Posted by simonw 5/27/2026
All the slop content, all the bots, all the misinformation and fake AI images and videos.
All of the social and economic disruption from datacenter buildouts.
The massive nosedive in reliability on the world’s software infrastructure.
After all of that and all we get is a code bot so a few incompetent loser devs can bloviate about not writing their own code and brag about never reading it.
Burn it all to the gd ground. Destroy this new Tower of Babel.
Intelligence is a universal good, it can apply to anything, and no, "human intelligence" is not the only form that is useful nor special. There are limitations to AI but also huge advantages, and its obvious that the advantages are worth paying for, given their revenue.
I know everything you’ve done for the tech community, but I please you to take some time off and reflect on this article. It’s not on par with ur usual level, but the tendency has been visible from the last couple of articles.
I thought this was one of my best pieces of writing this year.
(In case you missed it, the title was meant as a subtle burn on those two companies - it's pretty absurd for them to only just be finding product-market fit when they're already valued at over a trillion dollars.)
Also my highest respect for responding so calmly without lowering your debating level to mine. I try to best to explain what I think is wrong.
To start I didn’t interpret the article as a burn.
I think it’s interesting to explain what’s wrong with it, because it seems similar to what‘s wrong with AI. The issues are subtle.
- Anthropic doesn’t have a profitable quarter, it’s financial engineering (https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle...)
- The first argument about your subscription price, doesn’t has anything to do with the overall claim of the article. It would if at all be a weak argument to support the opposite. Subsidizing prices signals a lack of PMF.
- That you hire sales people after you had a billions of funding is nothing surprising and doesn’t indicate PMF or not.
- AI Implementations are fresh and of course AI Failures are thin, but so are AI successes. I haven’t seen any companies creating billions of shareholder value because they’ve massively invested in AI and their competitiors didn’t You really can look at these things in 5 to 10 years and it is multi-faceted including cultural acceptance.
- That they need to buy more compute to satisfy the requests is probably the strongest argument in the artical, but don’t conclusive. The product is been sold heavily subsidized and in hype cycle. And again both OPENAI and Anthropic have to show growth in order to justify the IPO.
- Regarding the part about revenue I refer to the linkedm article above, as it does explain it very well.
The conclusion is reasonable given the arguments, but not the title.
However it is missing all the real discussion points that are actually in observation at the moment.
Local models as alternatives, IPO finanical engineering, how AI implementation actually will perform over years... Let’s all not forget crypto. It’s been full of "use cases" just a bunch of years ago. I like the idea of crypto(btc,eth) and I’m still invested, but 99.99% of coins have died on promies.
So this is not a piece of critical thinking, but this reads like a twitter thread to sell me a course :/
The future are small models, nobody really needs big compute in the long run, that's why big tech is going for our personal hardware. So we won't become their competitor in their rent only economy. True competition is eliminated, natural evolution is being fixated by the government. This is not going to end well for the USA.
Kind of…
> I currently subscribe to the $100/month Max plan from Anthropic and the $100/month Pro plan from OpenAI
... which already indicates a bias.
> If you are a heavy user of coding agents these plans are a fantastic deal... that’s $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200—not bad at all!
Thank you for the sales pitch. Perhaps go buy a car and tell us how [insert your manufacturer] has "found product-market fit"?
> Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter.
First, the strong rumor is a claim by Anthropic itself. But even assuming that's true - it's an "operating profit", i.e. disregarding the massive capital expenses for years, and may also disregards ongoing capital expenses, if those happen not to be taken this particular quarter.
> 1 Trillion .. companies spending $200+/month/user will get you there a whole lot faster
First note the use of the first person plural to talk about Anthropic and OpenAI.
But that aside - most companies aren't paying $200 USD/user-month. But even if they were - if we take the 30 Million SW developers mentioned in trjordan's comment as subscribers, that's 2400/user-year * 30 Million = 72 Billion USD / year. And this is already rather optimistic, but - want to double that number of subscribers? Fine, make it 150 Billion / year. Still not there with a rosy outlook and assuming the hype and enthusiasm continue for many years.
And those rosy estimates are more likely than not unrealistic. I am reminded of this review of some empirical research regarding the benefit of LLM/AI use:
https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-pr...