I don't think you can draw an accurate narrative from two data points but I'm going to do it anyway. This and the slowing in revenue growth at Anthropic are not terrific signs. This should be the era of exponential growth for the AI industry. Even if the unit economics are sound at these prices, companies really need more revenue to service their current debt obligations and for now that can't come from price it has to come from volume. Furthermore, this is OpenRouter's statistics which partially represents the cost conscious section of the market and this doesn't line up with an induced demand story.

Again, two data points do not make a full story but if you're an AI bull this is not what you want to see.

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simonw 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I do find it pretty extraordinary that Anthropic's revenue growing from $4.8bn in Q1 to $11.5bn in Q2 to $16.8bn in Q3 is seen as a disappointment, but they did indeed stop doubling on a per-quarter basis.

	▲	CoolestBeans 13 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think it's a combination of it not being a GAAP revenue number and the timing. If you have flexibility in the report of the revenue number people assume you will choose the most flattering one especially before an IPO. If this is the most flattering number they can demonstrate, people are going to worry about what the not so flattering data says. The other part is how big the debt load is downstream. Anthropic is one of the revenue engines that has to feed the rest of the supply chain, clouds, SPVs, semiconductors, etc. They have to be pulling very large numbers to justify everyone else's finances. I think the growth is real and tremendous and that's probably more important than this blip in revenue growth. But things tend to look peachy until they're not and so everyone is on watch for cracks in the foundation.
	▲	_heimdall 20 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't have the numbers handy, but they spent drastically more than that each quarter. Growing revenue is all well and good, but profit does eventually matter, especially if debt dries up.

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simoncion 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> This and the slowing in revenue growth at Anthropic are not terrific signs.

The CEOs of both Broadcom [0] and Intel [1] publicly noting that the various LLM companies are going to have a difficult time paying for the things they need to pay for and Oracle [2] continuing to prohibit LLM-generated code in OpenJDK due to both copyright and licensing concerns [3] are also not terrific signs.

[0] <https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/broadcom-ceo-says...>

[1] <https://www.inc.com/moses-jeanfrancois/intel-and-broadcom-ce...>

[2] ...that is, the "law firm with a great big sales department and a software development division tucked into a broom closet somewhere" company ;)...

[3] <https://openjdk.org/legal/ai>

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_heimdall 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you're looking for indicators one way or another, I have yet to see any economic productivity indicators that would show any correlation between productivity and LLM use.

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judge2020 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think part of the issue is that SWE work is slowing down on needing more context and token throughput (see Opus 5.5) and new industries that _can_ adopt AI right now just don't need insane amounts of tokens flowing through it, for instance Legal (in the context of people using LLMs for Legal correctly), where you kind of just need the best model and context is maybe a few dozen PDFs relevant to your task.

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rideontime an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Not terrific signs for the AI industry or the economies that have come to depend on them, perhaps.

	▲	CoolestBeans 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		But it is only two points of unclear data among a sea of exponential growth stories. It is just that the total debt amount and rates environment mean the industry has to hit an extremely small target which prices everything toward perfection.