Why is everyone still operating under the assumption the current token costs will remain so heavily subsidized? We could see $200-400/hr in token costs once these companies need to turn a profit
Right, except I acknowledged my initial statement was wrong because I was basing it off of household income when you were actually referring to personal income. So why did you spend the effort refuting that?
Median personal income is per individual, which is obvious. After I corrected myself the question then became "did the typical individual's real income keep pace with the cost of the things they can't avoid buying?". The answer is no. And I already showed why.
You're right, I was mixing up the related charts. Still, this makes my case even stronger since personal controls for adding more earners to a household. If real median personal income only rose from ~$28k in 1974 to ~45$k today, that's a 60% increase. Median personal income rising by 0.9% every year over 50 years compared to healthcare rising by 3-4% every year since 2000 is not a gap you can ignore. Necessities grew at nearly 3 to 4x the income rate.
So the case that quality of life is trending downward is still completely valid and shows why you can't just point at a single graph and say "see? line go up therefore quality of life fine"
That chart doesn't make the case you think it does. Real median household income rising can be explained by things like more dual earner households (more women working since the 70s), more hours worked, etc. The household income can rise while the wages can theoretically remain flat or even fall.
The more relevant statistic is that median real wages have only grown by about 29% across 40+ years (~0.6% per year)
Since 2000, medical care costs have risen by 121.3%, hospital services by 275%, college tuition and fees by 196%, compared to consumer goods by 86.1%. Things like TVs and electronics went way down in costs while the essentials have absolutely skyrocketed. The cheap stuff drags the average down.
You need a lot more than a single graph to argue against the quality of life going down for Americans.
Obviously it's not. Would you like me to sit here and do the work of reading the article for you? Or are the numbers involved a bit too much for you to handle?
Continue shoving your fingers in your ears and closing your eyes to the absolute nonsense that is behind OpenAI and Anthropic's economics, it won't change the fact that their path to profitability doesn't exist.
I would assume being profitable constitutes as winning when you're throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at a technology. OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a very obvious path to profitability.
The author is pretty obvious and exhaustive about what he means by "losing": AI capex bubble is unsustainable, AI revenue is circular, no meaningful AI compute demand outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, AI products are mediocre at best (and still heavily subsidized, at that), AI is causing various mental health crises, OpenAI lost $20.9 billion on $13 billion in revenue in 2025.
OpenAI spent $17.2 billion on Azure in 2025 making the infrastructure bill exceed total revenue by about $4 billion BEFORE even counting salaries, research, stock compensation or anything else.
I feel like the responses here are purposely obtuse and people are refusing to realistically evaluate the economics of Anthropic and OpenAI
I guess I'm just confused by this sentiment. Are you making these conclusions while considering the fact that AI is still heavily subsidized? The economics of AI isn't quite the same as other software/tech.
I don't think it's going anywhere, but I don't know what happens when prices start to rise because these companies need to start turning a profit.
Human consciousness is dictated by their material conditions, not the other way around. If the material reality of many Americans is unhealthy foods and heavily car-centric urban design, where does the "decision" to walk and take public transit come from? It is genuinely not an option for the vast majority of Americans to live in a walkable and/or public transit supported community if the infrastructure does not exist.
And this wasn't due to consumer choice, either. Decades of policy dictated the shift towards car centrism that resulted in railways and street cars being torn up, the construction of the interstate highway system and destruction of dense urban cores, zoning law mandates and parking minimums, federal subsidies for suburban mortgages, etc.
This "choice" or "decision" was manufactured by car lobbyists.
Walkable neighborhoods and cities that aren't car centric being a "dystopian vision" is laughable. Thankfully, the default for car brains across much of the globe is car centric urban design.
You people never fail to be ridiculously dramatic.
The isolation produced by centering our urban and suburban design around cars is pronounced. It cannot be understated how much damage cars have done to our sense of connectedness, community, walkability, and health.
You're describing the same alienation of labor Marx identified 150+ years ago. It was only a matter of time before it caught up with our field. Someone who used to make their own clothes, from planting the cotton, to picking it to turning it into thread to weaving the thread into fabric to creating the piece of clothing felt a LOT less pride in their work when it was transferred to a factory line or automated loom.
The people who own the tools decide how the productivity gains are distributed. The workers could produce the same output in less same and go home earlier. Or the capitalists could keep the worker there the same (or more) hours per day and capture the extra output as profit.
Under capitalism, the choice is always the latter. You correctly identified the pattern that Marx described over 100 years ago. The capitalists own the tools and control the conditions of our labor as software developers. They extract that productivity gain as surplus value, and will never choose to willingly give us more leisure time.
This is silly. Would you perform the same test against Western models in asking them whether Israel is a genocidal apartheid state? It'll give you the same roundabout explanations and "some say no some say yes" responses that you'll get from asking Qwen about Uighurs or the protests of 1989.
We did know in the 20s. We knew in the 30s. We knew in the 40s. We absolutely knew in the 50s (oil industry funded their own studies on this). We knew before we decided to direct billions into a federal interstate highway system that bulldozed countless communities of color and killed many cities' downtowns and sense of connectedness.
I don't see anything positive about being forced to participate in this car-ownership game where 99% of North American cities are designed around car ownership, and if you don't own a car you're screwed. I don't WANT to own a car, I don't want to direct countless thousands of dollars to a car note, car maintenance, gas, etc. I want the freedom to exist without needing to own an absurdly expensive vehicle to get myself around. There's nothing freeing or positive about that unless all you've ever known and all you can imagine is a world in which cities are designed around cars and not people.