Why compute might get 10x more expensive in coming years
If a human-level software engineer that could run on an H100 equivalent, at current market rates for software engineers, that H100 should rent for over $250k a year. That’s 15x today’s spot price.
I want to experiment with very quick blog post where I time-box writing for 2 hours. I won’t be able to nail down a lot of important sub-questions, but the alternative is just not making any progress on a lot of different topics I’m curious about. Today I want to talk about the compute situation of the labs over the coming years. Anthropic revenue has 10xed year over year. Anthropic likely ends the year with ~$100–150B of revenue. For this trend to continue, Anthropic would have to make $1T in revenue by the end of next year. There’s no deep reason why the trend needs to continue, and it…
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