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So thinking this through to come up with your numbers, total investment through 2027 is ~$2T and interest on debt is over 7%, which makes servicing this ~$140B/
by kurthr 2mo ago
So thinking this through to come up with your numbers, total investment through 2027 is ~$2T and interest on debt is over 7%, which makes servicing this ~$140B/yr. However, failure rates on H100-B300 installed HW have been over 12%/yr even as the power and cost efficiency per token of the later builds has risen ~5x. So depreciation on the data centers is conservatively $240B/yr ignoring power costs (likely only $30B/yr at $0.05/kWh). Conveniently, this is $20B/month and if 5% of the population uses it, that's only 400million people so it's $50/mo or $600/yr, only if the AI-vendors make zero profit and $100/mo if they make 50% margins. Realistically, the OpenAI and Anthropic go to zero or it's $600/year.
I don't know where the 5% of world population came from, because that's clearly not just professionals or people making a lot of money. That's Uber drivers, and retirees in the developed world or tech workers in Asia making <$10000/year. Those don't look like great markets. This needs to be 2x higher value than their cell phone and internet that they might spend $300/year on today (that's a new iPhone every 3 years on an ATT plan). It's not like it can replace their plan, because they need that connectivity to use it!
Who's getting this value other than SWEs? There aren't 40 million SWEs and I don't see them spending over $6000/year. If their business does, it still has to pass on the cost to consumers and/or fire SWEs.
- alasdair_ 2mo agoEvery llm-wrapper business needs an llm behind it. There are a sizeable number of firms paying 10mm+ a month to offset the people paying $50/month
- kurthr 2mo agoThey must each have 20mm customers paying $10 a month to have 50% margins in profit. Or are they just VC funded? Are there 100 of them? That would be 2 billion customers.