I think they are actually underpriced relative to "taking away" jobs. I personally believe ant at 1-2T is pretty reasonable if you consider claude to effectively be the "best devtool of all time," aka it literally writes all software for you.
I think (somewhat arbitrarily), to get to higher valuations, you are going to have to disrupt more than just the software business. Which is what most labs are trying with finance, biology, chemistry, law, etc. That might be enough for a few hundred billion in TAM more.
I think to get to a ~5T+ valuation, then we have to start thinking about AI meaningfully displaces classes of jobs, maybe in the single digit %'s. As in, _global_ SWE headcount starts going down, but revenues for software companies as a whole go up.
I think for ~10T+, you definitely need meaningful job displacement across most white collar sectors.
Claude is in (potentially) a price war and research and development arms race with OpenAI and Google, and potentially other labs, so I don't think it's necessarily a given to price it as the company with the "best devtool of all time".
Yes service industry is quite broad, is white collar work more clear in general?
Yes, it is quite obviously apparent that law firms are and will be using lots of token-based intelligence. They won't be using the same tokens at the same time as an A.I. lab. However, the best law firms of 2029 will be using approximately the same tokens per employee as an A.I. lab of 2026, that much is clear.
> . However, the best law firms of 2029 will be using approximately the same tokens per employee as an A.I. lab of 2026, that much is clear.
This is as if you learned that Anthropic scanned 1000 books per employee this year to train their models and your conclusion was that the best law firm will be scanning 1000 books per employee by 2029.
I'm being sarcastic as to the specifics but didn't productivity go down 199k because the 200k engineer is now replaceable with a 1k subscription and will soon be fired?
Literally the output of the labor dropped to almost zero value?
The subscription didn’t do any work though. It didn’t magically create a new knowledge worker any more than a lawn mower in a shed cuts grass. The output of the labor massively skyrocketed in value. If you fire that dev, who do you think will use Claude?
This instead is a concern for newer devs. There is now no argument for bringing on the cadre of workers you’d need to do all the hand-jamming, testing, and reviewing, learning how to code in the process.
If you’re the CIO/CTO/etc. obviously you wouldn’t be fired, but any other position is useless down to the dev.
Dev teams should be leaner now, with maybe at most a director as their manager up to executive level.
As for ‘how much software do I really need?’ Well, what sort of company is it? Do you have internal applications to support your orgs? If you seriously need to ask ‘how much software do I need?’ Then you should just fire yourself.
I don’t think your point is meritless, but this is specifically a discussion about that top-10% dev. The one doing this type of work is not the one who will be let go.
I know a lot of people think that the AI tools level the playing-field, but we aren't experiencing that. The guy that did this translation is doing more tickets than the other 4 software devs combined. And it's not because they are low-effort tickets. That's also on top of the 6 hours a week of meetings he has that the other devs don't.
Productivity can be measured in many ways. Neoclassical economists will tell you there’s only one.
In this case, is the change of this software from one language to another/framework to another even valuable?
Example: if I manufacture $1,000 worth of some illegal drug that will potentially turn a normal functioning adult into an addicted criminal, how shall we measure my productivity?
I have not explored this but If I wanted Claude Code to make a spiritual successor to Punch Out I would first have it clone Punch Out to see if it was capable of doing this, then if it worked I'd start changing the assets and mechanics one idea at a time until I had something with more novelty behind it.
If you uploaded the audio via the web site or app and got terrible results I'd bet Argon wasn't the model doing the transcribing. The only way to know for sure is to try again with the API.
Oh it definitely didn't transcribe anything at all! This was through the WebUI. I'm certain it would have done better through Antigravity or such. Really I was just expecting a denial but I figured what the hell, the files are small and I like to see how the results of various models compare.
It's not regulatory capture because look over here: I've invented a new term "classic regulatory capture" which involves only those historical incidents that are not like this.
This is by definition not "classic regulatory capture" a term that I have borrowed to cover things that are not this.
Whenever someone brings up "regulatory capture" I shall change the topic to "classic regulatory capture" which by definition cannot be this.
"Classically, that would not be the case, my dear fellow. A classic duck would walk like a duck and talk like a duck. I regret to inform you that I do neither."
"Ah! A classic duck, you say? Well, that’s an entirely different bird, sir. Entirely different."
* * *
"AI politics is now loud–precisely the environment in which Culpepper predicts business power will be weakest. A mature industry can bend regulation to its purposes through revolving doors, longstanding relationships and obscure rulemaking. An industry under Sauron’s eye has much less power and faces much greater risk that politics will bend regulation to its purposes. Political actors are eager for an excuse to redistribute AI rents away from capitalists and toward favored groups..."
Usually he blogs from a libertarian point of view, so you would expect him to be fairly vigorous about denouncing regulatory capture, if that was truly the story here.
It sounds to me like he wants you to believe the effective way to lobby for a ban on open source A.I. development is to use the same "classic" methods that someone in the 1950s used to lobby for coffee beans.
Therefore, as they are not acting like 1950s coffee bean sellers, they can't be doing regulatory capture.
That's the only possibly explanation why they don't lobby like coffee bean sellers.
These industries and eras are completely interchangeable.
> Google currently has the most generous usage limits on their $20 plan among US providers, so it's a pretty good deal.
Are you saying when you use Argon in antigravity it has generous token usage? I forget if I tried it with antigravity but my experience with using it as a chat bot was the usage limit was terrible.
Yes. For similar tasks using Antigravity+Argon vs. Codex+Astra vs. Claude+Opus, Gemini has the most generous limits on the $20 plan. Since the ChatGPT limits got nerfed last month (or whenever, I can't keep up), the $20 ChatGPT plan is very stingy. With similar tasks I'd see 2x-3x faster consumption using Codex+Astra vs. Antigravity+Argon. I could casually code all day on the $20 Gemini plan, using Argon on Medium, without ever bumping into the limit, which is not true of ChatGPT or Claude $20 plans (but used to be true of ChatGPT). If I were using automated tools and doing a bunch of things at once, I'm sure I could saturate it, but I don't think most humans are very good multitaskers even with agents doing most of the work, so I tend to stay pretty engaged with what's happening and while the agent is working, I'm spending time looking over the previous work, testing, editing docs, etc. I'm not juggling five projects at once, most of the time.
The order of generosity, as it seems to be from my limited testing is currently Gemini->Claude->ChatGPT. (And, if we're including Chinese subscriptions, Kimi is below all of those. Very stingy.)
It’s also worth noting that, on antigravity, within the same 5-hour and weekly timeframes, the models work for the whole group, and Claude and GPT share the same group. So it’s more generous than the distributors themselves :)
I have no opinion on whether they are.
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