> Also, Anthropic is showing that to operate at Anthropic level, you need $300,000 compute spend per employee

They have infinite money to burn so they aren't going to optimize.

I've seen that trivial changes to workflows can token usage by 30%. Repeat this a few times and my token usage has plummeted over the last few months.

Only outputting test failures instead of having agents read test run output in real time. Not having build logs get fed into context. Projects like UCL (unified context layer) so agents don't rediscover the same facts about a code base again and again.

Giving tools agent output modes so they only print out the minimal info needed for an agent to get work done.

When I hear a company has an absurd AI spend I assume they aren't even trying to reign it in.

> No. This is opportunity cost.

It’s not opportunity cost. It would be opportunity cost if their employees not using it would lead to additional revenue. However, if Inwas to go to Anthropic and double my token usage Anthropic wouldn’t decline my money. If Anthropic’s employees would stop using Claude, their revenues wouldn’t increase by an equivalent amount.

Their revenues are not currently supply constrained.

It’s just a cost cost. If their employees stopped using these services they would simply need less infrastructure, and therefore save on the cost to build and run that infrastructure. It wouldn’t translate into an increase in revenue.

I don't buy it. A company like Anthropic is not going to just walk away from revenue. If external demand were really that high, then they should take the money first. And not just for the revenue; customer demand being that high is also an indication that the product is already great as-is so they stand to improve their bottom line by easing off on the R&D spend.

> Also, Anthropic is showing that to operate at Anthropic level, you need $300,000 compute spend per employee

That's API-list prices. They have an 80% margin over COGS.

Cost per equivalent output is dropping 10x every 18 months -> so in 3-ish years, if the trend continues, that will be $3k per employee.

Not bad. A lot of companies are already spending about that much or more on IT per employee.

Especially since that $3k bakes in an 80% margin. It's about $600 per year if you DIY at scale - which is about $50 per month - but at the $3k price, hardly anyone is going to.

In the West old-age dependency ratio (retirees per working-age adult) is climbing roughly 0.5 to 0.7 percentage points per year.

We've got to get 0.7% more productive for employees to keep the same quality of life (unless retirees get screwed, and since they vote and make up a huge portion of the voting block, I wouldn't count on that happening).

Further, more and more of the population has to transition into into elder care.

Unless we hit 3%+ GDP growth, us workers are probably going to see declines in quality of life (and we're probably not going to get those levels of growth)...

It depends on your assumptions. When Google is in "space crunch" mode, there are opportunity costs. Otherwise, there aren't, because you could do both.

You could also look at the opportunity cost of not letting Deepmind do quite as much research. How much is additional research worth on the margin? There will be diminishing returns.

They also offer $300,000 in compute spend (allegedly) for $200 a month to anyone who isn't employed by a large corporation so their pricing should be taken with a grain of salt.

> Also, Anthropic is showing that to operate at Anthropic level, you need $300,000 compute spend per employee

There are a bunch of open source harnesses that are competitive with CC and they aren't using anywhere near that many tokens to do it.

So every business should measure any client fungible resource that way? Should a bank put a revenue number to any capital held in excess of regulatory requirements, for example?

It depends on if Anthropic make more money on their internal spend on tokens than selling them externally. I strongly guess they do.

> Anthropic is showing that to operate at Anthropic level, you need $300,000 compute spend per employee

You have confused necessary and sufficient.

There is a huge difference between Anthropic and Google dog-fooding: Anthropic does not own or build data centers, they rent (as far as all the reporting on this I've read). Anthropic employees dog-fooding with Claude tools isn't "internal", its most likely being run on external AI data center compute, which they have to pay for, there's just no margin on it. It might even be run out of Google's data centers.

> So, every compute Deepmind and Googlers get is lost revenue opportunity and must be measured as such

Maybe, but it also reduces supply that can drive up prices

Not really- since they have an internal view of low and high usage times of the day, they can optimize differently.

Even within a single moment, if there is capacity for an internal request, just send it, if market traffic is currently at 100%, don't.

aka Cobblers children have no shoes. Anthropic profit less by selling it.

> No. This is opportunity cost.

This is NOT the definition of opportunity cost. Please do not throw in random terms you don't understand. Opportunity cost is the value of the next best alternative you give up whenever you make a choice. WTF does it have to do with mis-classifying an expense?

By 'operate at Anthropic level', you mean terrible reliability and availability, and terrible efficiency right?

If it were opportunity cost, that would imply that Anthropic can't sell as many tokens as people want to buy. But as far as I can tell, there aren't any "token shortages," at least at API prices. Or is there a maximum per-customer limit that I'm not aware of?

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