> Take the right to a jury. It sounds noble in theory. But when they say judged by your peers they don't mean your actual peers. It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty.
What? A jury system is far from perfect but this is about as intellectually rigorous as “the lottery is a tax on the poor”. Many people are thrilled to do jury duty because they are invested in their community, your nihilism is not a universal truth, jury duty isn’t a burden, it is a civic duty, an honor.
I stand by it. I am not being hostile, I am making a statement. Not that it matters, but I consider myself insane, too, and also unemployable. The point of my comment was to inform others that this is not what it looks like when you are going through a manic episode, this is just who you are, this is Andy being Andy. The point of my comment is also that whatever happened between you and Simple was obviously going to happen and it isn't a reflection on Simple. Well, they were bad in their hiring but whatever, they are a startup, it happens.
and since it’s mentioned in the post, it feels fair game to call it out: Andy has revised his experience up over the years, from working at Scale to running support at scale to founding a team at Scale… he was an early employee who did some customer support. Presumably Simple got caught up in Andy’s impressive revisionism.
As long as you’re not asking it for help discussing a trip to tiananmen square. “Censor” is probably the wrong word. Chinese models are “censored” but much less restricted. For all intents and purposes, Chinese models are less “censored” / “restricted” / “limited”.
> The distinction in the US before 2011 is that couldn’t buy health insurance as an individual, hence it was a benefit dependent upon being employed. Post 2011, health insurance became attainable without an employer.
More than 30 million people had individual health insurance in 2010. If it were useless, 30 million people would not have paid $5k - $10k per year for it out of their own pocket.
Which European countries have a healthcare system similar to the American system? A system that has "insurance" (e.g: The Netherlands, Germany) is no less "free" healthcare than a system without insurance (e.g: England) or a system that will "send you a bill" like France. "Free" healthcare means that the patient will never need to worry about the cost of their treatment because it is covered by the system (whether through taxation, reimbursement, insurance does not matter). How many people have been bankrupted by healthcare in Europe?
You're just flat out wrong, it was not "basically inaccessible". Tens of millions of people had individual health insurance prior to the ACA, over 30 million in 2010, averaging 10% of all insured people from 2000 to 2010. The ACA, while very important and valuable legislation, only increased the number of individually insured people by around 25%.
Democracy isn't to blame, capitalism is. The mega corps have every incentive to dodge the costs of their negative externalities and they have them money to lobby for that. The "reasonable" citizen supporting growth with caveats will be drowned out by the mega corp and their mega wallets. The loud NIMBYs are the only group that have any chance of stopping the negative externalities which they achieve by blocking the growth. Your enemy isn't the NIMBY, your enemy is the mega corp, the NIMBY is your ally, they are the backstop.
What are you basing that on? The ACA did not make individual insurance legal, it was already legal and widespread, it was not dependent on employment. The ACA made improvements, the ACA made individual insurance more accessible.
Healthcare is "free" across Europe, including in The Netherlands. The choice of The Netherlands' to structure their system as mandatory insurance doesn't change the nature of it, it is free at the point of service with the mandatory insurance costs paid for by the government when someone is unable to pay themselves.
The conclusion you're drawing does not follow. Canadians can be frustrated with the Canadian healthcare system and also believe it to be adequate when compared to the U.S. healthcare system. Canadians who are surveyed about healthcare typically say: the system is broken and needs to be fixed AND the socialized nature of it must be protected. Canadians are unhappy with underfunding, Canadians want more funding, they do not want the U.S. system.
The Dutch system and the U.S. system are not comparable. Health insurance in the U.S. is a “free market” that the government dabbles in with a little policy here and there. Health insurance in The Netherlands is controlled by the government, it is heavily regulated.
The U.S. has waitlists too? The U.S. makes people wait based on how much money they have, socialized healthcare systems make people wait based on an assessment of need. The latter is obviously better, even though it is not perfect. You’ll find that most everyone living with socialized healthcare believes it to be adequate when compared to the U.S. system. Adequate does not mean without flaws, adequate doesn’t mean available on demand, adequate means has good outcomes. Very few countries with a similar economy have as poor healthcare outcomes as the U.S.
I think that is correct, and exactly why these purported margins are nonsensical. If Anthropic's reported $50 billion in revenue is majority per-token billing, and tokens have a margin of 80%, that would put Anthropic's profit at $30 billion on per-token usage. Where is that $30 billion going?
And conversely, let's look at the amount Anthropic are spending on compute. Anthropic has just started paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month for compute. At an 80% profit margin that would mean Anthropic is going to be bringing in $6.25 billion per month... that's more than their current reported revenue.
