Claude is ready for its corporate close-up

Enterprises that have watched Claude claw its way toward mass appeal over the past few months of capacity challenges and pricing realignment should take a closer look at Anthropic's offerings, according to International Data Corporation (IDC). The tech consultancy has been tracking Anthropic's moves over the past six months and …

[Dan 55]

Anthropic have pioneered a way of charging customers an unknown amount every month, is that what it takes to be enterprise ready these days?

[DS999]

Isn't that by definition what happens when users use an unknown amount every month.

Or do you think that enterprises pay a flat fee for electricity, cloud compute, etc.?

[MachDiamond]

"Or do you think that enterprises pay a flat fee for electricity, cloud compute, etc.?"

This is where there's a gulf of ignorance. How much does each AI task cost to complete? Nobody seems to know. If you have a company and don't know how to describe the units of measure for what you sell and what it costs you for them, how do you set a price that leads to a profit?

If an AI company has been charging a fee based on days/weeks/months, they may find that people are using the crap out of the system since it's virtually unlimited for that subscription period. If the AI company sets their rates on that premise, users that don't do that will be priced out. The other factor being pointed out is that companies that are building workflows with subsidized AI costs are getting hit with untenable price rises that blows their business plan (after they've sacked their workers). The AI companies can't keep operating at a loss, that's a given, but they aren't getting close to knowing how to price their services which leaves users in a precarious position. Ruin your customers and your own business is destined for the tip.

If you use AI, it's best that you use it for things where there there's a continuing business with that thing that doesn't need AI any longer. A software application, physical product, book, etc. That way there's a possible path to not using it again or limiting the use to just the things where it saves money. If the AI component is needed indefinitely, the outlook is poor.

[Don Bannister]

But at least with an electricity meter you know what the units actually are, and you'd have a fair idea of what the devices connected might be using ...

[MachDiamond]

"But at least with an electricity meter you know what the units actually are, and you'd have a fair idea of what the devices connected might be using ..."

If you are a utility, you know what the units are. Ideally, for the AI company, they could add up all their costs and divide by what's been produced, if they could assign some sort of unit to that output.

[Dan 55]

Neither the electricity supplier or cloud provider suddenly change billing method or invent something called a token multiplier from one month to the next.

[Cubbie Roo]

Combined business revenue <$10bn on what, >$400bn investment and counting . . ??

[Clausewitz4.1]

AI Clowns trying to IPO non-profitable business

[MachDiamond]

"AI Clowns trying to IPO non-profitable business"

And the crowd goes wild with fists full of money to hand them.

[ExampleOne]

An interesting thing I noticed from managing part of our roll out is that Claude has acquired installation and management processes which are far more compatible with vague infosec compliance than the curlbash and auto-self-update they used to use.

Now we can mirror in an rpm repository and just treat it as a normal system package it it behaves! (In as much as anything ever behaves)

[has been]

Bad Internet neighbours.

Company should be regulated out of existence due to the damage is does scraping sites with its bots. There are a lot of organizations paying for the bandwidth...

[cyberdemon]

Re: Bad Internet neighbours.

It's not just bandwidth.. Sites pay for good quality content written by actual knowledgeable people, only to have it scraped and mangled by various LLMs, and for umpteen slop websites to pop up like a toxic fungus, serving back said mangled content.

It's especially bad for some fields such as engineering reference / teaching material. Sometimes almost every site I find on a search is just slop. Complete with nonsensical slop diagrams. The real sites are starved out and we are left with just the rotten slop. It horrifies me that people trying to study engineering have to deal with this

[MachDiamond]

Re: Bad Internet neighbours.

"Sometimes almost every site I find on a search is just slop. Complete with nonsensical slop diagrams. "

And if people don't learn the subject well enough to spot this, the whole world goes pear shaped since they've let the machines know things for them.