Valuations are based on future expected earnings, not revenue. It cost Ford a lot of money to make that $60k car. The margins for AI companies are unknown but the market is pricing that they’ll be higher at one point. Not that they’ll attract more revenue from the average person.

> My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.

How much of that 60K does Ford actually keep? And how much will it be once BYD is allowed in the US? The forecast for Ford is pretty much only downwards, the possible upside on AI is huge.

If every company in the F500 starts spending $2000+ on AI credits per employee, then every consumer product will indirectly be funding AI companies. I think it's already the case that companies small enough to avoid/skip getting O365 or Google Suite subscriptions will pay for AI first.

> My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.

AI company revenues aren't driven by consumer subscriptions.

The people doing $20 or even $200 per month plans for their side projects aren't driving the demand. It's going to be business customers spending $1000/month or more per developer and all of the companies feeding their business processes through the API like call centers, document processing, and everything else.

If you're thinking of AI companies as consumer plays you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. We get cheap access to Claude because they want us playing with it so when it comes time for our employers to choose something we can all lobby for Anthropic.

I guess I’m not surprised that if one “added up all the major AI valuations,” it’s more than any single consumer purchase or even most single companies.

Did you add Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon in that because more people consume from these firms than Ford

On the flip side, enterprise.

How many businesses are paying Ford $10 million per annum?

Ford probably made 3k profit on that car. Given the falling costs of inference, what are the chances your neighbor gives anthropic 3k in profit over the next few years? Not terribly bad.

At 20 year depreciation it’s $250 a month. Close to Anthropic’s $200 model. IMHO at this point a lot of developers would rather walk than code manually.