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."

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.

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.