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I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

simonwillison.net

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Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#51

Post by airstrike »

Who's to say those enterprises won't churn after XYZ comes out with a decent enough model that costs 10x less to use?

There's a whole bag of clever tricks you can play to juice short term results leading to an IPO that may not work longer term.

I'll believe they've found product-market fit when they have a product. Right now they're selling the infrastructure, in a highly subsidized and undifferentiated way (at least over a sufficient long period of time of, say, a couple of years).

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#52

Post by YetAnotherNick »

trjordan wrote: post #11

They've got, ballpark, $5t to $10t to make back in the next 5 years, or the hardware buildouts will start getting written down. This means we're going to need $1t+ per year in spending, per year, on tokens. 200m knowledge workers in the world, 30m developers. We're talking about a world where you need 5% of every knowledge workers salary to go into tokens. 20% if you're a developer. That's a _huge_ shift. Most people…

> $5t to $10t to make back in the next 5 years

Wait what? They spent 2 order of magnitude less on hardware.

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#53

Post by pembrook »

simonw wrote: post #16
prepend wrote: post #14

> $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200 “Tokens” don’t have an intrisic cost or value. Saying that I used $2,180.16 worth of tokens is like relying on the salesperson to convince me I’m getting a billion dollars worth of pots and pans for $19.99. I think it’s funny how we are throwing critical thinking out the window when it comes to evaluating biased sources of info.

I'm not sure what you're pushing back against here. I spent $200. If I had been paying API pricing it would have been $2,180.16. The article is about how enterprise customers get charged API pricing, which means if I had been employed by one of those companies I would have cost them $2,180.16. What am I missing?

API pricing drops DRAMATICALLY in enterprise agreements.

As with pretty much anything priced on volume/usage.

Enterprise deals are negotiated ad-hoc, the listed pricing is simply a jumping off point for the final negotiated discount.

If you’re going to give 20,000 employees Claude code you are not going to be spending $1B per year on Anthropic tokens as if you gave everyone an individual API key. Just as Anthropic isn’t paying AWS SES $10,000,000 to send 1 email update to their massive user base when the next Claude version drops.

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#54

Post by simonw »

brokencode wrote: post #43
antman wrote: post #33

The costs are exorbitant and most software is not produced by companies with such a huge moat. Anthropic made a profit through their recent bait amd switch pricing. There is zero useful insights online to indicate whether this might die due to commoditisation with good enough open models or fail the race to get more people subsidising unsustainable growth with other people’s money. Who knows? In any case they dont se…

Usage costs will come down with better hardware. Hardware is improving rapidly each generation.

That trend held true for the past three years, but it doesn't feel as safe to me now.

But memory costs are going way up. And both OpenAI and Anthropic bumped up the price of their frontier models in April.

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#55

Post by trjordan »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #52
trjordan wrote: post #11

They've got, ballpark, $5t to $10t to make back in the next 5 years, or the hardware buildouts will start getting written down. This means we're going to need $1t+ per year in spending, per year, on tokens. 200m knowledge workers in the world, 30m developers. We're talking about a world where you need 5% of every knowledge workers salary to go into tokens. 20% if you're a developer. That's a _huge_ shift. Most people…

> $5t to $10t to make back in the next 5 years Wait what? They spent 2 order of magnitude less on hardware.

From the verge: https://archive.is/kU4Zg

> Gartner forecasts that large AI companies would need to earn cumulatively close to $7 trillion in AI-driven revenue through 2029, which is close to $2 trillion per year by the end of the period. In order to achieve “historic returns,” the providers would need to earn nearly $8.2 trillion in the same period.

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#56

Post by esafak »

realo wrote: post #22

200$ per month per seat is nothing . A single 3D CAD license pack for the guys in our R&D group costs multiple thousands of dollars per seat, per month. It's about time software seats get some love too.

How many guys is that? Every single white collar worker is in the AI ICP (customer profile).

edit: typo

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#57

Post by jgbuddy »

trjordan wrote: post #11

They've got, ballpark, $5t to $10t to make back in the next 5 years, or the hardware buildouts will start getting written down. This means we're going to need $1t+ per year in spending, per year, on tokens. 200m knowledge workers in the world, 30m developers. We're talking about a world where you need 5% of every knowledge workers salary to go into tokens. 20% if you're a developer. That's a _huge_ shift. Most people…

You are making the assumption that the models are only used / paid for by 2.5% of the population (your knowledge workers value). There will be new value created by these models which people are happy to pay for which simply did not exist at all before. It is also naive to say that the hyperscalers are going to be expecting a return on this in 5 years, it will be entirely propped up by investments / IPOs as has been the case with any tech company for decades now to reach scale. The hyperscalers are currently spending ~650b combined annually, which they have the cash for and can sell in future compute instantly.

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#58

Post by NitpickLawyer »

altruios wrote: post #42
simonw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're pushing back against here. I spent $200. If I had been paying API pricing it would have been $2,180.16. The article is about how enterprise customers get charged API pricing, which means if I had been employed by one of those companies I would have cost them $2,180.16. What am I missing?

> If I had been paying API pricing it would have been $2,180.16 The point being made above is that API pricing is calculated... somehow... seemingly arbitrarily. Possibly untethered to the infrastructure costs entirely: which would be the basis of any 'value', however that holds the labor theory of value, which isn't accurate either. So how do you accurately price these tokens at all (other than through price-discove…

> So how do you accurately price these tokens at all

Like anything else in the economy: at the point where enough customers can pay you, and not enough will go to the cheaper competition.

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#59

Post by simonw »

pembrook wrote: post #53
simonw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're pushing back against here. I spent $200. If I had been paying API pricing it would have been $2,180.16. The article is about how enterprise customers get charged API pricing, which means if I had been employed by one of those companies I would have cost them $2,180.16. What am I missing?

API pricing drops DRAMATICALLY in enterprise agreements. As with pretty much anything priced on volume/usage. Enterprise deals are negotiated ad-hoc, the listed pricing is simply a jumping off point for the final negotiated discount. If you’re going to give 20,000 employees Claude code you are not going to be spending $1B per year on Anthropic tokens as if you gave everyone an individual API key. Just as Anthropic is…

> API pricing drops DRAMATICALLY in enterprise agreements

Do you have any numbers or reports to back that up?

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#60

Post by HDThoreaun »

trjordan wrote: post #11

They've got, ballpark, $5t to $10t to make back in the next 5 years, or the hardware buildouts will start getting written down. This means we're going to need $1t+ per year in spending, per year, on tokens. 200m knowledge workers in the world, 30m developers. We're talking about a world where you need 5% of every knowledge workers salary to go into tokens. 20% if you're a developer. That's a _huge_ shift. Most people…

Source on 200 million knowledge workers worldwide? My understanding is that it's just above 1 billion. I dont think a billion subscriptions at $1000/yr is out of the question but it might take a decade to get roiling
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