I’ve discussed with many people at work, all engineers, they’re weirdly oblivious. Most are shocked when I say things like OpenAI and Anthropic are gonna crater.

There’s a notable difference between saying those companies may crater, and predicting confidently that they will crater. The wording of your comment makes it seem like a foregone conclusion.

for real i hold the opposing view i think openai will be a 5-10T dollar company in the next 5 years, but im speculating just as much as he is.

Just a tad bit more ; it like saying either an event will happen or not so probability is 50%.

Your scenario is certainly possible, that doesn’t make both predictions equally (un)likely.

I still think OpenAI holds on as a Google competitor and Anthropic does fine as a business tool. Do they match their outsized spending with future growth? Well, that I'm not very confident about. A lot of this really comes down to what is the business model of integrating AI with 3rd party systems and I don't see that anyone has truly cracked that yet.

At least you admit you're speculating (we all are). They confidently just say its a foregone conclusion.

If they're actually that confident I hope they short the stock long term with basically all their money.

If you run a traditional short (borrow and sell the shares), you need to be right on the direction and the timing to make any money. One random surge in the price can kill your short even if said surge is short-lived.

I also speculate that OpenAI and Anthropic will crater, but I also expect that the market will remain irrational much longer then anyone shorting it today will remain solvent.

So yes, I believe it's going to leave a smoking hole in the ground, but I won't be betting money on it.

I'm also speculating that they'll kindly donate at least 1 T of that to me out of the kindness of their heart.

Because it is, there isn’t enough money to be made to cover their valuation and their competition are essentially free by comparison.

I can’t imagine being so overleveraged that I run into economic thermodynamics. It’s like interstellar travel: there’s not enough energy available to do it quickly and at scale and efficiently. There’s not enough monetary potential energy to satisfy the buildout.

We've been hearing this since DeepSeek was released in Jan 2025, and in that time, Anthropic's revenue has grown 100x. And they're still growing like crazy.

So...why hasn't that "essentially free" competition taken them down yet?

Mostly politics combined with nobody actually knowing how to utilize AI yet. We’re just now finding a singular use-case for AI, which is coding. Every other use-case has been a complete dead end. Cool gimmicks for demos, but nothing anyone uses on any regular basis, and definitely not value creating.

Everything is very unstable right now. This is still a very new tool and we’re very much experimenting on a product level.

Tell that to the mathematicians, translators, paralegals, financial analysts, customer support reps, etc, etc.

The customer support reps find the AI assistance hamfisted and laughable. AI call transcriptions get big and small details wrong, often leaving out critical details in favor of generic and high level "customer and agent discussed an ongoing issue with their home appliance." AI "let me direct your call" bots are constantly sending people to essentially random departments. AI bots trying to directly be the customer service serve only to piss people off before they get to a human, and I've run into a few businesses that are only staffed by bots.

Virtually all of those have no use for AI.

And, when they do, it’s because AI can write code. Take for example financial analysis. AI sucks ass at that, but it’s good at writing code. You’re using it to write code to do the analysis.

When you ask AI a math question, it’s not answering the question. It’s writing a program to answer the question. Because AI is basically only useful for writing code.

lol, this couldn’t be more false and reductive.

I guess the mathematicians are all freaking out over nothing, since AI can’t do math. Weird how it’s been solving these problems that have stumped humans for decades or more…just coincidence I guess.

I’m also quite sure that when AI is doing someone’s job by writing code to do it, they’ll be comforted that it’s not really doing it, it’s just creating and using tools from scratch to do it.

The desperate grasping for any kind of position to hang onto that AI isn’t already more capable than most experts in many fields is…sad to watch.

I never said AI isn’t capable or more capable than experts, just that it’s only good at writing code. It’s really, really good at coding.

I talk to our risk lead and he was also weirdly oblivious as well. The whole company is dependent on them not going down the shitter. Surely that's a tangible risk?

I'm indifferent either way myself. It's just shocking the amount of ignorance.

