Users arent buyers. If my employer could fire everyone tomorrow and replace them with a claude subscription we’d be out the door in seconds.

This is exactly what happened when manufactures could offshore production. They didn't care (sure there was PR "caring" but they still outsourced) how it would impact their former workers or company towns. https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/levi-strauss-aims-to...

We need a government program to retrain knowledge workers to flip burgers and make beds.

You've made the mistake of thinking Anthropic just wants to sell everybody a subscription to their models, so everyone can make their little spreadsheets or whatever.

That's not what Anthropic wants. They plan to be The Company. The only one. The one that does everything and makes every decision.

> How what exactly is Anthropic going to do in that world?

Govern it. Every ones end up delegating decision to it, because it will better informed, and anyone using can it out-compete you.

I'm pretty confident all hyperscalers only need their users because they are RL environments for them, this likely will mutate as they reach a ceiling.

My prediction is once they reach this ceiling (or find a better RL environment), they will cancel free plans and shift towards the next scaling laws challenge (robotics, etc) by buying out whoever started early and repeating the playbook.

Canceling the paid plans would only make sense if they solve for control, which right now isn't yet clear who has it and in what capacity.

> Their power is precisely in the users they have.

False. There is a brilliant quote from The Blacklist series: "every information is worth something to someone". Their strength comes from the fact that they convinced everyone to willingly let user-facing computers collect data, write and execute arbitrary code on people's computers with a simple "trust me bro". In other words they have near complete monopoly over the world's infrastructure.

Until they ban their users, which is precisely my point.

My point is that their power comes from the data they already posses, which is likely not far off 100%, including personal and proprietary data.

> Now what exactly is Anthropic going to do in that world

Dario already said it according to multiple sources: he believes Anthropic will be the last surviving company in the world, where all the value will accumulate

Elon Musk has another vision: his AI is going to build the Dyson swarm around the Sun. Money doesn't matter in that world, only how many robots you have, and how much mass you can put into orbit.

> Dario already said it according to multiple sources: he believes Anthropic will be the last surviving company in the world, where all the value will accumulate

Given that LLMs are practically commodities and open models are a dime a dozen, this is pure insanity. There's no way there from here.

It's pretty easy to imagine them creating a new AI that is an order of magnitude better than the current models with no one else having access to that technology.

It's easier to imagine Google doing it. It's equally likely to imagine OpenAI (equally resourced) or Deepseek (pushing novel optimizations) doing it.

And it's pretty easy to imagine me creating a castle made of cake and ice cream.

That doesn't mean there's any actual mechanism for me to do so.

What you're talking about requires a genuine breakthrough in AI research, not just iterative improvements on what we've already got. By their very nature, those are not something that can be predicted or relied upon; you cannot even be guaranteed that a given type of breakthrough will ever happen.

Hard to imagine for me -- how exactly do you get there?

It would be completely realistic if the US was the only player in AI. But that era is over.

LLMs are commodity. The ability to run them at scale is not.

Yes, and Anthropic doesn't have that ability and has to lease data centers from AWS and Google!

Neither of those is a reasonable belief; the two of them are either delusional, or lying.