> That said, even if a developer is burning $50/hr, many, many employees at large companies cost more than $100k/yr to employ all costs considered, so making them say 20-30% more productive can easily make that worth it for most. If the labs shave their margins ultimately to more like 20-30%, you'd have ~$15/hr in costs to use the services, and nearly every white collar job is way over 30k/yr to employ. If your salary is 80k, you probably cost the company 200k all in, so making you 15% more productive offsets the $15/hr cost.

Nobody including the connected article is making the argument that this cannot be profitable ever. People are saying "there is no way this admittedly quite interesting tool is going to be able to make back all of this money" and I think they are completely right to say that.

You can absolutely make money with this stuff, just not at this scale. The buildout for this shit has been certifiably crazy and a number of the involved firms are overleveraged for tens and even hundreds of billions of dollars.

How in the sweet fuck are you paying that off, plus giving investors dividends, selling this at $15/hour/user??? That math does not math. A quick google says there are between 1.5 and 4.4 million developers in the US alone, let's say it's 5 million, to be generous, and each of them is subbed to this for 8 hours per day, continuously. That's 600 million per year in revenue. If you took ALL that revenue, and put it towards paying down this debt, not leaving any for employee salaries, upkeep, ongoing development, it would take DECADES to pay down what OpenAI already owes.

And yes I'm sticking directly to code, because that's the only thing I've seen it be really good at. Are we really proposing that every knowledge worker on earth and every manager of such workers is going to have an autonomous agent running all the time!? To do what, make sure they don't have to read or write email? Which even just that example is bringing in a fucking mess of legal, compliance, and security violations because LLMs are not intelligent and are not capable of being properly secured.

Like I'm sorry, I cannot take this industry seriously when even the most basic back-of-napkin math is saying, nay, screaming from the rooftops that they are FUCKED.

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belval 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> selling this at $15/hour/user??? That math does not math. A quick google says there are between 1.5 and 4.4 million developers in the US alone, let's say it's 5 million, to be generous, and each of them is subbed to this for 8 hours per day, continuously. That's 600 million per year in revenue

That math is not mathing. $15/hour/user, with 5M devs, 8hrs and 240 working days per year that is 144B in revenue.

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vidarh 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

By your numbers, it'd be $120/day per developer * 5 million = $600m per day, not per year.

Of course people don't work every day, but even with European-level holidays that number is off by a factor of 240 or so.

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ToucanLoucan 2 days ago | parent [-]

Quite right, honestly not sure how I fucked that up so bad but I'll own it. Okay so all we need is every coder + 0.6 million more or so in the United States, subscribed to this for 8 hours a day, and the business model can work.

That still feels incredibly optimistic given how split the community at large seems to be about how good this tech is, and it assumes all those developers also all work for firms large enough to pay for all of that.

However we are still very much in back of napkin math. We haven't even gone into what it costs to provide these services, how much it's going to cost yet for all these datacenters to be built, how much electricity and water they're going to rip through, their own employees and basic overhead, and all the rest. So IMO, we've now elevated it from "hopeless" to "this could work if a whole lot of other things line up really well."

	▲	asdfasgasdgasdg 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's not just developers who are using this. My economist friends are. I bet most business analysts and general administration folks are or will be soon. Every normal person I know in my neighborhood is using AI for this thing or that. 50M people are currently subscribed to ChatGPT and it would be very surprising if this number goes down in the future. I dunno I think about the language some people are using about AI investment and it is reminiscent of the many years where people were saying Amazon was a bad buy because they never turned a profit. Admittedly AI companies are investing more than the money they've already brought in, but I would be very hesitant to predict that it's all froth given the usefulness I've gleaned from the tools. Don't get me wrong, I'm not unconcerned, but I think there are good reasons to suspect that at least some of the AI companies are making sound investments.
	▲	vidarh a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		My fiancees company has no developers, yet everyone has a paid subscription to LLMs. Certainly not $15/hour, and I don't think it's likely they'll ever pay that for everyone, but I don't find it hard to picture the aggregate cost of subscriptions on a global basis to far exceed $600m/day between far more people on subscriptions cheaper than $15/hour but more expensive than today, and companies ending up paying far more than $15/hour averaged over their developers for additional use. E.g. I already run agents 24/7 just for me. I couldn't yet justify $15/hour, but the amounts I'm spending is steadily increasing as I manage to squeeze returns from more and more things. Sure, it's back of napkin math, and I also think that several of the companies we see today won't survive and/or will only survive due to consolidation, but I also think the spend is going to be immense. With respect to the datacentres, I expect we'll see inference costs crash over the coming years - we're only seeing the beginning of what dedicated ASICs will do to inference, and what work to make models more efficient will do to the need for the very largest models, and while that might drive down the spend on individual subscriptions, I think it will drive up the total spend dramatically as cheaper models become capable enough to put them "everywhere". But, yeah, ultimately we're guessing. I'm happy to put my guesses on the record, though, and look forward to look back and see how wrong I got it in a couple of years.
	▲	2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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Maxatar 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You wrote an entire wall of text when you could have just taken 10 seconds to review what you call the "most basic back-of-napkin math" and realized you were off by two and a half orders of magnitude.

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strongpigeon 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> That's 600 million per year in revenue.

According to your math, that's $600 million per day

	▲	marcosdumay 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, the GP wrote the wrong unit on this place. That supports his conclusion that the pay-off would take decades, if it was actually per year, it would take several centuries.