Because they can’t. They literally cannot charge enough to make a profit and still have anyone use the service. This isn’t like Uber where they started out at like half the price of taxis and then crept up to “As expensive as taxis.” Anthropic, like all genAI providers, have been charging a tiny fraction of what their service actually costs in most cases.
There’s no path to profitability here. Corporate clients are already complaining that AI is too expensive with not enough upside at the subsidized prices. And regular consumers are sold an all you can eat product that they can’t afford to run as an all you can eat.
Imagine if you’re actually paying a few dollars every time you type an input into Claude… Now imagine it goes off the rails and hallucinates a completely useless output. Before that was “Shrug, oh well, retry.” Now? That’s a customer service ticket. That’s a vending machine that ate your money.
Imagine that happens across thousands of inputs for a corporate client. It will. We already know it will because the hallucinations are baked in and the industry has stopped when trying to pretend they can get rid of them. Imagine those sales calls.
The only reason these guys are valued like they are is because venture capital is still buying into the mythical notion that this is “the future”. Not based on any evidence, any facts, any plan… Just vibes, and a fear of missing out.
Because they can’t. They literally cannot charge enough to make a profit and still have anyone use the service. This isn’t like Uber where they started out at like half the price of taxis and then crept up to “As expensive as taxis.” Anthropic, like all genAI providers, have been charging a tiny fraction of what their service actually costs in most cases.
There’s no path to profitability here. Corporate clients are already complaining that AI is too expensive with not enough upside at the subsidized prices. And regular consumers are sold an all you can eat product that they can’t afford to run as an all you can eat.
Imagine if you’re actually paying a few dollars every time you type an input into Claude… Now imagine it goes off the rails and hallucinates a completely useless output. Before that was “Shrug, oh well, retry.” Now? That’s a customer service ticket. That’s a vending machine that ate your money.
Imagine that happens across thousands of inputs for a corporate client. It will. We already know it will because the hallucinations are baked in and the industry has stopped when trying to pretend they can get rid of them. Imagine those sales calls.
The only reason these guys are valued like they are is because venture capital is still buying into the mythical notion that this is “the future”. Not based on any evidence, any facts, any plan… Just vibes, and a fear of missing out.
Corporate clients are overusing AI. They won’t drop it entirely if they were charged more.
Also, don’t most people pay per month or year and not per prompt?
Corporate clients pay per million tokens. Regular consumers pay monthly.