It's the cryptobro craze but for AI. It's tiresome, I don't have AI fatigue, I love using Claude, I have aibro fatigue. I'll lump in the people all in on AI, and that includes anyone who hates it vehemently because they just have to sour conversations.

Yeah. AIbros and AI companies are SHOCKED that AI and datacenters are unpopular.

But guys, if your companies weren't run by psycopaths and weren't promoted by assholes who appear to be the exact same guys behind the NFT craze, (this is the future of creative expression! Don't like it? Your a luddite. Cope.) and weren't predicting horrible nightmare scenarios based on their tech maaaaaaybe people would like AI and be more interested in using it?

I personally see that generative AI is a very powerful and useful technology but I hate everyone involved in it and do not want to see them succeed because they're icky people.

Its like if the nazis had discovered how to harness atomic energy before anyone else. Fuck that.

I've talked to someone who has worked at those companies, and they drink the koolaid that people like Sam Altman shove down your throat, even when its blatantly bullshit.

Note that both Sam Altman and Dario have conveniently watered down AGI, and moved away from "trying to achieve AGI" essentially.

The model employee must live (or pretend to) inside the company's information bubble.

Words are cheap. Put your money and short Anthropic (when it IPOs) if you are convinced it will crater.

Are you one of those people who lost half their money to spacex? You sound like you are.

I agree with this sentiment entirely. Too much cheap talk. If you want to talk then you should be taking a position.

There is no position to take. The market will remain irrational longer than I remain solvent. But I'm not sure how long that will be

The complete opposite is the generally held perspective among engineers where I work. It’s the management that think they’re not going to crater.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

-Upton Sinclair

It's ironic that this describes both the engineers and the management, depending on where you stand.

1929 all over again.

Robber Barrons are back !

Question is: Who is gonna be the Carnegie that builds libraries vs the assholes who just hoarded

Not sure about Anthropic, unless they continue to fall over themselves in ego. They have strong GTM in my take.

Google is a bit oblivious (though is probably the smarter money based on diversification alone IMHO). OpenAI has folks wondering just how publicly Mr. Altman can blunder his wording before he gets ousted (today was along the lines of "you will own nothing" with his take that personal RAM ownership being an affront to efficiency).

All three are trying to convince enterprise buyers that central tokenmaxxing is the best thing since sliced bread; many of the circles I run in occasionally have huge (emphasis: huge in the 2010s ZIRP sense) buyers that are begging for more edge AI.

> when I say things like OpenAI and Anthropic are gonna crater

But how do you know that? (And no I'm not shocked by this statement, it's just odd to say it with conviction.)

Two companies valued at 3 trillion dollars who sell a product anyone can make that falls in cost by 50% every single quarter.

I don't understand how anyone could argue that doesn't crater with any conviction.

The world is using 300T token a day. Barely anyone is using AI. This number would grow 30x. If there is anything, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic are undervalued by a great deal.

There’s no business in tokens. Zero. The only business is selling compute and Anthropic rented all its compute.

Structurally they’re in a terrible position on what’s unfolding now with the completely collapse of model valuations. With truly “open” models gaining more and more momentum models are basically worth nothing and “token” prices are collapsing to the cost of compute. That doesn’t leave anything on the table for the Anthropic and Open AI’s of the world.

openai has a billion users. Ads and they know it.

The math doesn’t math here. There isn’t enough spent on online ads to dig them out of this hole.

Is that potential source of revenue? Maybe but folks are verbally very negative on AI ads.

Is that a viable business plan for Open AI? No.

Their ads aren’t converting like search ads, more like social

Even social is charitable..

What’s with the low quality posts?

Google search ads are highly converting because they are camouflaged.

OpenAI ads are nothing of the sort!

The equivalent model for chatgpt would be randomly getting replies that are generated from a prompt injected with advertiser copy and indicated by a small "sponsored reply" in the corner.

Honestly, having written that out... I'm not sure that's an outcome that's generally avoidable.

Google search ads are just highly optimised over now 26 years. There's no reason that OpenAI won't do the same. How successful they are going to be is not clear though.

