-weights models is already putting pressure on how much this can be billed. That's today, with stuff like OpenAI announcing 80% cuts on terra and luna. Tomorrow, in addition to the pressure from open-weights models, there's going to be pressure from chinese hardware: Tencent, Alibaba, etc. are all already working on their own AI chips.
What good would, say, a SOTA open-weights model running on chinese chips (chinese chips located in China or elsewhere btw) do to, say, Meta or Oracle's insane AI investements?
And it doesn't even have to be chinese chips: what good AMD AI chips doing inference by having weights etched on silicon will do to OpenAI and Anthropic?
All the people, especially here on HN, who were explaining six months ago that OpenAI and Anthropic models where so good for coding that coding was solved once and for all can now run better open-weights models than the proprietary ones from six months ago. For a fraction of the price.
If people, instead of paying $20 per month pay $80 per month for their AI subscriptions, what makes you believe that money is going to go to one of these companies participating in this $2 trillion debt?
And really, in which new domain have we seen the first movers being able to keep a lifetime grip on the market without getting their arse handed to them by the competition? Things moves quickly today: I'm not sure OpenAI and Anthropic are the Ford equivalent for AI.
For all I know OpenAI is "La Mancelle":
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mancelle
And Anthropic is Panhard.
That AI is here to stay is a given. That people may be willing to pay more is likely (even though IMO they won't pay 4x more for something only marginally better). But that the current players are going to stay on top even though the competition closed the gaps to weeks?
I don't buy it.
A bit of napkin math.
How many are the white collar workers? 300 mln? even with $100 subscription each, the monthly revenue for your addressable market rises to $30 bln. If we increase the figure to half of humanity and they are 3 bn, you multiply it upto 10 and $300 bn monthly, $3.5 tn annually.
Now start cutting it down keeping in mind that not everyone is an office worker, does not need $100 plan, has access to cheaper models, could get ai through someone elses subscription or local models. I'm not sure how down it will get, but it can get down a lot and will have to be split among few players. At least for me it does not seem unrealistic that the revenue won't be enough for everyone.
Currently, a $20/month openai subscription gives roughly $400 in codex api credits. That doesn’t count what you can get from the web chatbot.
So it better be that api tokens are seriously overpriced. There is value at $20/month. I am not so sure if it’s $400/month or more.
using how?
summarize email and then generate slop that gets summarized on the other end
Not to forget asking questions and getting wrong answers... Thus possibly causing net loss for company.
After using it a bit I’m convinced it’s not, as a whole, a bubble.
Bubbles exist around it. Data center construction may end up overbuilding, much like the dark fiber thing during dot.com, since better chips and models will shrink power and space requirements over time.
But the core tech is the most powerful new thing I have seen since discovering the Internet, at least. Maybe more.
A bubble doesn’t mean a technology is useless. It just means it’s overvalued
In the last 30 years, we’ve had multiple bubbles in the tech industry. Every one of them was backed by real stuff that we still use today. They were still bubbles and a ton of people were hurt when they popped.
The railway bubble and the optical fiber bubble left the world with lots of railways and optical fibers. Once their original owners went bankrupt, the assets themselves were quite useful and changed the world.
The cryptocurrency bubble, however, didn't. Not really. At best you can use it to buy drugs. Some of the GPUs may have been repurposed for AI, but not enough to make a dent in AI, and the AI reesarchers who kicked off the AI bubble were having to buy their GPUs for high prices to compete with the miners, not low prices after they went bust, so we can't even say miners helped kick it off.
Many of those assets were useless - like railways from nowhere to nowhere. Only some ended up being used.
And many innocent people ended up being hurt in the process.
Bubbles are not good. They are harmful. The ability yo recoup some of the losses in the span of next 15 years does not make the bubbles something positive.
I know. I'm saying that overall I don't believe it's that overvalued.
Specific things may be overvalued. I suspect data center real estate is a bubble, for instance.
Is Sam Altman even allowed to rent a car with his level of debt?
