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lompadyesterday at 11:33 PM3 repliesview on HN

They don't just need healthy margins, they need to make back almost a trillion dollars in a couple of years. Comparing that to elastic search and redis doesn't make much sense.

Hyperscalers work because it actually has value compared to free offerings and because of the absolutely massive cost of switching providers.

Similar with Windows and macOS. Extremely high cost of switching to something different, if possible at all.

Same with office. Extremely high cost of switching due to compatibility issues and retraining of staff.

Your post primarily shows: It's all about lock-in. So far, it doesn't look like LLMs have any of that. So I don't think your points are valid here at all.


Replies

shaewesttoday at 1:25 AM

The companies don't necessarily need to make back $1T, the investors do, and those investors don't require $1T in profit to do so, they need an asset worth $1T.

Considering leaks suggest Anthropic's ARR would be $47B, that'd be a 20x valuation, but it wouldn't shock me if Anthropic doubles their revenue in the next year or two, in which a 10x revenue could easily support a $1T valuation, and boom there's your ROI, but considering they've raised $135B total, and their ARR is 30% of that, I'd consider that a pretty good ROI, especially if growth continues.

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alightsoultoday at 2:56 AM

Not convinced about office. Plenty have switched to gsuite. Plenty of people have switched to MacOS and android away from windows.

w29UiIm2Xztoday at 12:27 AM

If AI replaces labor, that's a trillion dollars of labor. About one-fifteenth of annual labor/wage earnings.

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