You're misinterpreting the quote. Socrates is saying that being able to find a written quotation will replace fully understanding a concept. It's the difference between being able to quote the pythagorean theorem and understanding it well enough to prove it. That's why Socrates says that those who rely on reading will be "hard to get along with" - they will be pedantic without being able to discuss concepts freely.

Likewise with AI the appearance of reasoning without the substance could lead to boring exchanges of plausible slop rather than meaningful discourse.

I mean Socrates said enough stuff that was wrong or didn't have any scientific understanding either.

Simply put at humanity wide scales written information is by far the most important thing you can have. There is kind of a Sortie's paradox occurring where you have individual knowledge that can be held by one person conflicts with systems knowledge that has to be redundant and can be easily transferred.

China is not the only nation that depends on Gulf oil, all of SEA does as well. If the strait remains closed it will destabilize the region and diminish the prestige of the US, and with the US military focused on the strait China will benefit.

Current US interventions should be read as a sign of weakness - an inability to shape events without resorting to naked aggression. Global hegemony can not be maintained through force alone.

No one ever asks how much it costs Facebook or Uber to serve requests because it is irrelevant, they set prices to maximize their profit like any good monopolist. Similarly the future cartel of big providers will charge their captive users whatever they can get away with, not the cost of inference.

The current discourse around "AI", swarms of agents producing mountains of inscrutable spaghetti, is a tell that this is the future the big players are looking for. They want to create a captive market of token tokers who have no hope of untangling the mess they made when tokens were cheap without buying even more at full price.

If Anthropic's compute is fully saturated then the Claude code power users do represent an opportunity cost to Anthropic much closer to $5,000 then $500.

Anthropic's models may be similar in parameter size to model's on open router, but none of the others are in the headlines nearly as much (especially recently) so the comparison is extremely flawed.

The argument in this article is like comparing the cost of a Rolex to a random brand of mechanical watch based on gear count.

But opportunity cost is not actual cost. “If everyone just kept paying but used our service less we would be more profitable” is true, but not in any meaningful way.

Are Anthropic currently unable to sell subscriptions because they don’t have capacity?

The opportunity cost isn't selling subscriptions, the cost is the gap between what they could sell the GPU time for via their API vs what they're selling it for in a flat rate subscription. If you assume API demand is unlimited and GPU supply is fixed, then the opportunity cost is the 'real' loss of revenue that comes from redirecting supply away from customers willing to pay more to customers willing to pay less.

> If you assume API demand is unlimited

Doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Not everyone on a subscription plan would convert to a 200USD/mo API consumer.

No but demand comes from a lot of sources beyond vibe coders.

True, but you need to run the optimisation function to calculate at what X does the increased revenue at lower margin from Pro Max subscribers outweigh the reduced revenue at higher margin for API consumers, and adjust your pricing to approach X.

I'm sure that Anthropic have some very smart folks on that right now.

Opportunity costs are real. In many cases they are more real than 'actual costs'. However, I otherwise agree with you.

> Are Anthropic currently unable to sell subscriptions because they don’t have capacity?

Absolutely! Im currently paying $170 to google to use Opus in antigravity without limit in full agent mode, because I tried Anthropic $20 subscription and busted my limit within a single prompt. Im not gonna pay them $200 only to find out I hit the limit after 20 or even 50 prompts.

And after 2 more months my price is going to double to over $300, and I still have no intention of even trying the 20x Max plan, if its really just 20x more prompts than Pro.

This has a absolutely nothing to do with whether they're limited by available compute...

I don't think that logically follows.

They have a business model and are trying to capture more revenue, fully saturating your computer isn't obviously a good business strategy.

If anything, you are confirming that $170 covers heavy Opus use profitably for the provider.

Opportunity cost is not the same thing as actual cost. They might have made more money if they were capable of selling the API instead of CC, but I would never tell my company to use CC all the time if I didn’t have a personal subscription.

You’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope. An investor is buying opportunity and it is a real cost to them.

Still makes no sense as they’d lose revenue, data, and scale if they don’t subsidize.

> If Anthropic's compute is fully saturated then the Claude code power users do represent an opportunity cost to Anthropic much closer to $5,000 then $500.

I think it's the other way around? Sparse use of GPU farms should be the more expensive thing. Full saturation means that we can exploit batching effects throughout.

If they have spare capacity then there is no opportunity cost to selling $100 subscriptions for exactly that reason. If they don’t have spare capacity then, at the margin, they could replace a subscription user with API calls that make them $5000: that’s opportunity cost.

If you own equity in Anthropic you should care about that cost. Maybe you are willing to tolerate it to win market share, but for you to make the most profit you need that cost to shrink.

You know who also loves to use the term "opportunity cost"?

The entertainment industry. They still tell you about how much money they're leaving on the table because people pirate stuff.

What would happen in reality for entertainment is people would "consume" far less "content".

And what would happen in reality for Anthropic is people would start asking themselves if the unpredictability is worth the price. Or at best switch to pay as you go and use the API far less.

Don’t give them any ideas, please! I need my 100 USD subscription with generous Opus usage!

Google's Antigravity has Opus access, and I suspect it's subsidised.

I prefer car analogies

> The argument in this article is like comparing the cost of a Rolex to a random brand of mechanical watch on gear count

I mean... rolex is overpriced brand whose cost to consumers is mainly just marketting in itself. Its production cost is nowhere close to selling price and looking at gears is fair way of evaluating that

Not directly. But if production cost is above selling price, you typically tend to get less production. And if production cost is (way) below selling price, that tends to invite competition.

> The politicians' initial efforts caused a public outcry though, when they stipulated that all samples should be destroyed on a donor's death.

Looks like you're right.

As an investor in Anthropic which pricing strategy would you support? That's the question you need to ask, not what there current pricing strategy in the win the market phase happens to be.

It’s sort of surprising how naive developers still are given the countless rug pulls over the past decade or two.

You’re right on the money: the important thing to look at are the incentive structures.

Basically all tech companies from the post-great financial crisis expansion (Google, post Balmer Microsoft, Twitter, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, etc) started off user-friendly but all eventually converged towards their investment incentive structure.

One big exception is Wikipedia. Not surprising since it has a completely different funding model!

I’m sure Anthropic is super user friendly now, while they are focused on expansion and founding devs still have concentrated policial sway. It will eventually converge on its incentive structures to extract profit for shareholders like all other companies.

In my experience the most common use of this data is to build case for firing someone for cause when upper management wants them out. It's rarely used for actual security purposes.

Capitalism is the only economic system that has the privilege of being evaluated outside of the context of the society in which it exists. When socialism is criticized the political system is always, justly, included; so the purges of Stalin and the homophobia of Guevara are all taken into account. Apply the same thinking to capitalism and you have to count a lot more deaths and injustices: the Irish and Bengali famines, world war 1, climate change, etc.

Add the East India Company's rule in India to the list, 40 million deaths on a conservative estimation.

You're misinterpreting the quote. Socrates is saying that being able to find a written quotation will replace fully understanding a concept. It's the difference between being able to quote the pythagorean theorem and understanding it well enough to prove it. That's why Socrates says that those who rely on reading will be "hard to get along with" - they will be pedantic without being able to discuss concepts freely.

Huh, I think you're right. I think I failed the litmus test. Thanks for explaining!