Mina Kimes

value of this technology, the underlying skill, I think, is its facility with data.

And there are so many jobs that are, whether they're in data analytics or they're in research, they're putting together PowerPoints, they're working with Excel.

There are so many jobs where the moment-to-moment tasks are so easily reproducible or accelerated

by the best AI tools that exist.

But I think it's far more likely than what you've seen in the last few months is going to continue, which is that anthropic and open AI have, in the last 13 months, gone from a combined ARR, a combined annualized revenue, of about $3.5 billion to a combined annualized revenue of $35 billion.

It's grown by 10x.

That's practically unprecedented in the history of capitalism.

And it suggests at the very least that there are ordinary people, not just 60 people in the Philippines, but millions of people in America that are choosing to pay significantly for this technology month after month.

People who are paying it for it out of pocket or you mean in companies and in their jobs?

Because I think that's an important distinction here.

It's a great question, and it's hard to decompose exactly how much of this spending is coming from individuals who are choosing to pay for it versus companies that are choosing to pay for it.

But I would say this.

There are a lot of companies, a lot of major Fortune 100 companies that prohibit their employees from using Claude or OpenAI and force them to use other models like Gemini.

And that suggests that a lot of the money that's going into anthropic and open AI are from individuals choosing to use this technology rather than from companies forcing them to use this technology.

And I think it's important to say, you know, you go back to what the folks at Meter said.

It's not that the folks at Meter have found that companies are forcing software programmers to use AI.

What they found is that the individual software programmers themselves

will not enroll in this study because it requires that some of them be selected to be in a control group where they can't use this technology.

And they're saying, we can't do that.

I don't dispute that there's utility for software programmers.