Anthropic is claiming its total addressable market is over $30tn, so it’s all good, right? (No, that’s obviously crazy)
AI lab Anthropic, reportedly on the verge of a $2 trillion IPO, is preparing to tell investors that its total addressable market is worth more than $30 trillion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
To put that figure in perspective, it eclipses the total GDP of China, is roughly equal to the entire GDP of the U.S., and represents about a quarter of the total world GDP of $120 trillion.
“Mercedes claims they have a total addressable market of $30 trillion by demonstrating that everyone has sold their vehicles and switched to driving a Mercedes on the new $20/month leasing program. Mercedes has not provided a response when asked how much their cars actually cost to own.”
Eh total addressable market is such a meaningless figure anyway. Total addressable market is everyone who has a device that they can use AI from, multiplied by the average annual cost of using them. Plus every company that exists in the world, multiplied by how much the AI spend is for the average company. Plus every government in the world. Etc. Boom, 30 trillion. It’s like a super optimistic “this is the maximum that any AI company could ever earn per year if they controlled the whole market and everyone who could use AI is a paying customer”.
That 2 trillion valuation they seek is hella bogus either way. For 30 trillion actual revenue with any real profit margin, it would be low, but we all know they’re not bringing in trillions in revenue.
I wonder how much of that proclaimed TAM will be addressed with open models. I’m running Qwen 3.8 27B on my 7900 XTX and have no need to give Anthropic or OpenAI any of my money or data.
The catch is that’s the amount of money it’ll be after inflations boom ;)
ez, just do some more hyperinflation. That’ll be about enough to buy a bag of rice
An entirely reasonable sum.
I’ll get my big wallet, I better give them $7tn those poor billionaires.
Waiting for the bubble to pop. I need a new GPU and maybe a SSD.
I assure you, if you are a brokie like the rest of us, you will not have the money to spare in the ensuing recession. Honestly I expect personal computing is dead, likely for a decade or more, if it ever comes back.
From one brokie to another, drowning in debt is indistinguishable from drowning indebt with a GPU and SSD.
Last night, my friends and I were talking about how we’re trying to spend more time at home to save money. Instead of going out to a bar, we’re starting to plan more hangouts at home. Why spend $2k/month on rent if we aren’t going to be there? It feels like anytime I leave the house, I’m spending $100 or more. We all were at a bar last weekend watching college football, and after spending $10/drink, we dipped out, bought $50 in beer and pizza, and played Mario Kart at a friend’s house. Much cheaper to just play games at home and hangout.
Well, the downside of that is that it’s insular, you lose the opportunity of meeting new people
And sure, not everyone cares about doing that a lot of the time, but for me personally that’s a great loss at least. I love meeting new people, and everyone being priced out of existing in social meeting places… sucks. A lot
If I already had a solid group of friends, I wouldn’t really care for meeting new people. If someone cool comes along, awesome. Welcome to the group.
But why would I actively go out and try to sift through the 95%+ of people at bars who are either A) shitty, B) don’t give a fuck about me, or C) both; just to try to find one or two new people that I might exchange a couple texts with over the next two weeks before we proceed to forget about each other entirely?
If I already have friends at home who just wanna hang out and play Mario Kart or Magic: The Gathering or Catan or something? Why would I need to talk to strangers, most of whom would just tell me to get bent anyway…
That’s awesome. You guys should stockpile a few good boardgames while you’re at it, for when you want to switch things up
Yeah, there is also speculation that part of this build out is intended to force a shortage to get everyone to shift to thin client “cloud PCs” where everyone can be monitored and ad blockers can be avoided.
yes that’s exactly the plan and the reason these companies are paying profound premiums back to nVidia. If they don’t pay up nVidia will just announce another spark roll out and scare the crap out of them. They know as soon as newer computer hits the consumer market they are dead in the water.
That shift has already happened.
People on this forum trend to use personal computers but most people now only use phones. They might have a laptop provided by work but many don’t own one at all.
