I feel the same until I’m reminded I’m paying Anthropic $100 every month for something that’s indispensable to me now and would probably pay a lot more. Very inelastic demand as long as competition is low at the frontier.
Why will Anthropic be able to do that? That assumes there won't be competition and switching costs will be high. That doesn't seem to be the case to me.
There are no places in the US that Tmobile is the only wireless mobile network provider. While all 3 mobile network providers have weak coverage areas, Verizon is considered to have the most reach.
I think about this a lot - on HN and elsewhere online, there's an outsized portion of people who are likely to see use in AI. If you're online, you're on a computer and you're likely to also do office work that an AI can help with / do for you.
I don't think a majority of people will find it actually useful in the long run. I do game development as a hobby outside of work and every artist I know is outright hostile towards any sort of AI, to the point that they are dropping out of any community that so much as allows any mention of AI workflows.
I know that OpenAI is at least exploring "AI as entertainment" (Sora) but it has yet to be seen if that will be widely accepted or profitable. I've also been reading about teens talking to chatbots more and more rather than talking to real people, which seems like it will only end in mental health disasters.
$100/month isn't much for developer tooling. If you add up how much I spend on hardware upgrades, other SaaS products like backup services, software licenses, and other things it's easy to justify $100/month for a powerful tool.
I pay for my own AI provider subscriptions because keeping work and personal strictly separated is important for me. I do know some people who secretly pay $200/month for Claude and use it at their job even though it's not approved. I do not recommend doing that, but it shows that some people value this for their work.
For developers earning more than $10K per month, spending less than 1% of salary on tooling to make the job easier is easy to justify.
I’ve been a copilot and ChatGPT subscriber for probably close to two years now, give or take a couple of months, and I had a trusted friend telling me for months to give Claude a try.
It took about two weeks of really running it through its paces, and constantly slamming against the limit on it to convince me I had to upgrade to at least the 100/month sub, and at this point I wouldn’t blink to bump that to the 200/month if necessary.
I 100% believe we’re in a bubble, and that this level of compute isn’t sustainable at this price point, but for as long as I have it, I’m going to run it at the redline.
I’m a solo dev working on a project that I’ve just gone full-time on, after about 1.5 years of part time work. It’s a codebase that I laid the groundwork in, and has very well established systems, standards, and constraints.
The work I’m using Claude to do is the exact work I would be doing myself, but it does it at somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10x the pace I could have. I don’t know that I could get the same rate of production if I managed a team of 2-3 programmers. Right now, it’s literally almost perfect at taking my iterative suggestions, and implementing them at that accelerated pace.
Honestly the hardest part is dealing with the fact that at the end of the day, I have to understand this codebase perfectly (solo dev and all that), so I have to take in changes to it that are also 5-10x the rate my normal intuition would. But, again, the plus side is that it’s implementing them essentially exactly as I would have, as it has ~20k lines of code that I wrote to use as an example.
If I were to hire even one other programmer, I’d be paying well north of 5k/month, and I’d not only be managing a super computer programmer tool, but an actual human being as well. $100/month might as well be free comparatively.
Because I don’t believe 50% gross margins at face value, as being discussed in this thread I think the economics of all of these things are far more complex than that.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t staked my investment portfolio on there being a bubble, I’m just preparing for the worst and doing as much work as I can with Claude before a potential massive rug pull happens.
>If you’re using it for personal work, why is $100 worth it?
I'm not who you were replying to, but:
My work pays for $100/mo Claude, I pay another $100 to bring it up to $200/mo level because:
- Partly: I got in the habit back when work was only paying $20 and I was paying the $180.
- It is not worth it to me to spend braincells trying to optimize my use to slip into the $100 plan, I give everything "Opus, effort max" and with the $200/mo plan I never run out ($100 I'll run out mid-morning).
- I run a *lot* of experiments, including work-related and personal, to try to understand and improve my AI use skills.
- I also use it for a lot of personal things, right now I'm using it to help me plan a backyard studio and ADU.
It's an actual bubble specific to AI. This investment is just another example of the bubble. Pre-2008, all the investment would be coming from banks. Post-2008, all the investment came from VCs... but VCs got tapped out, so AI companies went to bigger private capital. They tapped out all the private capital. So now they're making the rounds, making deals with any corporations left with tens/hundreds of billions in cash, because they're the only possible investors left. When all of them are tapped out, and without a release of pressure from the hardware market, the only investor left will be the government. After that it's kaplooie.
You'll notice that all the really big deals have fallen through, because they're based on promises and meeting objectives that can't be met. So it's likely that there will be really big writeoffs but not a huge implosion like 2001/2008. The real losers will be the retail investors who put all their money in a handful of stocks at ridiculous valuations.
How does that work? Are you using separate accounts? Do you just max out one of them and then switch to the other one?
We need to run a SotA coding agent basically 24/7 uninterrupted and so far we didn’t find an easy solution for this (you can get provisioned TPUs for Gemini on GCP but it costs a fortune).
Surely that’s possible for under $5k a month? $10k?
It's a mathematical reality rather than 'feeling'. It has become that a few years ago. It becomes even more serious when you consider that the Chinese models are just as good, and they are being just given away to run locally like Deepseek.
Why should anyone feed the SV AI bubble if they can just use cheap Chinese models, even locally if they want to...
You had it 20 years ago: doctors spoke into recorders, transcriptionists turned that into notes, the docs reviewed them.
The first study I cited replaces the "spoke into recorders" stage with non-AI voice recognition.
The second study replaces the "spoke into recorders" stage with LLM voice recognition, and... crucially... also replaces the educated transcriptionist step with nothing.
I imagine that the real problem is that the voice recognition can be classic or LLM and it just doesn't matter as much as having two humans in the loop instead of one. But that's not a story which gets you to replace cheap voicerec with expensive AI.
A pretty insightful viewpoint I heard recently from a doctor friend: doctors and hospitals believe that only a corporation could possibly implement this, so they fall into the SaaS trap and lose data sovereignty.
Under the hood, a lot of the companies are Llama or Gemma wrappers connected to whisper.
This is seriously a good example of a domain that should enforce on-premises AI. Doctors absolutely can afford to buy an NVIDIA workstation. Transcribing text is not exactly super demanding, comparatively speaking. When did we even stop considering non-cloud services? If AI boomed 10 years ago, we wouldn't even be discussing this.
I know some European "automatic scribe" projects of the government sector. Their IT buys a physical GPU server hosted locally. Pretty sure it wouldn't be accepted otherwise (or maybe I'm just naive, but it sure is a topic they care about). The software stack is mostly open source, I think. It sure as hell doesn't talk to a big American cloud provider. (Well, the transcription service doesn't. Who knows what they do with the automated transcript. Probably the same thing they did with the manual transcript.)
Outside of gay people, the rest is your projection: they are homogenous society, racial problems are nonexistent. US is heavily heterogenous and despite that you segregated like a third of society at the time.
Sorry, I have lived and worked there 6 years in different cities and I do speak a fluent (though with a very heavy French accent) mandarin. It's totally not my projection but my experience first hand.
During the "diaoyu island" incident in the 2010s the sushi shop 200m near my appartment got sacked, and all japanese-brand car get smashed.
My black (and indian) friends all complained how hard they were treated. And when talking with my Chinese friends they all had very .... interesting... point of view.
Different things. "Rust is safer" generally means memory safety i.e. no double-free, no use-after-free, no buffer-/under-flows, and the like. The safety you seem to have in mind is "minimal dependency count".
I think they're removing old rust that would crate friction in moving towards AI assisted development. Old rust which is used to higher quality of code...
That makes sense that if they want to move the company to have only AI actually write code then offer retirement to people that resist this directive.
Though based on the headlines that I've seen regarding Azure development I'm not confident that they would end up in a better place if this ends up happening.
But maybe who knows, they might open source the NT kernel as there will be nobody left to maintain it within Microsoft.
If you consider Apple hardware support bad then I honestly don't know what you're expectations are. Apple support is the best I have ever experienced and I have tried all types of brands and warranties. Only thing that can match it is NBD warranty at HP/Lenovo/Dell.
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