3 ms·
If Anthropic is selling a dollar for less than a dollar, they are running a business that doesn't make sense. That's what jeopardizes Claude Max, not this.
by avaer 4mo ago
If Anthropic is selling a dollar for less than a dollar, they are running a business that doesn't make sense. That's what jeopardizes Claude Max, not this.
- gruez 4mo agoBut if it's intended to be used by one person, it seems like breaking the contract by sublicensing it out to dozens of other people. It's like buying a netflix subscription for $15, then sublicensing it on a per-hour basis to dozens of other people.
- TurdF3rguson 4mo agoThere's still per-window and weekly limits though, so it's not really like that.
- gruez 4mo agoOffice 365 is licensed per seat/account, but each account has a 5 device limit. Do you think it's fair game for an enterprising person to sub license each account to 5 people, 1 device each?
- TurdF3rguson 4mo agoI wouldn't do it personally for the same reason I wouldn't share my toothbrush with 5 people.
- wslh 4mo agoYou can write whatever contract you like, the problem is how to enforce it, and a greater problem is enforcing it around the world.
- fg137 4mo agoThat kind of mentality never works in business. Bear in mind that for years people shared Netflix accounts until it was cracked down technically.
- ralph84 4mo agoAlmost all consumer services have a built-in level of breakage that make them profitable. Mobile providers certainly wouldn't be able to offer unlimited calling if everyone was actually on the phone 24x7.
- margalabargala 4mo agoSure they would. Do you know how little bandwidth a phone call takes? A voLTE call is like 40kbps. For every person on earth to be on the phone to another person would be 4 billion calls would be about 160tbps. Which is less than 10% of the Internet's capacity.
- ralph84 4mo agoTerminating a PSTN call requires a lot of control plane infrastructure beyond just raw bandwidth. Especially mobile where you need to keep track of devices physically in motion. Could a system to support 4 billion simultaneous calls be built, sure. But current PSTN systems are nowhere near sized for it.
- noncoml 4mo agoWhen was the last time you place or received a call to/from PSTN?
- cr125rider 4mo agoThe over subscribed gym model!
- walrus01 4mo agoPlenty of things are intentionally run at a loss (for years!) to gain market share and quantity of ongoing recurring users, or with expectation of ROI later on. Multiple generations of the Xbox hardware have been sold at a loss with the expectation that customers will purchase 300, 400, 500 dollars worth of games, which are very high margin, over the lifespan they own the system.
- avaer 4mo agoI get that. It works as long as nobody calls out the emperor for having no clothes. It's similar to fractional banking, you gamble that people won't want their deposits all at once and pray for you're big enough for bailouts when they do. It's still a business whose fundamentals don't make sense, you're just gambling you won't get found out.
- cr125rider 4mo agoOh they know what they’re doing. They’re playing the long war of attrition game. Subsidize your product to undercut your competition until they go out of business. Tale as old as time.
- mmooss 4mo ago> It works as long as nobody calls out the emperor for having no clothes. Why would customers knowing that the vendor prices goods/services at a loss cause those strategies to fail? Customers often know. Most know about razors and blades; many/most know Lyft/Uber operated at a loss to gain market share. etc.
- mrandish 4mo ago> you're just gambling you won't get found out. It's not so much keeping it secret as counting on no one finding a way to harvest the subsidized value at scale. There's an example of that occurring in game consoles with the Playstation 3. Sony's little-used OtherOS feature allowed Linux to be installed on the PS3 and the Cell processors were quite a good deal for scale compute. So the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory bought ~1800 PS3s and ganged them together in a datacenter as a supercomputer called Condor. At >500 TFLOPs it was the 33rd fastest supercomputer in the world. Of course, Sony pushed a firmware update that removed the OtherOS feature entirely.
- mullingitover 4mo ago[dead]
- wqaatwt 4mo agoWe really don’t know what are Anthropic’s margins on inference. Most available data indicates they are quite high on the API so it’s not that obvious that subscriptions are unprofitable.