I’m happily paying $200/mo for Claude code. The tokens I use would be >$10k at API rates. I’m building the best products of my life, and multiple of them in parallel. I’m doing better creative work, finally realizing a game idea I’ve had no time for, etc.
If this level of usage goes to $500/mo… I’ll be out. It’s worth what I’m paying, but hey I went a decade without writing that song or building that game. It’s not freaking heroin, it’s a tool that offers a good value for what I pay.
I interpreted hooked to mean “the degradation of skills has made it significantly harder to transition back to doing things with auto-complete/by hand”.
Fair enough. Though in that framing I’d question whether SWE skills degrade that quickly, or are unrecoverable. I took a year off from writing software… I was fine.
Can you share some use cases of what you think will get companies to become hooked? I'm really failing to see a dependency link emerging either now or in the future.
That combined with the relatively easy switching costs. It doesn't bode well for AI companies seeking to create a walled garden.
Teachers in public schools are being told to use AI in their curriculum. In some cases, this means students are being taught not to think (regardless of the intent of the lesson). When prices make this curriculum untenable but the kids already depend on it, that rugpull is going to severely harm a generation of kids whose education was already disturbed in 2020.
Some countervailing forces off the top of my head:
* Hardware improvements will reduce costs
* Model training improvements (read: more efficient model training) will reduce costs
* Better models will reduce costs (more inference for less hardware time while keeping quality constant)
* Tooling and platform will stabilize—less need to dump money into applications and backend systems because they will become mature—also improvements in AI efficiency and quality will lower the cost of maintenance and future feature development
* Energy buildout will stabilize (we will eventually have enough energy supply to meet AI demand)
* Chips market will stabilize (chip supply will catch up to AI demand, lowering the hardware costs)
What's your time estimation for the last 2 points? Last I heard TSMC is not willing to commit dozens of billions to build new fabs for what might be a fad. Granted, they're not theonly foundry, but that's a signal nonetheless. Given the current craziness around hardware, I doubt the stabilization will come soon. Probably not before token costs soar.
I'm far from an expert, but I'm pretty sure the chips bottleneck at the moment is memory chips which has little to do with TSMC and the memory industry is _dumping_ capital into increasing manufacturing capacity. I'm not sure when energy prices will stabilize.
I'm not sure I agree. Beyond the Anthropic world, we see
1. The GitHub Copilot pricing change that started a week ago already change buying decisions.
2. Small name open weight providers selling at what I assume, and hear through grape vine, is a profitable place.
Claude is over priced for what you get, and if headline is true, expensive to run. I do wonder if their API pricing is profitable. That's the word on the street about Big AI, they are making money on the PayGo
By "word on the street" do you mean "word that they are leaking to the press so they get favorable coverage, and based based on opaque and questionable accounting"?
The press is not the channel I hear things through. New media is fundamentally broken right now and you should not use it as a source for quality information.
I’m happily paying $200/mo for Claude code. The tokens I use would be >$10k at API rates. I’m building the best products of my life, and multiple of them in parallel. I’m doing better creative work, finally realizing a game idea I’ve had no time for, etc.
If this level of usage goes to $500/mo… I’ll be out. It’s worth what I’m paying, but hey I went a decade without writing that song or building that game. It’s not freaking heroin, it’s a tool that offers a good value for what I pay.