I used to agree with you but now do not. I now think the floor for this market is probably no worse than the annual revenue of cell phone plans in the US market. So say, $250 billion.

Now, that probably doesn't justify the valuations and hype being thrown around, but I think it gets at a real revenue number.

I also don't know how that number fits into the funding rounds already raised and VC dreams of IPOs for these two.

This isn't coming from deep analysis on a verifiable source, but I started asking people in my social circle (includes white-collar and blue-collar folks) about their LLM use. The biggest surprise in 2026 for me was that almost all of these people told me about regular (and sometimes sophisticated) use.

A more intriguing observation - I work on the side with high school students and have two college kids of my own. Their LLM usage (and their peers) is much, much lower than expected . . . that's a little counterintuitive given "popular" perceptions I read.

▲

lelanthran 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I used to agree with you but now do not. I now think the floor for this market is probably no worse than the annual revenue of cell phone plans in the US market. So say, $250 billion.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing. I'm talking about what their IPO is going to do to their share price.

In any case, $250b revenue translates to, best case scenario, $50b profit. On an investment of $1t. It does not look good for those companies making up the $1t investment.

	▲	clusterhacks 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Gotcha. I'm past the point of having any confident thoughts about what happens to their share price at IPO. What about the idea that there is a high likelihood that the potential share price for OpenAI and Anthropic are both going to be pretty divorced from a rational market price for either?

▲

throw310822 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Interesting idea and reasonable number, but cell phones need a lot of infrastructure and they need interconnection. The risk here is that in the future a combination of near-sota open weights models optimised to use as little resources as possible and a reasonable drop in compute price, will make possible for small and tiny providers to compete with Anthropic/ OpenAI or even for people to run their own private models for most applications. Then large, expensive sota models would only be used for research and to answer the small subset of general user queries that need that kind of intelligence.