I think you are underestimating the market for AI. The better it gets the more the market expands.

The total amount spent on salaries in he US alone is over 12T dollars.

Assuming AI becomes ever more useful and is widely adopted 500B in revenue is not that crazy.

kevinsundar 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Here's the thing though: like labor today, employers will constantly be pushing for the lowest possible price. Especially in a world where open models are 90% as capable, the cost of AI labor will quickly drop. Thats not a good thing for Anthropic or any other frontier AI lab. There's a reason most companies don't just hire the top 5% of intelligent individuals. Its really just not needed for most business.

Also another aspect: think of the most highly paid workers right now in the US and the companies they work for. Assume that normal people no longer have jobs due to AI. How are these companies going to continue making revenue to pay Anthropic? Anthropic might get a quick buck but a long term growth business is not macro-economically possible for frontier AI businesses.

▲

raesene9 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Let's posit that that's possible, for Anthropic to get to 500B in revenue, they'd either need 100% of the market or the market has to be even bigger.

OpenAI, Google, the many Chinese labs all have products and several of them likely have better financial positions. At the moment Anthropic have one of the best models but it needs to stay sufficiently above competition for them to capture a large share of the market.

At the same time this year we've seen a move for model diversification as cheaper models become "good enough". If this IPO was 6 months ago I think it might have gone better for them.

▲

throwawayffffas 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the market has the potential to be 1 or 2 trillion in the US, 10% to 20% of labor costs. I say this because I believe most companies would not blink at spending that money to supply their workforce with AI tools assuming the AI actually did the work.

The winner take all network effects are probably not there in this case, but still if Anthropic is a large player and has 20-30% of the market they could have a revenue in the hundreds of billions.

Double the size of the market to include most of the rest of the world and the 500B is suddenly under 20% market share.

	▲	raesene9 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		and if 20% of labor costs are translated (a.k.a 20% more unemployment), who's buying all the goods and services those companies create? The tech companies will just parrot "UBI" at that point, but given how adverse they are to being taxed, how UBI would be financed, is an unanswered question.

▲

kannanvijayan 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The "good enough" problem is a real biter. The personal PC market overtook the mainframe market long before PCs were even close to beating the top supercomputers. Cheap and good enough is the threat.

What does good enough look like for various use cases, when do we hit it, and can these companies guard that territory?

▲

fluidcruft 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As I understand it, AI is only really getting traction in IT and software development. It's been mostly irrelevant elsewhere overall, all things considered. That could change, but basically there's only one product that is selling. Dunno whether there is $500b/year of IT and programming to replace.

▲

surajrmal 6 hours ago | parent [-]

People are using it to do contract negotiation without a lawyer, argue with their doctors over health matters, complain to teachers about their methods, etc. On the flip side, lawyers are using it in supplement to paralegals, doctors transcribing patient notes with it, and teachers are using it to generate worksheets. It's being used fairly widely already

▲

sensanaty 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe, but most people aren't paying for their chatbots at all, yet alone the 100$+ plans. Out of the non-technical acquaintances of mine who do use some form of AI (which is a tiny amount of people), they just use the free tiers on claude and ChatGPT, none of them ever have or ever will pay a single cent for any of this. Even the technical folk are barely paying, and they're certainly not wasting 200 bucks on it.

▲

lbreakjai 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's true, I do all of that, but I'm using the free Claude version. It's been more than enough to handle the few home renovation projects I'm currently working on.

That's quite a leap to assume there's a ton of money to be made with the casual users sending perhaps a couple of messages a day to real an email and draft a response.

▲

throwawayffffas 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The money is not on the casual users, the money is on the lawyers and accountants, and consulting specialists that have actual business use cases.

If you are spending 50 - 60 grand a year on a paralegal will you balk at another 5 or 10 that will allow them to do double the work?

	▲	lbreakjai 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but the message I was responding to was describing casual uses: people using AI to argue with their doctor or review some contract, or what have you. The problem with the "double the work" narrative is it ignores the second order effect. You can do twice the work, but so does everyone else. You doubled the supply, was there a massive pent-up demand for lawyers or accountants at the current price point?

▲

fluidcruft 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I recommend listening to the LegalTech Week podcast. Generally lawyers are finding it's not delivering efficiency overall. They spend more time reviewing the output. The courts are drowning in slop and deepfake evidence is a growing concern. The jury is still out on all of this.

	▲	mattm 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Do you have a specific episode to recommend? I would love to hear about the challenges of checking AI work in another industry.

▲

iLoveOncall 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Employers are reducing AI spending, not increasing it.

You're also assuming that basically the entirety of the market would go to Anthropic, rather than other providers, which makes no sense.

You are vastly over-estimating the market for AI. The extreme majority of people would never pay a dime for it.

▲

suddenlybananas 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you ate up that 12T dollars on AI, the economy would collapse and whoosh would go the 12T dollars.

▲

throwawayffffas 5 hours ago | parent [-]

My hypothesis is not that the AI is going to eat up that 12T dollars. But there will be additional investment to provide AI tools to the workers to the tune of 10% to 20% of their salaries.

	▲	kevinsundar 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But why would 10% to 20% go to Anthropic rather than being mostly diffused across all providers with the majority actually going to cheap open model providers who provide 90% of the intelligence for the lowest cost?