Does anyone feel that the jig is almost up? Surely the returns aren’t anywhere close to what investors expect with the sheer amount of cash at this point in time.

Are Anthropic and OpenAI rushing to IPO for immediate cash so they can delay the inevitable? Surely this cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay John to pay Tim must end.

We are only just now getting a taste of the “true cost” of these tokens. Then there is a lack of compute bottlenecking everything. Even now I’m looking at the 7.5x rate of tokens for Opus 4.7

Open models are promising and cost a fraction of what they proprietary models cost which the big two are vulnerable to when companies start to feel the cost of tokens.

Will data centres be built fast enough and powered sufficiently to lower the cost of compute thus tokens?

Is it just a giant Hail Mary to get to AGI ASAP before the economy collapses?

Above all else, I simply feel the models have plateaued. I am noticing productivity loss for tasks I deem as “complex”

> Surely this cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay John to pay Tim must end.

I think a LOT of companies really never needed to be on the public market, and its a darn shame that so many go on the stock market, we have this obnoxious culture where you have to fire tons of people if you have a bad quarter just to show you're stopping the bleeding. Companies literally fire and hire x number of people every quarter to keep things going, its ridiculous and unhealthy. Private companies rarely work like this, I'm sure there's exceptions.

Every company I've worked at started off private, and those were their golden years, until some economic hurdle happened so they sold it off to a bigger fish who is on the stock market, who bought them to be more attractive to investors or what have you.

I wish there were an alternative to the stock market where you invest for the long haul, and you cannot take your money out in x number of years. I think this would make more sense. Maybe it doesn't fix the VC peeps want their money back nonsense, but if you could do it even for early stage companies, maybe it could help somewhat.

From the limited perspective of software development, today’s models are well-worth their per-token cost.

This reads to me like Anthropic anticipating demand and making a commitment to acquire supply. Not unlike airlines committing to future jet fuel purchases, or Apple committing to future DRAM volume.

I don’t necessarily disagree but to provide some counter points:

1. Model providers are currently profitable when just counting the cost to serve tokens for inference[1]. They lose money training the next generation of models.

2. Open models don’t work nearly as well. Given that tokens are still relatively cheap, and hallucinations are expensive, I’ve not seen a huge up tick in open model usage for coding agents yet.

3. On the AI economy front, I really have no idea, but AI companies (meta, msft) have already come down in value. It seems investors are at least a little wary of AI over valuation. Of course, the stock market is not the economy, but it’s not clear where warning signs would be. Earnings are healthy.

1: https://martinalderson.com/posts/no-it-doesnt-cost-anthropic...

2: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/04/20/a...

I am not sure how grounded this is in reality. Fortune 500s that were not already testing the waters with companies like Anthropic are rushing to figure out governance and how to use these tools across their orgs.

Has there been a ton of hype? Absolutely but the value proposition is getting more and more tangible.

Did some of the AI companies over commit in spending? I am sure and they will probably hurt in the long term. I thought Anthropic had been scaling towards profitability at a quick timeline though.

If there is bubble to be popped, I'm guessing there's still a few years before it happens. Just based on the timeline of events, maybe end of 2028. Even if the big players find profitability, all of the other companies latching onto the AI-first identity will probably pop by then.

Anthropic revenue is ~$30B/year.

>Does anyone feel that the jig is almost up? Surely the returns aren’t anywhere close to what investors expect with the sheer amount of cash at this point in time.

It's only a matter of time until they crash the market. Nobody is making any money, even if the White House is dumping billions in their tools.

Doubtful. Look at how long Uber and Tesla have lasted despite making huge losses. Hell even Magic Leap somehow still exists (I guess because they don't have running costs beyond salaries).

I think this can keep going for at least another 5 years.

> We are only just now getting a taste of the “true cost” of these tokens

Why do you believe that? Better metric would be price per token of open models served by third party. Last I was tracking the price for similar level model was decreasing by more than 10x year on year, and they are 10-100x cheaper than top properietery models.

Sure you can say that you can't compare them but for sure you can compare the top properietery model of 6 months back to current open models and the gap in time seems to be constant.

> Will data centres be built fast enough and powered sufficiently to lower the cost of compute thus tokens?

...building datacenters will not lower the cost.

The cost (real, not investment hype subsidized one) will only drop with:

* more efficient models * GPU/RAM market going back to reasonable pricing.

The AI bubble pumped the second into unstustainable pricing and progress on first is going.. slowly.

> Open models are promising and cost a fraction of what they proprietary models cost which the big two are vulnerable to when companies start to feel the cost of tokens.

Anthropic are scared of open weight models and need to fear-monger towards you to continue paying for their models.

That's the whole point of their 'safety' marketing narrative, account bans, and Dario being the AI scarecrow scaremongering everyone about nonsense like 'Mythos' towards the world.

'Mythos' is already here in the form of open-weight models that also found the same vulnerabilities as Anthropic did.

You're observing that:

a) effective price-per-token is rising b) there is insufficient compute to meet the demand.

And your conclusion is that the industry is circling the drain and due to collapse?