> Coding agents really did change everything. These are tools which burn vastly more tokens

The assumption here is that this is a positive thing.

But this very well could end up being a major negative long term by increasing the cost per user, reducing margins.

More usage = more cost = less profit.

It's not obvious that more usage is good. It's only good if revenue per user increases more than cost does. I'm skeptical about that.

> It's only good if revenue per user increases more than cost does.

That's why it's so important for these labs that they're selling API tokens for more than the compute+energy costs needed to generate them.

Every indicator I've seen is that they do have a positive margin on that. If they don't, they're screwed.

What's an example of an indicator? Genuinely curious!

Insider tips from Google and AWS telling me that they run inference at a profit (though that was over a year ago now).

Dario telling Dwarkesh three months ago that they have a margin on inference: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dario-amodei-2?timestamp=3528.0

Are these sources not incentivized to say exactly this, regardless of whether it's true?

	▲	simonw an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The insiders tips? I don't think so, they were people I trust. They had all the incentive in the world to say "I'm not going to talk about that."