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Discussion (54 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Maybe in the distant future where quickly building a visualisation to help explain some concept would be valuable to one shot quickly - but "One shotting an app" is ridiculous because app development (or any development) is never "build it and then finish" but is an interative process, testing feedback, user feedback, and even app-creator communication ambiguity means being able to "one shot an app" is pretty worthless
What bills? Deepseek has been profitable for long time.
China has cheaper electricity and a more capable grid for the industrial type usage levels they need to drive.
API prices are paid by companies getting tens of millions of dollars of value.
In normal life money is the key constraint; buy this don't buy that etc. - whereas in VC funded companies the constraint is time. If you as a founder get funding and don't spend it fast enough you put yourself at serious risk of being replaced.
When enough of the world operates on that principle it creates a highly price insensitive market and that then can support a ton of ideas and experiments, some of which turn out to be really really good. It's a wild way to do innovation but it's been working well for decades.
$200/mo of Claude may give you what would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to create in 2023, but the value of what it creates isn't there anymore. It should be compared against what it would cost to create with other tools, not against the cost of you doing it by hand.
Otherwise would be like justifying an obviously overpriced car, because "it saves me so much compared to carrying things thousands of miles by hand!"
It's not an expensive car vs. any car.
It's car vs. no car.
That may well be true, but the same tens of thousands of dollars of value can be purchased for a fraction of the 200usd Anthropic asks.... therefore why not?
And even beyond pure monetary considerations, it often refuses to help as soon as its trigger happy safeguards kick in, can't debug a lot of code before it decides to stop helping IME.
Below a certain threshold prices are effectively all the same.
Companies pay API prices because part of the bundle is a trust anchor / liability shield: "we bought Anthropic's thing! We didn't risk it! We paid for ZDR!"
I've been thinking about it a lot and I think there's going to be commoditization of tokens. No local models - the hardware to run at scale is too complicated for companies that are reluctant to even run a local file server - and not wholesale run to Chinese suppliers (due to IP considerations mainly).
I think the winners in the coding/office work space will be intermediaries who can sell reasonable quality tokens at cost plus. It's the same reason "real" companies don't hand out their employees fully decked Macbook Pros or don't provide $500k TC packages as a norm: they are fine with "good enough" and "good ROI". And that's not going to happen with Claude API pricing where it is.
Another field is API pricing for things that are not coding, like automated systems doing analysis of things. I think there it's a real race to the bottom, including - or even mostly - direct sourcing from China (just like business do with their real goods today).
What insane price is that? Pro is $20 per month. Same price as a Netflix ad free sub.
Anthropic and its investors/customers don’t need random internet commenter’s permission to decide whether or not something is worth doing or justified.
Personally I think when something doesn’t make sense to you, you should try to figure out why it makes sense to other people, and whether they might have different needs/constraints/incentives/skills/knowledge.
Why might people spend more on AI as it gets better, rather than less? Could they, perhaps, allow for entirely new kinds of capabilities and products that hacker news commenters have not yet seen? As they have done every year for 3 straight years (hacker news has been wrong in exactly the same way every time, btw)? Might some people prefer to spend $10/day to work with the most capable AI available, due to the amount they use it while doing their job, and its effect on output? Do some people use AI for more than just tinkering with open source harnesses? Could it be that when you don’t understand something, there really is a way to explain it, that isn’t “everybody else must be stupid”?
Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations (referencing spacex as the first)? (I imagine openai will likely be in the same ballpark) genuinely we're reaching "elementary levels of big funny number" in the market.
To put it in fewer words; the stock market is rigged.
Suppose there are 100 million jobs that can benefit from spending $10k/year in tokens. At a conservative 30% margin and subtracting $100 billion for expenses that's $200 billion in annual profits, which can easily support a $5T market cap. And that's just scaling up today's use cases, not even considering the possibility of labs having their secret internal models doing drug discovery or quant trading or other profitable hobbies.
Some notes from me researching trying to answer my own question:
> Wall Street experts and financial research firms project Anthropic’s current blended gross margins to be in the mid-40% to mid-60% range, with internal company forecasts aiming for a software-like 77% gross margin by 2028
> Anthropic’s revenue is heavily dominated by enterprise and developer customers (roughly 75% to 85% of total revenue).
> Premium Token Pricing: Enterprise and API clients generate 3 to 5 times more revenue per token than consumer users.
Net is estimated to be between 10% and 30%
> The projection dwarfs the $47 billion revenue "run rate," reflecting the firm's current pace of business, that the company publicized as recently as May, and shows the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite.
Never do they account for competition, risks, delays, lawsuits and geo-political issues. Seems like this is massaged to get tens of millions of retail traders holding an expensive designer bag that is riddled with holes.