The push to “the cloud” happened ten years ago. The people around here are the exception.
A phone is not “the cloud”
For most people it is. If you removed Internet access from the device what do you think people would say?
9 out of 10 apps are just web apps with a launcher and stop working the moment you disable data.
And how is that any different than a desktop tower?
I can run LLMs locally on my desktop tower. I can run CAD Software and create things. There is a large number of tasks my desktop can do that a phone can’t for a number of reasons not the least that using a phone without their app stores is becoming increasing difficult.
Just because you might just use yours as a thin client for Chrome doesn’t make me wrong.
With the amount of integration it achieved to facilitate services and transactions? I am very skeptical of that. I expect to happen a serious market feagmentation and a great number of bankrupties but the void will be filled by new presences.
It wont be like dead dead, but just stagnant. Companies like nvidia will just sell the barely passable hardware with even less reason to upgrade because the prices will rise and the performance jumps will decrease. The good thing is that even the entry level hardware was already good enough for 95% of use cases and what justified upgrades anyway was mostly AAA gaming graphics slop or heavy 3d renders for professionals.
The bad news is that entry level hardware will cost more than high end hardware did last year
and they already bought years worth of chips, so no computing for a long time.
afaik they havent, they committed to buying them, so they will be built, and when they dont buy them because they are insolvent, we should be able to get them at good prices
https://thedeepdive.ca/openai-locked-up-40-of-global-ram-with-no-obligation-to-buy-any-of-it/
The main thing will be the value of the dollar becoming next to null.
Putting some of your savings in foreign currencies can help dampen the blow a bit. That is, if you have savings to spare…
Unfortunately the bubble popping will not provide you with better or cheaper access to those. At this point it is artificially created scarcity because they don’t want consumers to own hardware anymore. Even with the AI bubble popping, the tech oligarchs (with NVIDA at the helm) will still be pursuing their wet dreams of consumers having to subscribe to their cloudbased computers for everything.
Other manufactures will arise then. Won’t be quick, won’t be painless, but the US is not the whole world.
You seem pretty sure about that. But where was the competition when they forced the switch to CD’s? The manufacturers are engaged in a shit-trust, and other anti-competitive behavior.
No one will step up.
Thats not… I feel like you weren’t alive yet when that transition happened.
Because CDs are objectively better in basically every way than VHS and cassette, especially for consumers. No more tapes stuck in the player, no more rewinding, no more randomly unspooled tapes, no more twisted ribbons, no more seeking static, no more heat warping, etc. plus cds take up less space overall, and you can easily use many-disc cd changers.
The market absolutely drove that transition, not manufacturers. VHS and cassette were still supported and produced for a LONG time after cds came about, because not everyone was willing to drop a ton of money to get their collection in a new format.
CD’s are not better. They scratch easily, and the players break. Like right away. I have vhs that still work, no cd player still works outside of a laptop or game consul, and the disks scratch and get ruined.
That you think they are better, ruins your credibility with me personally on this. You clearly don’t fucking get it.
Wow. Ok have fun with that personality… eesh.
Oh, the personality of not believing the oligarchs in the face of some credulous half wit? I will, thanks.
I’m going to have to agree with the other guy. I have working VHS tapes and working CDs/DVDs that are both over 30 years old. That just means that you didn’t abuse them and kept them away from bad temperature and humidity ranges. CDs were so much better than cassettes that it wasn’t even funny. If you were abusing your CDs so much that they were getting scratched to hell, I can’t imagine you weren’t running into similar issues with your tapes. DVD were vastly better than VHS in much the same way. And the “better” wasn’t even about durability which was probably a wash as they failed in different ways. CDs had better audio quality and better quality of life for the user. You had no need to rewind/fast-forward. The audio didn’t get continually more staticy as time went on. They took up less storage space, especially if you used a CD wallet/book. You didn’t need to clean the heads on a CD player. All these same issues applied to DVD vs VHS other than skipping around a DVD is less common than a CD as movies and shows tend to be viewed sequentially.
