alt Hacker NewsOkay, so if we make the dubious assumption that revenue would increase proportionally in accordance with usage up to 100% of the population, that would still only account for a 6x increase in revenue-- not the 10x increase that they need to fulfill their contracts. Their product is increasingly replaceable, their revenue is super concentrated in just a few customers [0], and they're cracking down on distillation which was almost certainly a decent percentage of their revenue as well [1].
I'm not convinced.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/two-custome...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ai-copycats-distil...
Replies
Thats a different discussion though.
But I do assume its not just adoption in the future its replacement and re-investment:
Right now a company can't invest in anything else than humans. A team has 5-10 members, the 5-20% of them are below avg or just avg. you were happy to have them for whatever reason like smaller tasks, easier tasks more repetitive tasks.
Now you can just replace them with AI Tokens.
The second driver of this, or why this will/is happening not just for something like a developer through coding agents: the agentic layer is coming. Which will eat tokens for breakfast, but will also replace humans.
Your HR system? Will have an Agentic layer by default. Your HR system will either respond automatically to you or with A2A to the ticket system. The ticket system will have an agentic layer. Your SEO tool? you will us the agentic layer to create camapaigns automatically. You migth give feedback but you will need less people and less skilled people if even.
And this will happen on every layer of your stack.
that would still only account for a 6x increase in revenue-- not the 10x increase that they need to fulfill their contracts
Assuming you're talking about the $600 billion or so over the next decade, they don't need a 6x increase to cover that, they're already pretty close based on the $65B run rate as of last quarter.
their revenue is super concentrated in just a few customers
20% for the top two customers is not actually that concentrated. If both of them go to zero, at their current growth rate (45% from Q2 to Q3) it would take about 6 weeks to replace that revenue.