No clue how it's low effort to point out ads. It's not my fault you and everyone here lacks the product creativity to see the reality that they WILL be embedded in the answers and you will not be able to tell it's an ad. This will result in a literally the best ad system the world has ever seen. They simply need to wait a few years for the general pop to be reliant on them (which if you work with kids surprise they believe everything it says) and then slowly shift this over. They will be the most valuable company in the world bar none.

Do I think it's dystopian and shitty? Yes. Doesn't mean it ain't gonna happen and doesn't mean it's not the right move for the business.

> surprise they believe everything it says

It's not just kids in my observation.

Google search ads used to also convert highly because they were well-targeted and positioned at the point of consumption.

If I'm searching for red widgets, it's a fairly strong indicator I'm way more likely than the average to want to BUY red widgets, so a well-placed ad for redwidgets-cheap.com didn't feel hostile.

Now when it's "I am clearly searching for red widgets but you want to railroad me into blue doohickeys because they're paying more per click", you're one step above a Taboola chumbox.

Google, I hear, is very very good at Ads

but Opus 5.5 is the best product ever made in the history of the world (yes I'm serious). There's gotta be some consideration for that.

It has zero network effects and barely any economies of scale. It's a good product without a moat which will get replaced by any company with their own compute and cheaper energy.

I think the only way out for Anthropic is to buy a few neoclouds as they go under, but even then it's a coin flip as to if they survive the next 3 years.

Or they partially crash and get bought by Oracle. The Sun route

The market is a cold beast and doesn’t care. If things hit the fan it will happily take ownership Opus 5.5 in bankruptcy court and slit everything else out on the street.

If people paid a profitable price for Opus 5.5 it would not be the best product in the world and would not be slotted into so many things where it's benefiting from ubiquity. That circle needs squaring. There will be an Opus 5.5 that's a 10th of the price in a few months.

I personally don't really believe the meme that Anthropic and OpenAI are charging less than the marginal cost (cost of inference on requests). Open weight models have surpassed the abilities of their closed weight models when such claims started, and the inference costs on said open weights models are provably not so high.

Where they quite reasonably might be making a loss is their marginal costs + amortised fixed costs (training).

I predict that eventually the training expenditure is going to slow down. At that point, the large commercial providers are likely hoping they can keep inference demand up, and recoup their investment.

The driver for the training is an arms race between providers and open weights labs. But several dynamics could play out:

* Models will be seen as good enough, with only fine-tuning required, for most use cases, and demand for expensive training of foundation models drops off, stopping the arms race. * Most of the participants cannot raise capital due to lack of market confidence in them, and there is a 'winner takes all' dynamic with the remaining provider, who can then raise costs.

I personally think the first end game is more likely than the second.

You might call it a meme but that is their own internal reporting/panicked emails. Subscriptions are offered at a large subsidy with the benefit of more training data and adoption.

> I predict that eventually the training expenditure is going to slow down. At that point, the large commercial providers are likely hoping they can keep inference demand up, and recoup their investment.

The big labs can't do this that's their edge over open models. The stickiness is critical for them to keep up. They might try again but it's going to finish badly.

Cost per token is going to tank; it's a race to the bottom. The frontier model providers have no moat between each other and eventually even the open weight models will be "good enough" for almost every purpose.

Right now the market is expecting something a lot more than "sells a lot of tokens" out of these things to justify their valuation.

The future is in private data, private models, and private APIs, which can't be distilled as easily as public APIs.

Wouldn't that depend on how much data? I assume those who own the data would rather buy the hardware and create models from this data themselves, as opposed to sending their data off to someone else, or allowing it to be pirated.

For most of those Google is much better positioned.

I disagree, the moat will be of those holding rights for valuable problem domain specific training data. Examples I can think of:

Adobe sits on a treasure trove of:

- Copyrighted multimedia

- Years of telemetry on content creation

Zeiss sits on decades of data:

- Medical imaging, and surgical footage.

- Silicon waffer inspection.

