←back to thread

152 points isoprophlex | 8 comments | | HN request time: 0.418s | source | bottom
1. VirusNewbie ◴[] No.45646306[source]

         I have sat with these numbers for a great deal of time, and I can’t find any evidence that Anthropic has any path to profitability outside of aggressively increasing the prices on their customers to the point that its services will become untenable for consumers and enterprise customers alike.

This is where he misunderstands. Enterprise companies will absolutely pay 10x the cost for Claude. Meta and Apple are two large customers, you think they won't pay $500 a month per employee? $1000 a month per employee? Neither of those are outrageous to imagine if it increases productivity 10%.
replies(3): >>45646354 #>>45648348 #>>45649473 #
2. scottyah ◴[] No.45646354[source]
Also spend will drop dramatically if the models level out a bit more. The training is what's compute heavy, and if you aren't having to retrain every month, but able to use things like Skills to stay competitive your costs will drop a lot.

I suppose that's the pessimistic-on-AI side. On the other hand, once you create God little things like money are meaningless.

3. ludicity ◴[] No.45648348[source]
I'm much more skeptical about this for two major reasons.

Firstly, a huge amount of labour that can be accelerated by LLMs fall into the "bullshit jobs" category, where you can make someone faster at writing emails but the emails themselves don't really contribute much value. The majority of LLM use I see falls into this category. Many people can speed up parts of their job, but you can add as much efficiency as you want without actually impacting the bottom line -- and for various reasons that are not tractable right now, including with LLMs, businesses aren't able to get themselves to remove these roles.

Secondly, the median company is incapable of doing the things that aren't driven entirely by hype or political promises made by executives. We still exist in the universe where they prefer to have all their staff attrition out due to not getting raises, then end up paying the same amount for a bunch of folks that have no knowledge of the business when they inevitably have to replace their best talent.

With all that said, I'm sure a few savvier places would happily drop $1000 month per head if the value is there, but I really think in the average case that this would be more about marketing than any logic. People still buy Informatica in 2025 for much more money than they spend on LLMs.

replies(1): >>45650244 #
4. HDThoreaun ◴[] No.45649473[source]
Its too easy to switch providers when theres a billion dollars a year at stake. If youre an apple exec who sees that the company is spending 10k per employee per year why wouldnt you start an initiative that cuts that spend to 1k per employee per year? Then you can go to the board and say you personally saved them all that money and get a big promotion.
replies(1): >>45650232 #
5. VirusNewbie ◴[] No.45650232[source]
Yes yes, why not just build our own cloud and our own workspace/365 provider, brilliant plan. Genius move to get a promo at any F500.
replies(1): >>45651093 #
6. VirusNewbie ◴[] No.45650244[source]
You don't need to remove rolls if it makes everyone 10% better at their job. You think companies like paying for Office 365? That's barely a value add compared to free versions, but every company on the planet forks over money for that.
7. HDThoreaun ◴[] No.45651093{3}[source]
Doesnt matter if it is a shitshow. It saved a billion dollars a year
replies(1): >>45652145 #
8. VirusNewbie ◴[] No.45652145{4}[source]
and yet Meta and Apple are both paying Anthropic hundreds of millions...