Anthropic's spend commitments at half a trillion are unbelievable. I love their product but think they've leveraged up awfully hard... makes me wonder how quickly software engineering, marketing, and other valuable features will soon be siloed and locked behind increasingly lucrative paywalls.

In a roundabout way, I hypothesize about Anthropic's future pricing power by using the analogy of historical cable TV package pricing compared with the total price that households are now paying for various streaming services. Cable TV was often $100+ per month in the 2000s when Netflix came along and offered most of a viewer's favorite shows plus movies and eventually originals for $7/month, streamed at any rate a viewer wanted. Over the years since we've watched media companies snatch back their most valuable IP and start their own streaming services, and the result is households now pay a total cost that approaches what people used to pay monthly for cable TV packages.

There's little doubt we're in an era of very cheap AI, as most people are well aware given the amount of money Anthropic and OpenAI are losing. I also hope local inference can help suppress the future pricing power of Anthropic and OpenAI and continue to enable somewhat equal access to all of the benefits of AI in the future.