There's a kind of inconsistency in that he ends the video talking about overpriced stocks and how it's hard to short them but the title is about the $1.75tn in debt which seems to mostly be from professional investors, apparently:
>JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, private equity and credit giants like Blue Owl Capital, BlackRock, and PIMCO, alongside international commercial banks
who probably know what they are doing and read the footnotes.
My guess is that the lending is actually ok because there's a lot of real demand for compute. $1.75 tn is about 1.4% of global GDP which doesn't seem that silly in the AI boom.
to modify sinclair: it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his bonus depends on his not understanding it
>> when his bonus depends on his not understanding it
As he explains here: https://youtu.be/NufJ7g63KSY?t=1233
It might be more accurate to say that many retail investors are ignoring big tech’s debt.
That does not explain the buy recommendations for SpaceX
Oh that one's explained by bribery. Just pay some analyst to put out ridiculous "predictions" about your company
It’s worse. They are doing this in the hopes of getting future underwriting business.
The creativity of the financial industry is quite insane. Combined with the scale-at-all-cost strategy in AI companies, this is a ticking time bomb, no doubt.
I think it is easy to forget that a revolutionary technology does not automatically make a viable business model. I think we are yet to see the real winners in this game.
Is this an AI generated video? The guy didn't blink an eye or moved the head more than one inch in 30 minutes!
Hah instantly knew it was a Patrick Boyle video. He's a well-known expert in rap music that also does finance on the side.
True. He mentions AI vids and rap here https://youtu.be/Ak4on5uTaTg?t=161
I think he just cuts a lot of takes together. It's his style.
No. There's a blink at 11:04.
Wall Street makes money from issuing debt, trading debt, and IPOs. They need to get the last two mega IPOs off before the curtain call on this era.
But they can only partially influence the market, they can’t control it. The question is if the market will let them get these IPOs off or if the jig is up.
Here’s an exercise for anyone curious: pull up the median stock in the S&P 500. Look at its P/E. Take 15 minutes and look through the company’s financials and figure out what you think about the quality of its earnings.
Then decide if that P/E is appropriate.
The bubble isn’t in just AI, the bubble is everywhere, and AI is its largest manifestation.
TINA, There Is No Alternative
As long as the money printer is running...all Quiet on the Western Front
It's a near guarantee that when things shall heat up and the stock market shall crash and people are going to say that "this time it's worse than 1929", we'll hear the brrrrrrrr sound of the money counterfeiters, very likely synchronizing their counterfeiting operations worldwide (US / EU at least) to print ever more money.
The papers mentioned:
1. — "The Big Market Delusion: Valuation and Investment Implications" - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3501688
The paper behind the "big market delusion" he discusses.
2. - "Do Stock Prices Fully Reflect Information in Accruals and Cash Flows About Future Earnings?" - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2598
This is the "accrual anomaly" paper Boyle describes.
3. - "The ‘Incomplete Revelation Hypothesis’ and Financial Reporting" - https://publications.aaahq.org/accounting-horizons/article/1...
Paper explains why information can be public yet still not be fully incorporated into prices when extracting it takes effort.
4. - "Limited Arbitrage in Equity Markets" - https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Limited%20Arbitr...
Mitchell and Pulvino work on the "limits of arbitrage."
5. "How Pervasive Is Corporate Fraud?" - https://www.chicagobooth.edu/research/rustandy/social-impact...
The paper on about one-third of corporate fraud is detected
6. "There’s never been a better time to commit financial fraud" - https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/29/theres-never-b...
7. "Firm Data on AI" - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34836/w348...
The Bank of England study on executive AI usage and productivity.
We now have several voices saying the same:
"Aswath Damodaran: Big Tech Has No Idea How AI Pays Off" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229981
Capitalism works with debt for growth. Strange HN doesn't understand this
And capitalism also works with crashes taking unprofitable companies down. And frauds, eventually, gets companies valuation like Enron and FTX to zero. And people go to jail.
Now I'm not saying OpenAI or Anthropic are frauds. What I'm saying is that, eventually, things revert to what is just.
The late 90s SV tech-bros behind pets.com or webvan for example faked it for 18 months to 36 months or so. At some point when the expenses outnumber the revenues, capitalism does its thing.
Yes and since there is no fraud there is no reason for this panic they know what they are doing
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