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152 points isoprophlex | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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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%.
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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.

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1. 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.