Also just to add that the transition from tapes to CDs and DVDs took decades, by the time tapes finally were fazed out blueray was a thing. I have a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban on VHS that’s what 04 I also have a copy of Sabatons Great War album on cassette because fuck it why not. Even now cassette still kinda alive.
I will quit the internet before I become a renter of everything I used to just use free.
I love computers but never enough to participate in their plans.
I know how to read. Write. Draw. Go on walks. Play sports. Basically sit and watch paint dry than give a shit about not using a computer again
Free or one time purchase and possible payments for once in a while big updates. I don’t mind paying when the offer is good and I have money.
I am not paying google shit. Or any of them. I will join a privateering crew first.
You sort of can with solutions like MeshLLM
You might, I think I would (at least personally, professionally I may not have a choice) but the vast majority of people will gladly go with this plan I suspect.
Look at car purchasing, most people don’t look at the sticker price or the total cost of ownership, they stop paying attention as long as their income can (and in a lot of cases it technically can but really shouldn’t) support the monthly payment.
Similar thing with new phones, most people buy a service plan that includes a lease or loan on a device. Very few people buy their sevice outright, because that’s a big purchase vs. a smaller monthly payment.
If there was a market for this for laptops, regular folks would eat it up.
That’s all opinion, so take it for what it’s worth. I hope I’m wrong. I’m fearful I’m not.
Imagine if this was invested in arresting climate change.
We always have money for other stuff.
And homelessness, and actual education for people.
Yeah, “and”.
You could probably actually solve a lot of problems in the world with this money.
Instead they are literally posting trillions into accelerating climate change.
And arresting dissenters and innocent bystanders
Yeah, the party of “fiscal responsibility” is always like “WHERE WOULD WE GET THE MONEY FOR THAT?!!?!?” whenever it comes to a cause that’s actually important or would help people.
“The same place you always get the money for your greedy money-grubbing ventures that exclusively benefit you and your cronies” is what I would tell them.
If we just stop sending billions and trillions of dollars to the already rich, then maybe we could fix society and save the planet?
But no, there’s never “money for that”…
Ok so this is interesting. I am not sure this number is accurate I haven’t fully vetted it. I do this same type of forecasting. Morgan Stanley said for current capex commitments by 2027 4th quarter they needed to be 700 billion in profit. The problem is to meet that number they would need full market saturation and another 3 trillion in capex for build out. That means the entire accessible market would be using AI. They have another problem that more than half the world cannot access AI in its current form. The tooling these companies are using are wasteful and don’t meet the bandwidth needs of mobile first countries. So until the industry adopts things like https://codecai.net/ half the world’s markets are inaccessible. Finally they are under attack from all sides even if they had the money they may not have the ability to build out the AI infrastructure because that build out is becoming untenable for most communities. Even more the open source models and low cost AI are already in someways encroaching quickly on frontier systems. If you look at it right now the only reason you don’t have home AI as a commonplace solution is because the manufacturer has chosen not to sell it to you.
I’m just waiting for some breakthrough in the hardware and suddenly all of those data centers become outdated.
With the stories of AI being used to break into secure systems I wouldn’t be surprised if other nations also start throwing up walls to block them.
This isn’t the same thing as making VCRs cheap enough that every home has one. There is no FOMO wirh AI at the consumer level, no one knows what to do with it. The only people who want it are the ones who male it!!
Also note Apple’s, AMD’s and NVIDIA’s (Spark) unified memory solutions for local LLMs/agents. AMD advertises 300B and NVIDIA advertises 200B models running locally. The question is whether Anthropic/OpenAI are going to be relevant at all in the future, with local models becoming increasingly capable and affordable. However: There are rumors the Chinese government wants to restrict access to its models. Not set in stone and also not sure whether this is true. Could this entail no more access to new open-source models? Who knows. But even then, energy and resources are going to be a bottleneck. I have not looked into the concrete numbers and this is not my field of expertise, but I find it highly unlikely that they are going to be able to capture the entire market.
