Comment by einpoklum

8 hours ago

Sounds like mostly-baseless praise for the LLM behemoths / capital investment black holes.

> I currently subscribe to the $100/month Max plan from Anthropic and the $100/month Pro plan from OpenAI

... which already indicates a bias.

> If you are a heavy user of coding agents these plans are a fantastic deal... that’s $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200—not bad at all!

Thank you for the sales pitch. Perhaps go buy a car and tell us how [insert your manufacturer] has "found product-market fit"?

> Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter.

First, the strong rumor is a claim by Anthropic itself. But even assuming that's true - it's an "operating profit", i.e. disregarding the massive capital expenses for years, and may also disregards ongoing capital expenses, if those happen not to be taken this particular quarter.

> 1 Trillion .. companies spending $200+/month/user will get you there a whole lot faster

First note the use of the first person plural to talk about Anthropic and OpenAI.

But that aside - most companies aren't paying $200 USD/user-month. But even if they were - if we take the 30 Million SW developers mentioned in trjordan's comment as subscribers, that's 2400/user-year * 30 Million = 72 Billion USD / year. And this is already rather optimistic, but - want to double that number of subscribers? Fine, make it 150 Billion / year. Still not there with a rosy outlook and assuming the hype and enthusiasm continue for many years.

And those rosy estimates are more likely than not unrealistic. I am reminded of this review of some empirical research regarding the benefit of LLM/AI use: