If you added up all the major AI valuations, it's apparently worth more than products Americans constantly buy and rely on for their main life. So either AI is going to be involved in every Americans life to a large degree, and paying real money for, or these valuations are insanely wrong.
there are plenty of people who basically believe this is the end of the human economy - there will be nothing left that isn't done by AI in the future. Even the bits left that humans do will be human facades on AI driven activity (like your hairdresser will be viewing you through AI powered glasses using AI powered scissors etc).
So from that point of view you can indeed look at it as the entire value of the economy should be invested into AI companies.
But let's be real, the AI output today is largely complete and utter shit. Like, really, without careful promoting and oversight, it's not fun to read, it's not smart, it's not accurate, it's not thorough, and it's certainly not yet over the massive show stopping hurdle that is lying and hallucinating all the time.
To me the bigger point is, the nature of humans is they seek out signals of value, and we will rapidly hone in on whatever unique attributes still differentiate something from being AI generated and those will become what people value. Or to put it another way, no matter how good AI gets, "shit" will be redefined to that.
Already in posting here you have to actively avoid using language that could be mistaken for AI generated text or people instantly devalue your comment if not outright call you on it and try to have your account banned etc. It's not about the content of the comments - it's because they don't think AI content carries value.
Which is all to say IMHO a surprisingly large slab of the economy is going to resist AI automation, because people will instinctively reject anything that IS automated as low value (because it actually will be, in the long run).
It's usually drastically better than humans. Most humans can't code. If you are comparing it to specialists then you are already admitting they are on their way to replacing us.
The more I use them the more I draw this conclusion. Like we have given certain models an unbelievable amount of slack for bad output.
That is ultimately where it is headed and has been headed for over 100 years now.
The question is when will we get there.
If the answer is tomorrow, money means nothing and none of these investments matter. If the answer is 30 years, well lots of money to be made up until the inflection point of machines being able to design, build, and repair themselves.
You heard AI powered scissors and thought that's where we're heading? I think you'd have to be totally divorced from the average person to believe this.
Meanwhile people are still begging car manufacturers to stop locking their glove box behind a touch screen. Or how about a TV that isn't loaded with crappy software that makes it unusable after 2 years. There's a reason we don't put tech in everything.
Well, fortunately (from a certain point of view), it doesn't really matter what people beg for as long as they need the thing anyway and you and your competitors all agree not to give them what they want.
At some point in American history you probably could have said the same about railroads.
"The American Civil War (1861–1865) was followed by a boom in railroad construction. 33,000 miles (53,000 km) of track were laid across the country between 1868 and 1873,[28] with much of the craze in railroad investment being driven by government land grants and subsidies to the railroads.[29] The railroad industry was the largest employer outside of agriculture and involved large amounts of money and risk. A large infusion of cash from speculators caused spectacular growth in the industry and in the construction of docks, factories, and ancillary facilities. Most capital was involved in projects offering no immediate or early returns.[30]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873#Factors
"In the United States, the panic was known as the "Great Depression" until the events of 1929 and the early 1930s set a new standard.[2]"
> it's apparently worth more than products Americans constantly buy and rely on for their main life
What are you counting in this category?
There are countless examples, but let's say Ford. Worth $150 billion, $50 billion not counting debt.
My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.
Valuations are based on future expected earnings, not revenue. It cost Ford a lot of money to make that $60k car. The margins for AI companies are unknown but the market is pricing that they’ll be higher at one point. Not that they’ll attract more revenue from the average person.
Now let's think about how much money it costs Anthropic to make that $60k. :)
Oh we don’t want to talk about that.
> My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.
How much of that 60K does Ford actually keep? And how much will it be once BYD is allowed in the US? The forecast for Ford is pretty much only downwards, the possible upside on AI is huge.
If every company in the F500 starts spending $2000+ on AI credits per employee, then every consumer product will indirectly be funding AI companies. I think it's already the case that companies small enough to avoid/skip getting O365 or Google Suite subscriptions will pay for AI first.
> My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.
AI company revenues aren't driven by consumer subscriptions.
The people doing $20 or even $200 per month plans for their side projects aren't driving the demand. It's going to be business customers spending $1000/month or more per developer and all of the companies feeding their business processes through the API like call centers, document processing, and everything else.
If you're thinking of AI companies as consumer plays you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. We get cheap access to Claude because they want us playing with it so when it comes time for our employers to choose something we can all lobby for Anthropic.
>when it comes time for our employers to choose something we can all lobby for Anthropic
They should stop messing with us then. Stealth model changes, threatening to take code away on the $20 plan, the list goes on.
I guess I’m not surprised that if one “added up all the major AI valuations,” it’s more than any single consumer purchase or even most single companies.
Did you add Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon in that because more people consume from these firms than Ford
His neighbour isn't spending $60,000 on all of those together
Count the Fords on the street.
Now count the Amazon deliveries in a year on said same street. And next year, and the year after, and.. however long one keeps a Ford these days..
It's quite a scary thought exercise.
The average person spends 2,800 with prime or 1100 without. 75% of Amazon shoppers have prime so about $2500 a year. Amazon collects 35% on each sale where they ship and package for you.
Amazon makes 800 dollars off of each person in revenue.
Ford makes $303 per person in revenue.
AWS makes the same.
AI spend for all platforms $450 per person
Their costs to produce aren't equal.
On the flip side, enterprise.
How many businesses are paying Ford $10 million per annum?
Ford probably made 3k profit on that car. Given the falling costs of inference, what are the chances your neighbor gives anthropic 3k in profit over the next few years? Not terribly bad.
At 20 year depreciation it’s $250 a month. Close to Anthropic’s $200 model. IMHO at this point a lot of developers would rather walk than code manually.
Yeah, but $200 a month is not a sustainable price.
Cable TV begs to differ. I grew up working poor and plenty of people around me dumped a lot of money into cable TV subscriptions, and $120 back in the late 90s is $240 now.
Computer costs keep collapsing. Image and audio generation is turned out to be less computer intensive than text (lol).
First company to launch 24/7 customized streaming AI slop wins!
I think the poster was saying giving away the models for $200 isn't sustainable for the provider, not that a user won't pay $200 for the latest and greatest models.
Seems they are growing and model is overloaded. I suspect they’ll raise the prices.
$1k for a lot of developers here is totally worth it.
nope
The valuations on AI companies are a bet on them capturing enough of the $60 trillion annual wages paid to people to have a good ROI.
And when these AI companies are slurping up $30 trillion of the annual wages ... where does it re-enter the human economy? Or does it just disappear into NVIDIA and never come out again?
I'm not sure exactly what kind of point you are making but the valuations are at least nominally based on the expected value of the business far into the future and aren't comparable to, say, purchases done over a year despite both being denoted in dollars.
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Stocks vs Flows! You can't compare (as in subtract and check sign) $ and $/s!
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