Light web searching suggests that neither the automobile industry as a whole nor the health insurance industry as a whole exceed $3 trillion in annual global revenue. Which means the plagiarism-to-slop pipeline just needs to make a little bit more than the automobile and health insurance industries combined to justify itself.
Easy. AI cloud controlled vehicle fleet with government support to make it mandatory, AI health centers as default healthcare, supplement the rest with premium AI generated nudies.
Wow you just described something that would make me go full IRA good job. Fucken caused a physical recoil in absolute horror.
The local models thing is the real threat. For what 90% of the world who actually cares and wants AI, a local model is probably already “good enough”. Or would be if they could get the hardware, or maybe they don’t know how to set one up.
Got a 27b model running on my gaming GPU. Its a bit slow but good enough to look someing up, causual coding, and stupid questions. China is really kicking ass with the open source models.
Same, a 35B model is running on my gaming rig. It’s good enough for most things, even coding.
If you look at it right now the only reason you don’t have home AI as a commonplace solution is because the manufacturer has chosen not to sell it to you.
And memory shortage. By buying up all RAM they ensured that you can’t run much more than lobotomized models.
Still much cheaper to run an open source model on a rented gpu from the cloud.
up all RAM they ensured that you can’t run much more than lobotomized models. this is what I mean they’ve chosen to target a different consumer and rightfully so in that they are paying a premium for that product but they are also being subsidized by the same vendor so it’s not clear that they are paying more due to the bizarre circular funding pattern.
How much is the cure/treatment for Parkinson’s worth? Or other intractable medical problems?
What about a device able to manipulate the containment field of a fusion reactor?
These are the reasons why everyone is buying the compute services - there are dozens of moonshot-grade problems that are suddenly possible to attempt. Many will fail, but whoever gets that one success will gain astronomical benefit.
AI has been mainstream for what, 4 years now?
if AI had such powerful results for developing novel solutions to problems such as medicine or material science, why have we not seen major improvements in those sectors?
the way AI is spoken about is that it’s “world impacting” and “sector disrupting”. the only disruption and impacts I’m seeing are in human rights violations, price gouging, privacy negation, and corruption.
if these are the results after only 4 years, I can only logically assume it will only get worse with more time and support.
The PC became mainstream in 1981. Why didn’t the Internet become big for another 10 years?
bullshit. you’re talking about two different technologies.
the PC didn’t promise to cure cancer. it promised to help you run your business more efficiently.
Takes years to get new drugs to market. AI is speeding up drug discovery by predicting protein folding ridiculously fast, but there’s a lot of other work that needs to be done. Perhaps there will be models to speed up some of those processes too, but the real bottleneck is approvals and while AI might be used to speed up the paperwork part of it, I can’t think of any way it’ll be able to speed up actual trials. What I suspect will happen is we’ll get an even faster response time with the next global pandemic that requires a vaccine, and we’ll start getting more and more mRNA vaccines, including some for some types of cancers.
This paper details 9 processes in which AI is already helping or is predicted to be able to help in material development. Material development also takes time to get anything to market, for various reasons. But there’s a nonzero chance that the recent battery tech boom from China has been aided by AI. They just tested a very high density solid state cell not long ago.
if it wasn’t maliciously designed it’s absurdly negligent. both of which are reason enough to not use AI at all.
wouldn’t it make more sense to streamline the existing processes first before creating a traffic jam of “potential” cures? where at least the models could be trained on existing cutting edge medical research instead of flying blind and developing novel treatments and cures.
the more I think about it the more is seems plausible that the actions AI implementation takes is malicious negligence. incompetence derived from a malicious intent to do harm on someone or something.
is this the disruption AI execs were talking about?
I’ll believe that these things are possible when there’s some empirical evidence that they are.
