66 comments

[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 39.2 ms ] thread
Is it realistic to expect every person on earth to pay them $3,500?
a) No. That is not realistic. Some would pay much more, most others way less.

b) If they get $3500 + x in return, why not? The pie is not fixed.

Their friends control the Central Banks and the printing will continue until $30T buys you a loaf of bread
Of course, we just need to figure out how every person on earth would make at least $7,000 after they loose their job on the name of AI. (Assuming they need at least $3,500 for other basic needs).
Babies included.
instead of 10 years priced in, like what, here 2 generations priced in?
The question isn't whether or not every person pays $3500, but whether or not businesses can extract more than $3500 of value from their interactions with you to make it worthwhile for them to pay.
Put 100% tariffs on everything and drive inflation and trade wars up.
the 30T number is indeed ridiculous, but looking at it as an average per person is a bit silly when the numbers range from $0/mo to $millions/mo. averages get wonky with outliers.
Stretch the timeline out enough and add enough inflation and anything is possible!
Agree with the abrudity. I also had to look at are there other absurd but real things. Estimating at 4.2 trillion in oil revenue is about $500 per person globally. Until you factor in the uneven distribution of that revenue what seems like an order of magnitude problem goes away.

There are of course many other holes to poke in a high level estimate like this.

I'm sure they can extract $3,500 worth of value from everyone's existence.
Look. This is a new golden age of cocaine, because of the big cuts in everything in the US took away the cocaine busting operations in Colombia and Bolivia, because the revolutionaries that previously kept control of it stood down and became a political party and new, profit-driven cartels came up, and because battery technology means that narcosubs and similar drone things work much better than before (and they can be made remote-operated, so the cops can't do shit even when they find one). Wholesale prices have halved or gone down 60% to like, 12k usd / kilo, street prices commensurate. The huge new opportunities created by increased market size have increased competition and made the cartel nature of the cartels decrease. So always think of that when you look at people acting like this and having such megalomaniac goals.
Honestly you have a point. The decrease in cost of cocaine is very real
It would be hilarious if the price of cocaine actually affected macroeconomics because of how it affects human behavior.
It actually might. It affected the mood of stockbrokers in the 1980s, both because of general energy levels and also because they were addicted and had to keep the money flowing. That must do something to macroeconomics.
Is there a dataset for this? Maybe a Bloomberg ticker?
Maybe in the 80s. I had the insight one day that the past 20 years of tech have been fueled by massive doses of amphetamines, and seen under these lens a lot of products, choices and what has risen to popularity make a lot of sense.

Too bad I don’t take my ADHD prescription anymore and I am now utterly alienated by the work hard not smart crowd.

I don’t really like working with cokeheads. Megalomaniac goals but not the discipline or grasp on reality to achieve them. Always feel like it could be cool to be on a team of cokeheads (and be one) if everyone was truly cracked.
I think whats most important is these numbers don't exist as material goods and they're basically like the african colonies back in the 1700s and 1800s; you could just make shit up because no one of any means was going to come call you on it.

They also sound exactly like the same people, except not describing africans, but the entire world.

Yep, 92% of estimated US GDP in 2026. That sounds totally plausible to me.
In there is some delusion that LLMs will create hundreds of trillions in new wealth.
$30T? Why not $100T? $1000T? Why not $1 trillion trillion? If we're just pulling numbers out of our asses we may as well go big.
1 trillion trillion you say?! Sounds ridiculous, but if they can even reach 1% of that target, they'll make a killing! Sign me up!
Can be achieved with low/no margin financialization of revenue between a web of companies.
I see myself over $3000T in potential revenues too. You shall see. Please invest.
Well I’m getting on this train. Even if he comes in under, that’s still like infinity percent growth from current!
Before you dump it, you have to pump it...

In other words, we are to see a media barrage leading up to the IPO to get retail investors to jump on the stock.

Now AI companies are playing with ridiculous Enron-level accounting tricks to justify their already inflated valuations?
What are they currently making?
It’s heartening to see that most of HN is starting to call shenanigans on these ridiculous numbers.
I remember how 3 years ago the consensus, even here, was it was a fad or unsustainable.
You think $30 trillion projected growth is sustainable?
As far as I am aware, they have yet to make a single dollar in profit.

At some point selling a dollar for 5 cents stops being a viable strategy.

Sure, the revenue per unit looks bad, but we’ll make it up in volume!
With how much money has changed hands or has been agreed to do so, aren't the people involved already rich beyond their wildest dreams?

Isn't that one of the most lucrative financial things seen at this scale, and one of its primary characteristics is that it was accomplished without profits?

Who wants to rock the boat anyway by introducing a truly unruly variable at this late date?

That is a typo. It is a Q not a T ! How could we have missed it
They should focus on fixing claude code, as I just canceled my 200/month subscription for codex because it's quality has degraded so much.
The only obstacle is everyone using it for everything
Over what period of time?
There is still no way to search or filter your list of projects in the Claude sidebar, or get it to show you the active ones.
2025 revenue numbers:

  - Microsoft $281 billion
  - Apple $416 billion
  - Google $402 billion
Seems likely that a company renting most of their hardware will generate multiples more cash than these established players
That's awesome! I also predict that Leopold Aschenbrenner will be the world's first trillionaire under 30!

PS: Not.

As you mock them, notice that they again emotionally provoked the public, using words that disrupt people's feeling of safety and stability and therefore which bypass their cognitive processes and hit directly in their emotions and alarm. That's the goal.

The mocking is usually an attempt to get back some equilibrium, to regain leverage, to make the scary threat into something smaller.

So it looks like their tactic worked yet again. Why is it a goal? One aim is to seize and hold the initiative, and also to make you compliant when they do further transgressive or dangerous things.

So I'm guessing that's the same $billion passed around these companies 30,000 times, then, right? If we're just pulling numbers out of thin air, I think I want to make $6723 kajillion dollars this year, and if I don't, I'm going to whine!

This shit is getting so fucking exhausting. No, you're not going to make $30 trillion. Ever. It's second-hand embarrassing how high these idiots are after huffing their own farts.

I hope it crashes and burns -hard-, and the 'wealth' of these insipid billionaire sociopaths 'leading' these operations evaporates so they're just another crank on the street corner so they're easier to ignore.

The combined revenue of the SP500 ~$18.28T, or ~14.8% of global GDP in 2025 (~118.35T). So is anthropic really saying that they expect to have 1.64x the revenue of the SP500 or that the total addressable revenue for AI they suspect is $30T? That number is at least plausible but expect to earn 25% of global GDP is a bit whacky unless you've drunk a lot of koolaid
When all this crashes, future historians will look back and wonder how so many got hoodwinked by AI.

Some of these future historians might even be reading this Hacker News thread.

To any future historians reading this, many of us did know this AI stock bonanza was just a modern day tulip mania. Alas many wealthy people did get hoodwinked though.

(comment deleted)
Honestly though, if they legitimately achieve RSI, I feel like all bets are off and anything could happen.