Comment by utopiah
14 hours ago
> All these improvement in a single year
> hard to argue against the value of current AI
> People are willing to pay $200 per month, and it is getting $1B dollar runway already.
Those are 3 different things. There can be a LOT of fast and significant improvements but still remain extremely far from the actual goal, so far it looks like actually little progress.
People pay for a lot of things, including snake oil, so convincing a lot of people to pay a bit is not in itself a proof of value, especially when some people are basically coerced into this, see how many companies changed their "strategy" to mandating AI usage internally, or integration for a captive audience e.g. Copilot.
Finally yes, $1B is a LOT of money for you and I... but for the largest corporations it's actually not a lot. For reference Google earned that in revenue... per day in 2023. Anyway that's still a big number BUT it still has to be compared with, well how much does OpenAI burn. I don't have any public number on that but I believe the consensus is that it's a lot. So until we know that number we can't talk about an actual runway.
> People pay for a lot of things, including snake oil, so convincing a lot of people to pay a bit is not in itself a proof of value
But do you really believe e.g. Claude code is snake oil? I pay $200 / month for Claude, which is something I would have thought monumentally insane maybe 1-2 years ago (e.g. when ChatGPT came out with their premium subscription price I thought that seemed so out of touch). I don't think we would be seeing the subscription rates and the retention numbers if it really was snake oil.
> Finally yes, $1B is a LOT of money for you and I... but for the largest corporations it's actually not a lot. For reference Google earned that in revenue... per day in 2023. Anyway that's still a big number BUT it still has to be compared with, well how much does OpenAI burn. I don't have any public number on that but I believe the consensus is that it's a lot. So until we know that number we can't talk about an actual runway.
this gets brought up a lot but I'm not sure I understand why folks on a forum called YCombinator, a startup accelerator, would make this sound like an obvious sign of charlatanism; operating at a loss is nothing new and anthropic / openAI strategy seems perfectly rational: they are scaling and capturing market share, and TAM is insane.