It’s going to be an interesting period ahead. The market is going to struggle to absorb SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and others. They’re just massive relative to typical IPOs. Maybe one can sneak through but not all. Someone is going to have to have a very bad day and it’s not clear who yet.
Separately there’s a big battle to keep these folks out of the S&P index, because many funds (some of whom are required to buy index stocks) think they’re horribly over valued and will tank once floating.
These companies are not publicly traded yet so they are not in these indices. Funds are fighting to keep them out so they’re not required to buy stocks they think will tank.
It's very unlikely, part of the reason why valuations are so high is because there is so much money, not just in the US, but globally, that is desperately seeking a place to park.
Anthropic have clearly been working towards this since last year when they started focussing more on building products around their models that could be monetised, instead of competing on the most advanced chatbot. IMO this is part of a broader strategy on their part to tap into the enterprise market, because that is where the money is, not in selling subsidised subscriptions to consumers. This is also what the market will want to see: a credible path towards profitability.
I hope price increases will mean we see serious moves towards open source and/or on device models. Feels like that's where we should all be headed but the current subsidy is a distraction.
I think it's a good thing if the pricing gets more realistic. Both for the customers long-term and for the economy. To evaluate AI tools and how much benefit they provide you need to evaluate the costs as well. And right now nobody truly knows where the costs will end up. That's fine as long as the prices are stable, but they aren't.
In one example I know, a boring company that isn't a pure software company, the Github Copilot pricing change will make it around 15x as expensive as before. It's far from ideal when you cannot rely on pricing to stay somewhat stable.
After Anthropic achieve's "safe" AGI (A Giant IPO). Those token prices are NOT going down as I am predicting [0]
Why would they?
They need to pay for the increasing costs and the high demand for running Claude and soon it will be reflected in their earnings releases. So every token cost counts and the subsidization era of tokens will eventually end.
VC’s weren’t going to keep them propped up forever and it’s not like any of these companies have even a semblance of a plan to get into the black, so unfortunately this was always going to be the next stage for any LLM start up not bought out and folded in to a big player.
I'd say it's a mixed bag. Yes, price increases are/were expected. But blocking 3rd party harnesses from their subscription and also moving SDK/claude-p access out of the subscription is blocking innovation and therefore future use of Claude models. What I mean is, while Claude models are SOTA, Claude Code is not. It's full of bugs and shortcomings and new innovative harnesses might make better use of the model, but this won't happen now as they are blocked. Same for all the people building their own scripts/workflows around claude -p or the SDK, they will now stop inventing new stuff on top of Claude.
I think it also doesn’t help that they’re all different flavors of the same tool and it’s very easy to jump between them. None of them actually made a particularly distinct product, and they want us to use their tool to make/justify the nebulous billion dollar product.
As for subscription/token costs, even with increases they’re not even remotely covering costs. If people actually paid what it cost for these companies to even break even, nobody would be using these tools. They simply aren’t that consistently useful despite all the grand claims. They can be useful and in some areas they are very useful, but nobody is going to spend thousands of dollars a month to have something rewrite their emails regularly. And it’s not like these companies are trying to target one industry. They want to target everyone.
Well it will always be good in a way, but probably won't become better in the near future. Opus 4.7 was a downgrade in a way that gives Anthropic more control and better margins. And they keep Mythos away from the normies, giving access only to large corporations who pay millions for it.
It’s going to be an interesting period ahead. The market is going to struggle to absorb SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and others. They’re just massive relative to typical IPOs. Maybe one can sneak through but not all. Someone is going to have to have a very bad day and it’s not clear who yet.
Separately there’s a big battle to keep these folks out of the S&P index, because many funds (some of whom are required to buy index stocks) think they’re horribly over valued and will tank once floating.
Get your popcorn ready.
> because many funds (some of whom are required to buy index stocks) think they’re horribly over valued and will tank once floating
Most of S&P 500 have shares in these anyway e.g. Microsoft and OpenAI. Not really making THAT much of a difference.
[delayed]
? No.
These companies are not publicly traded yet so they are not in these indices. Funds are fighting to keep them out so they’re not required to buy stocks they think will tank.
>The market is going to struggle to absorb
It's very unlikely, part of the reason why valuations are so high is because there is so much money, not just in the US, but globally, that is desperately seeking a place to park.
Anthropic have clearly been working towards this since last year when they started focussing more on building products around their models that could be monetised, instead of competing on the most advanced chatbot. IMO this is part of a broader strategy on their part to tap into the enterprise market, because that is where the money is, not in selling subsidised subscriptions to consumers. This is also what the market will want to see: a credible path towards profitability.
I hope price increases will mean we see serious moves towards open source and/or on device models. Feels like that's where we should all be headed but the current subsidy is a distraction.
I agree but with the current hardware pricing it is a big problem
I think it's a good thing if the pricing gets more realistic. Both for the customers long-term and for the economy. To evaluate AI tools and how much benefit they provide you need to evaluate the costs as well. And right now nobody truly knows where the costs will end up. That's fine as long as the prices are stable, but they aren't.
In one example I know, a boring company that isn't a pure software company, the Github Copilot pricing change will make it around 15x as expensive as before. It's far from ideal when you cannot rely on pricing to stay somewhat stable.
After Anthropic achieve's "safe" AGI (A Giant IPO). Those token prices are NOT going down as I am predicting [0]
Why would they?
They need to pay for the increasing costs and the high demand for running Claude and soon it will be reflected in their earnings releases. So every token cost counts and the subsidization era of tokens will eventually end.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46886918
VC’s weren’t going to keep them propped up forever and it’s not like any of these companies have even a semblance of a plan to get into the black, so unfortunately this was always going to be the next stage for any LLM start up not bought out and folded in to a big player.
I'd say it's a mixed bag. Yes, price increases are/were expected. But blocking 3rd party harnesses from their subscription and also moving SDK/claude-p access out of the subscription is blocking innovation and therefore future use of Claude models. What I mean is, while Claude models are SOTA, Claude Code is not. It's full of bugs and shortcomings and new innovative harnesses might make better use of the model, but this won't happen now as they are blocked. Same for all the people building their own scripts/workflows around claude -p or the SDK, they will now stop inventing new stuff on top of Claude.
I think it also doesn’t help that they’re all different flavors of the same tool and it’s very easy to jump between them. None of them actually made a particularly distinct product, and they want us to use their tool to make/justify the nebulous billion dollar product.
As for subscription/token costs, even with increases they’re not even remotely covering costs. If people actually paid what it cost for these companies to even break even, nobody would be using these tools. They simply aren’t that consistently useful despite all the grand claims. They can be useful and in some areas they are very useful, but nobody is going to spend thousands of dollars a month to have something rewrite their emails regularly. And it’s not like these companies are trying to target one industry. They want to target everyone.
Yeah I'm worried about that too. Current SOTA models might just be too expensive for most use cases if we had to pay the real costs.
I like Claude a lot. I hope it continues to be good
Well it will always be good in a way, but probably won't become better in the near future. Opus 4.7 was a downgrade in a way that gives Anthropic more control and better margins. And they keep Mythos away from the normies, giving access only to large corporations who pay millions for it.