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.