I wonder how much capex risk there is in this model, depreciating the GPUs over 5 years is fine if you can guarantee utilization. Losing market share might be a death sentence for some of these firms as utilization falls.

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utyop22 5 days ago | parent [-]

What I hear nobody talking about is the price elasticity of demand and how this plays into the economics of the model business.

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Jaxkr 5 days ago | parent [-]

I think some of the power user demand is fairly inelastic. I’ve seen developers who are allergic to spending money happily drop $200/mo on those new Claude subscriptions.

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utyop22 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah but if you push the price up, given that many users will cancel their subscriptions you will end up with still a tiny market segment relative to what is necessary, in revenues, to justify the valuations purported.

	▲	lumost 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's a tricky one, there is also a lot of push right now to use AI so developers are incentivized to drop money on subscriptions. I'd have difficulty justifying 1k/month for smaller shops - but corporations will be different. If the average engineer is just 20% more productive, then that is a 30-60k value to the company. I don't have difficulty getting to a 20% productivity gain with AI just from automating the tasks I procrastinate on or can't focus on. Likewise the ability to code a prototype overnight/over the weekend is a reasonable extension of practical working hours. The challenge I do see is that fully AI generated code bases devolve into slop pretty fast. The productivity cutoffs are much lower compared to human engineers.