Why don’t you buy my amazing car. Yes it looks like that car that your nan drives to the shops but actually it can fly and time travel as well.
Those results are still tightly controlled by NDAs. They need time for FDA approval, patents, etc. Then time to get to market. These are not released in scientific papers anymore. It’s protected because it cost so much up front.
Surely in the age of self-promoting narcissists we would hear about these break-throughs in all the media?.. Not just “it can potentially cure cancer if you give us another $tn”, the real results under review by relevant authorities/academics. Moreover, these breakthroughs do require a shitload of compute, but I do not see how a chatbot could be helpful with it. Other than, of course, stealing the preprinted work of some academic and claiming it their own, as recently with OpenAI Navier–Stokes equations conundrum. Can you imagine how many problems like that would already be solved if all these billions were spent on it, rather than chatbots drawing glossy pics?..
LLMs aren’t gonna give us any of those things. Thats just snake oil.
I believe at most, coding, scripting, and text processing.
Exactly, there’s a few specific use cases that the current generative AI is good at. Reading medical imagingand medication development are things I’d add to your list.
However, outside of those specific tasks AI is not particularly useful. An incremental improvement in productivity in some cases.
Medical imaging and medication development would be bespoke models no? Not standard LLMs?
Probably. I mis-spoke.
You can add transcription to your list though, it’s saving providers a lot of time on charting
AI is not just LLMs. Much of AI is machine control, and bioinformatics.llms are the foam on top of the ocean.
I’m aware, and I wish people were more clear about the difference, but its LLMs that are driving these insane buildouts, not the other disciplines. This article is clearly talking about the LLM “AI”, not bioinformatics or anything that may actually be fruitful.
The LLM companies like to claim they’ll solve cancer, but its all snake oil hedged on a mythical AGI popping up and fixing everything.
Yeah, but the current hype is around LLM, the other kinda of AI are the same as they were before this started.
Alphafold almost certainly benefited from genAI research, since 2 and 3 are somewhat genAI inspired architectures, they use their own versions of transformers and also diffusion
Get the sheriff of Nottingham to take care of it!
Finally a way to get endless Just Dance Vance videos combined with every type of kitten and alligator interaction video!
Basically, this is a money pump to bleed out small and mid-sized corporations, they fire all their workers, pay out all their wages to AI, but their customers can no longer afford to use them, they run until they’re dry leaving Nvidia, X and Oracle as the only remaining companies, who can afford to (and are designed to) run mostly by AI
So there will be trillions spent on land and energy wasting data centers to get a dressed up ELIZA that will not solve a single world problem (like hunger, homelessness, poverty, ecological collapse). Simply great! Why not end capitalism right now? It is the only reasonable path at this point.
Someone asked me a couple of weeks ago why the New Zealand Green Party’s answer to all of our problems seemed to be taxes on rich people and big corporations. I said that it was because 40 years of neoliberalism had given us an economy that balanced a rise for the 1% with a fall for the 99%, and we should start trying to address that gently and legally before the 99% remember that a guillotine is 18th Century technology and can be easily constructed in a garage.
The end of capitalism isn’t too far off, the way things are going. And it’s going to be messy as hell.
So wild to see the mainstream media slowly accepting what I have been screaming to anyone who will listen for 4+ years now.
Better late than never?
I’m never letting anyone get over this. When I first heard about AI I was like, “oh, it might be interesting, but since it costs more to keep on than it makes in revenue it’s economically useless, right? Right, Anakin??” I now know how I would react during the Emperor’s New Clothes. That makes me feel good. Unfortunately, I also now know how most other people would react, too (“My, your grace, what a beautiful set of clothes you have! I can’t see your balls at all!”). That makes me feel scared for the future.
Bain is a fucking moron
Great, now a phonetic Batman villain has a say in the economy. Good. It’s just a joy to see, really.
Resist, resist, resist.
Boycott, boycott, boycott.
