alt Hacker NewsI'm not imaginative enough to see more use cases and who will pay. You can burn a lot of tokens and dollars on math proofs. Same for white hats finding vulnerabilities in all the software. Generating video.
Personal assistants dealing with your email, filling out paperwork, and booking reservations don't use a lot of tokens.
If every software developer paid $200/month, every academic paid what they pay for Matlab or Mathematica licenses, every YouTuber paid for whatever video processing, and every normal person paid a subscription comparable to their TV subscriptions and cell phone plans - does that justify the valuations?
The government pays for surveillance? Companies pay for customer service replacements and target advertisements?
It seems like there are a few small categories that use a lot of tokens, and a large category that doesn't need many at all.
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If every software developer paid $200/month
That's significantly underestimating the potential. Companies typically spend $200k/year for developers (salary, benefits, taxes, equipment, office space...). If AI can make them even 25% more productive, that would justify $50k/year in tokens.
If they do for material sciences what they did for math proofs, the world is going to get weirder!
The labs probably foresee things looking more like OpenAI solving Navier-Stokes: a company identifies a strategic opportunity locked behind an extremely difficult problem, throws a huge amount of money and compute at it, solves the problem faster than their competition, snatches the opportunity.
Current companies are paying way more than 200$ per month per developers. In startups, SMEs and big tech, you can multiply it by x10
It seems like there are a few small categories that use a lot of tokens, and a large category that doesn't need many at all.
It won't be about tokens in the long run, and I think the labs know that. It will be about long-term memory and user relationships, and who gets to own that data.
The disruption and upheaval has barely even started, IMHO.
> If every software developer paid $200/month, every academic paid what they pay for Matlab or Mathematica licenses, every YouTuber paid for whatever video processing, and every normal person paid a subscription comparable to their TV subscriptions and cell phone plans - does that justify the valuations?
> The government pays for surveillance? Companies pay for customer service replacements and target advertisements?
Yes definitely. All together that's probably within striking distance of a trillion dollars in annual revenue. Just TV subscriptions + cell phone plans in the U.S. alone is about 400 billion (leaving aside any other country).
Most large, mature tech companies are at 5-10x revenue to valuation ratios (and 10-20x EBIDTA to valuation ratios).
Of course whether you get there is a separate question, but any company that fulfilled what you're asking would pretty easily justify multi-trillion dollar valuations.