Is it not sort of implied by the stats later: "Revenues from Claude Code, a program for coding that Anthropic introduced earlier this year, already are said to be running at an annual rate of $1 billion. Revenues for the other leader, Cursor, were $1 million in 2023 and $100 million in 2024, and they, too, are expected to reach $1 billion this year."
Surely that revenue is coming from people using the services to generate code? Right?
A back-of-the-napkin estimate of software developer salaries:
There are some ~1.5 million software developers in the US per BLS data, or ~4 million if using a broader definition
Median salary is $120-140k. Let's say $120k to be conservative.
This puts total software developer salaries at $180 billion.
So, that puts $1 billion in Claude revenue in perspective; only about 0.5% of software developer salaries. Even if it only improved productivity 5%, it'd be paying for itself handily - which means we can't take the $1 billion in revenues to indicate that it's providing a big boost in productivity.
If it makes a 5% improvement, that would make it a $9 billion dollar per year industry. What’s our projected capex for AI projects next five years again?
Surely that revenue is coming from people using the services to generate code? Right?