[smt88]

No. First of all, AI companies make money per token, not per user. The unlimited plans are all dead or dying.

Second, they can increase prices if they're really killing jobs. The price for a model that can kill 1 job is much lower than the price for a model that can kill 100.

[SuboptimalEng]

That's a fair point. Model prices can increase. Let's say Anthropics/OpenAI/Gemini figure this out.

Doesn't this mean that any company that depends on headcount growth (every SaaS), loses?

100 SWE -> 10 SWE, 100 slack/gmail/notion/zoom/etc. subscriptions become 10.

[smt88]

> Doesn't this mean that any company that depends on headcount growth (every SaaS), loses?

Yes, assuming they aren't also scaling their costs down with AI.

But this is mostly a moot point because we don't yet have any evidence that AI is killing lots of jobs. Companies are doing necessary/planned layoffs after over-hiring for years, and some of them are making it look better to investors by saying it's because they're smart (for using AI) instead of the truth, which is that they stupidly over-hired.

You also have to remember that AI is way, way under-priced right now. That $200/mo. Claude bill should probably be double or triple what it is. All of the AI companies are plowing money into keeping prices artificially low.

The economics will change a lot once they can't do that anymore. Google will likely dominate because they can burn their own cash from other businesses instead of cash from VCs or retail investors.

But if prices go up and these companies charge enough to be profitable, people will start to question whether it's cheaper to just have people doing the work instead.