alt Hacker NewsWhen I'm building out a new feature, I can churn through millions of tokens in Claude code. And that's just me... Now think about Claude code but integrated with Excel or datadog, or whatever app could be improved through LLM integration. Think about the millions of office workers, beyond just software engineers, who will be running hundreds of thousands or millions of tokens per day through these tools.
Let's estimate 200 million office workers globally as TAM running an average of 250k tokens. That's 50 trillion tokens DAILY. Not sure what model provider profit per token is, but let's say it's .001 cents.
Thats $500M per day in profit.
Replies
I find it absurd to pay for tokens I cant control, predict or even check in any reasonable way. It is literally amounts to "pay whatever random money the company asks you to pay" kind of contract.
Currently there is no profit per token, quite a bit of loss per token, that's the problem. Your not going to make it up in volume.
I’m with you on the Claude Code example —- it matches my experience.
But I do think the important thing to look forward to is AI work which is totally detached from human intervention.