What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.

A $20 Claude subscription lets you scratch the surface. A $20 Claude subscription without training means you have a lot of people spending time figuring out how to use it, and then maybe getting a bit of payback, but earning back that training is going to take time.

Getting people to figure out how to enter questions is easy. Getting people to a point where they don't burn up all the savings by getting into unproductive conversations with the agent when it gets something wrong, is not so easy.

How viable are the $20/month subscriptions for actual work and are they loss making for Anthropic? I've heard both of people needing to get higher tiers to get anything done in Claude Code and also that the subscriptions are (heavily?) subsidized by Anthropic, so the "just another $20 SaaS" argument doesn't sound too good.

I see no reason to believe that just handing a Claude subscription to everyone in a company simply creates economic benefit. I don't think it's easier than "automating customer service". It's actually very strange.

I think it could definitely already create economic benefit, after someone instructed clearly how to use it and how to integrate it in your work. Most people are really not good at figuring that out on their own, in a busy workday, when left to their own devices and companies are just finding out where the ball is moving and what to organize around too.

So I can totally see a lot of failed experiments and people slowly figuring stuff out, and all of that not translating to measurable surpluses in a corp, in a setup similar to what OP laid out.

> A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker

Only until the loans come due. We're still in the "uber undercutting medalian cabs" part of the game.

$20 is not useable, need $100 plan at least for development purposes. That is a lot of money for some countries. In my country, that can be 1/10 of their monthly salary. Hard to get approval on it. It is still too expensive right now.

>I think there are enough short term supposed benefits that something should be showing there.

As measured by whom? The same managers who demanded we all return to the office 5 days a week because the only way they can measure productivity is butts in seats?

If anything, the 'scariness' of an old computer probably protected the company in many ways. AI's approachability to the average office worker, specifically how it makes it seem like it easy to deploy/run/triage enterprise software, will continue to pwn.

I've never looked at enterprise licensing, but regular license wise, a Claude subscription is actually $200 a month. I don't count the $20 or $100 tiers because they're too limited to be useful (especially professionally!)

I think crazygringo mispresents Solow paradox. None of the main explanations say it's the cost that removed the productivity.

I think the subscription price is only the visible tip of the iceberg

Agreed.

We do have a way to see the financial impact - just add up Anthropic and oAI's reported revenues -> something like $30b in annual run rate. Given growth rates, (stratospheric), it seems reasonable to conclude informed buyers see economic and/or strategic benefit in excess of their spend. I certainly do!

That puts the benefits to the economy at just around where Mastercard's benefits are, on a dollar basis. But with a lot more growth. Add something in there for MS and GOOG, and we're probably at least another $5b up. There are only like 30 US companies with > $100bn in revenues; at current growth rates, we'll see combined revenues in this range in a year.

All this is sort of peanuts though against 29 trillion GDP, 0.3%. Well not peanuts, it's boosting the US GDP by 10% of its historical growth rate, but the bull case from singularity folks is like 10%+ GDP growth; if we start seeing that, we'll know it.

All that said, there is real value being added to the economy today by these companies. And no doubt a lot of time and effort spent figuring out what the hell to do with it as well.

> A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker

Talking about macro economics, I don’t think that number is correct.

not true at all, onboarding is complex too. E.g. you cant just connect claude to your outlook, or have it automate stuff in your CRM. As a office drone, you don't have the admin permissions to setup those connections at all.

And that's the point here: value is handicapped by the web interface, and we are stuck there for the foreseeable future until the tech teams get their priorities straight and build decent data integration layers, and workflow management platforms.

A computer lets you save a fortune in storage rooms, admin staff, delivery fees etc. It lets you reinvent how everything runs.

ChatGPT just lets you generate slop, that may be helpful. For the vast majority of industries it doesn’t actually offer much. Your meme departments like HR might be able to push out their slop quicker, but that doesn’t improve profitability.

Problem is, that just having a Claude subscription doesn't make you productive. Most of those talks happen in a "tech'ish" environments. Not every business is about coding.

Real life example: A client came to me asking how to compare orders against order confirmation from the vendor. They come as PDF files. Which made me wonder: Wait, you don't have any kind of API or at least structured data that the vendor gives you?

Nope.

And here you are. I am not talking about a niche business. I assume that's a broader problem. Tech can probably automate everything and this since 30 years. Still business lack of "proper" IT processes, because at the end every company is unique and requires particular measures to be "fully" onboarded to IT based improvements like that.

You still need to teach a 2020s employee how to use Claude.

- protect yourself from data loss / secret leaks - what it can and can't do - trust issues & hallucinations - Can't just enable Claude for Excel and expect people to become Excel wizards.

And nobody talks that the "20 bucks per worker" it's selling it at loss. I'm waiting to see when they put a price that expects to generate some net income...

Like Uber/Airbnb in early days, this is heavily subsidized.