"sustainably profitable businesses"

by beattherush, Chicago, Tuesday, June 02, 2026, 13:26 (8 days ago) @ HumanRobot

I don't believe they will.

Current subsidy rates for LLM pricing are estimated at 80%. Even with that major discount, CIOs in large corporate are already putting the brakes on ummetered AI rollouts and rehiring junior developers. The scale projections for Anthropic et al. are still in the handwave stage of rigor. They won't reach the scale they think.

Smart players, IMO, have already figured this out. This is an environment where you sell pickaxes and let the gold miners take all the risk. The better-led firms are playing it that way. Microsoft very carefully hedged its bets on OpenAI all along. Apple, a firm not shy about spending R&D money, has let others take the lead and as usual will swoop in late. IBM pretty clearly is setting up its usual middleware play. X it's hard to tell what's going on but them renting compute time to Anthropic tells you something.

It will all end in tears. Remember Global Crossing?