These embody a training corpus that is de facto (lawfully) out of reach of the crawler scrapper approaches of Google/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic (even if they pirate the seas for torrents like before).

Neither Adobe or Zeiss are an AI power house but the barrier to entry has also dropped with all the movement in the field.

Excellent point, and one that’s not raised enough in these conversations.

Google owns Google Books and a myriad other data sub businesses beside the index of the entire web.

Well openai and anthropic are sitting on absolute treasure troves of private data that is their users' interaction with their models.

personally thats why i think OAI is in a way better place with them targeting ads.

I saw a (highly reputable of course) tweet a few days back suggesting all of OpenRouter's DS4 traffic would fit on a single rack of modern Nvidia kit.

Hm, that’s doubtful. I think even one instance of DS 4.1 Flash alone at ~500B parameters needs a full node (8 GPUs).

4xh200 seem to be enough if you cpu offload the engrams (which is pretty typical and even expected).[1]

And these are quite old cards by now. But yeah "all of OpenRouters traffic" is gonna take more than a rack

https://recipes.vllm.ai/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash?hard...

CFOs looking at tons of 2026 token spend but with no clear ROI have joined chat.

If everyone is using AI the ROI could just keeping up with everyone else. If anything Intelligence is now becoming a tax or the cost to use the toll road.

ROI in the space is not complicated, their revenue is already insane. You just drive down costs with fixed capex (GPUs), that will continue to pay out over 5-10 years. These are growing pains, they need to make it past the GPU scarcity/ramp up phase.

The CFOs he is talking about are the enterprises who are spending big money on the tokens ; they are not seeing RoI ; not hyperscalers or frontier labs

Yep, i can't disclose specific numbers but we went from $X/month/person budgets to $X-100/month recently, and this is a pretty big company with ~5000 people. From what I can tell the pursestrings are only tightening further too, too little actual real-world benefit for the obscene spend

% would be helpful, is it -1% or -100% per month per person?

Correct. The people that control the pot of money these labs ultimately need to survive seem increasingly unconvinced that giving these labs money is a good idea. At least at the levels the labs need to not go bankrupt.

What GPU scarcity? Unconnected GPUs are being hoarded by the oligarchy:

https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-hoarding-unused-ai...

Reports indicate GPUs are increasingly being put on shelves in warehouses. There’s a scarcity of power and data centers to host them, but data increasingly suggests the world has an over supply of chips at the moment.

Like most “scarcity” scenarios things flip from under supply to massive oversupply real quick. Remember during COVID when lumber got stupidly expensive and then almost overnight folks couldn’t give wood away.

high token usage but where is the value? How come the other s&p companies aren't killing it?

Well they just need to use it properly and build a bunch of software systems for them to lever..oh hang on a minute...

It's like Agile, if it doesn't work, they must be doing it wrong.

And price could drop 100x.

If models got smarter and an average prompt response used let's say 5k tokens instead of 10k tokens, would that change your prediction?

Point is, the number of tokens is a silly metric to proxy these companies' growth.

Yeah, nobody is doubting that people want to consume tokens. We're doubting that that Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic has a significant enough moat to keep people buying their tokens there. Over the past couple years the moat has been the model. As open models are getting better, that moat is drying up. Eventually the market for "tokens" will converge with the market for compute, which is a commodity with little to no moat.

I think even if the moat dries up, you could think of tokens/inference similar to compute. There's all the open source tooling available in the world for you to rent your own bare metal servers/racks and use a white glove service, yet there is demand for cloud.

At current prices, it makes sense to self host, but if the price goes down and the demand grows across different verticals, there is room for this business.

Everyone I know and their mom is using AI, technical or not. The question is, is it profitable to run a frontier AI lab and sell inference while spending billions on R&D.

Anthropic could be super profitable right now if they stopped developing new models. But then they'd quickly fall behind because there's not much of a moat. Maybe the only ones who will survive this are huge companies like Google with separate incomes who can swallow the cost of staying on top.

How so? I thought Anthropic was very capital efficient. They still have more than 100B cash, and their inference margin is 80%.