And that's just one contract for compute. We know that Anthropic also pay Google ~$3 billion per month for compute (based on their committed spend of $200bn over 5 years) which is $36 billion per year. At $36 billion per year on compute with 80% margins that would put revenue at... $180 billion.
Add in their spend with Amazon and Microsoft, Anthropic are spending at least $4 billion per month on compute, or $48 billion per year, all but equal to their revenue. If margins on tokens are 80% and an estimated $37.5 billion of revenue is per-token revenue, that needs just $7.5 billion of compute per year, less than $1 billion per month.
The numbers just don't add up. If margins are 80% and they have $48 billion per year in compute spend, revenue should be over $200 billion.
If the 80% margin made any sense whatsoever, Anthropic would be printing money, yet they're losing money, and have only been profitable for one month based on some financial engineering (pre-commitments billed after the fact to reduce their costs during one month).
My guess is margins are closer to 20% than 80%. That's the only way any of the numbers can make sense.
You’re missing the point. Anthropic are bringing more compute online by renting it and then they are creating the demand for it by increasing the limits on fixed cost plans. Anthropic are increasing their spend on compute without increasing revenues. I’m not guessing that, it is part of their announcements!
“First, we’re doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans.
Second, we’re removing the peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts.“
Every one of these plans is a fixed cost. Anthropic doubled their limits without changing the price. Even if inference is wildly profitable and these plans aren’t subsidized, they’ve just cut the profitability in half.
And the non-plan usage that is being paid for directly is paid for monthly. If they can sell $1 of compute as $10 of inference then they have $9 the next month to spend on more compute. Of course the capital markets would want to give them money if that were true but they would have no reason to take it.
Why would a net 30 business need to borrow hundreds of billions over many years? Anthropic currently spends an estimated $5bn/month on compute so at most they need to float $5bn, but if they’re making 90% margins on compute, that $5bn would be paid for… within a couple of days. Where is the hundreds of billions of dollars?
A good manager doesn’t ask what you want to get better at, they ask what they can do for you. A manager who asks these sort of dumb questions is just going through the motions, you should do the same, say whatever they want to hear and then don’t think about it again. You can, alternatively, try and make them into a better manager by changing the question but they might not be receptive.
The entire economy could be entirely powered by AI and use less compute than is being used today. You're projecting the amount of compute used by coding while subsidized onto other industries, but that doesn't translate.
Speak to some of these legal technology companies and ask them 2 questions:
1. How much is your AI spend on coding?
2. How much is your AI spend on AI within your product?
The answer to #1 will dwarf #2 by orders of magnitude. And that's now, when these companies are still finding their feet, using the most expensive frontier models for their product that are likely overkill (as the product matures, they'll find the right mix of cost vs. capability, whether that's lower cost models from frontier labs, or open weight models).
Put simply, compute does not scale with economic value. A task you bill $500/hour for could be done in 2 seconds by an LLM vs. a task a developer bills $500/day for could take an LLM 10 minutes. Same dollar value, huge disparity in compute.
The only use-cases for AI that are comparable to coding on compute are image and video generation. Unless we end up with an economy primarily made up of companies producing code, image and video, there's literally no way compute needs can keep growing without subsidies.
I think it is hard to overstate just how much "work" is being done by Claude Code and Codex because it is "free" at the point of use. There are millions of newly minted developers prompting Claude and Codex to generate trillions of lines of code every single day because it has no marginal cost, not because it is driving any economic value. And as soon as they're exposed to the real cost, when economic value becomes a factor, they're going to stop doing it (as we're already seeing with companies like Uber).
Through your YC connection and legal work, you have access to a lot of very successful people working in every industry: ask those 2 questions, how much are they spending on coding with AI vs. how much are they spending on AI in their product? You're going to find that even the most aggressively AI-integrated products are spending pennies on their product's AI usage compared to the dollars they spend on their AI coding.
We're at peak compute demand, and it is almost entirely driven by coding, which is subsidized. The real economy isn't like the creative and chaotic make things and see what sticks world of coding. The real economy is boring, routine, regimented, task oriented, you hire people, train them, they do the tasks, you make some money. Most of the economy could be replaced with a few semi-intelligent macros.
Yes, AI is coming to every industry, you're right, but it isn't going to explode compute demand, it is going to make these industries more efficient, it is going to reduce costs, not shift them to compute, because $1 of compute can do more than $1,000 of a human in most industries.
We can come back to this comment in a couple of years. I bet we'll be using less compute then than we are today.
What? A jury system is far from perfect but this is about as intellectually rigorous as “the lottery is a tax on the poor”. Many people are thrilled to do jury duty because they are invested in their community, your nihilism is not a universal truth, jury duty isn’t a burden, it is a civic duty, an honor.