Comment by jillesvangurp
5 days ago
Some of the revenues are very real. A few million subscriptions at tens-hundreds of dollar per month add up to non trivial revenue pretty quickly. I think most software engineers will have such subscriptions fairly soon. We're talking about a market where companies drop 5-20K/month on software engineers and hire whole teams of those. Of course they are going to spend on this. Maybe not 500$. But 20-100$ is a lot less controversial.
And this is quickly spreading beyond software engineering. Software engineers are just being guinea pigs for agentic AIs eventually popping up in all sectors. Basically, while security and quality issues are being sorted out, it helps having users that are a bit more clued in about what they are doing.
That's why AI investments are so hot right now. Of course there are a lot of AI companies that will fall short. There always are. And companies like Nvidia that will make a lot of money selling GPUs.
But there is some non trivial amount of revenue potential there. Anybody still in denial about that is probably penny pinching.
I refuse to pay for any product where I'm the product. Run it locally, maybe I'll pay for it but never online.
My guess would also be that at the 100$ price point only one company can be profitable but that is just a very wild guess.
For what I've seen SE's are some of the last to adopt it. My marketing colleague has been overflowing in generic AI crap produced by external writers for over a year now.
> I refuse to pay for any product where I'm the product.
Are you "the product" if you're paying $50 but the company also gets $0.35 of value from your data?
If yes I think you're overreacting, if no then I don't think your worries apply to AI subscriptions. (Other worries do, but not that one.)
I think this will generally be paid by employers that will pay extra to take care of the usual liability legalese. Which would typically also take care about concerns related to intellectual property, security, etc. This will be about as controversial as office 365, slack and other licenses. And you might reasonably expect some of those subscriptions to include AI features.
Anyway, your employer won't ask you for permission, they'll just expect you to use the tools they provide you with. And the responsible IT manager, VP of engineering, or whomever is just going to look at cost/benefit here and come to some conclusion based on that. My guess is most companies will pay up for some decent subscriptions and will probably get some value out of those.
Likewise freelancers might be asked to not use their personal accounts for security reasons, or they might be expected to get a proper paid subscription that provides the right guarantees in the same way that they might be expected to have a laptop to work on. I've had customers providing me with laptops and I've also done projects with my own laptop. It seems to vary.
Right now Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are playing a game of chicken. But even after that it's not clear if the remaining players will be able to generate a profit.
Even if AI companies can recoup the billions or trillions of dollars invested, how long will that take and what will be their margin after that?