Comment by bunderbunder
20 hours ago
I have a hard time believing they are likely to get to $500bn in revenue. That’s another $450bn in revenue growth that needs to happen before demand tapers off.
But I see every reason to believe demand will taper off. It seems it’s already happening. Enterprises have been deciding that maybe corporate chatbot and coding agent budgets shouldn’t actually be infinite. AI startups are starting to successfully outcompete each other, effectively killing off members of Anthropic’s customer pool in the process. And consumer demand for AI products seems to be dropping. None of these are signs that suggest that Anthropic has thus far met only 10% of plausible long-term demand.
Total global wages ~$12 trillion/year. The "what you have to believe" here is that AI tool spend becomes at least 10-20% of it, my belief here is we see net slowdown in hiring as human + AI = super productivity so as businesses grow we'll continue to see increase in AI spending.
Then if inference does grow to a $2-3 trillion/year market that Anthropic is a big winner, as big as NVDA is now (they're going to be over $500 billion in revenue in calendar year 2027).
At this point, though, “human + AI = super productivity” is looking more lime dogma than reality.
The pattern seems to be that it makes people more productive when you measure it in terms of raw work product volume. But not all work product is equally valuable, and we have yet to see a clear pattern of increased economic productivity. Instead we just keep finding new and interesting bits of jaggedness in the frontier.
Of course nobody can prove those economic gains will not manifest at some point in the future. I can’t prove that Jesus isn’t coming soon, either. But I also can’t prove which millenarian denomination, if any, he would choose to bless in the event that he does come back.
> The pattern seems to be that it makes people more productive when you measure it in terms of raw work product volume. But not all work product is equally valuable.
This is a good point. I can code with Claude Code at 10x or maybe 100x, but have very little in the way of design, sales or marketing skills, and thus, I've been unable to make much side-hustle money from my new superpowers.
Meanwhile at my boring day job, my productivity is gated by a frustrating variety of coworkers and embedded processes, none of which seem to operate at 10x, to put it politely.
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Products don't exist to serve themselves and code is just a fraction of what makes the world go; wages go down, spending goes down, free capital to spend on iterating goes down.
It's part of the reason so many of the dark enlightenment dorks are pushing more towards automation of control.
>human + AI = super productivity
There have been no signs of "super productivity" in the larger economy due to AI. Boosts in productivity have, so far, been seen exclusively in sectors like tech.
We will see more (and bigger) "circular economy" deals.