Aswath Damodaran warns that a larger AI market could mean greater job displacementMachine translation

The $10-$15 trillion total addressable market for AI, if it is successful, is actually "terrifying". - The famous "Dean of Valuation", Professor Aswath Damodaran, of NYU Stern School of Business. The reason: AI as a tool is a much smaller market; AI as a replacement for human-jobs is where the giant market story comes from. "The best-case scenario for AI, that $10 to $15 trillion market, will happen if ONLY it replaces people. If AI is a tool, it’s going to be a much smaller market than if AI replaces people. So, the stories we’re telling about $10, $20 or $25 trillion markets are actually terrifying stories for the rest of the world. Why? Because if that story comes true, half of all white-collar people are going to lose their jobs. And what are they going to do instead? Who’s going to come up with the income to buy the products and services? If AI works as well as it’s supposed to and replaces people, how do we deal with that as a society? Because people lose their jobs. Not only do you lose your income, you lose your life’s meaning.." ---- Full video on "Excess Returns" podcast Youtube channel (link in comment)

NYU professor Aswath Damodaran ("Dean of Valuation"), published a long blog and says Anthropic’s IPO will be priced on run-rate revenue rather than valued on cash flows. > Justifying a $1.5T to $2T value for Anthropic requires very fast early growth, operating margins rising to 30% or more, compute costs growing slower than revenue, and risk falling to average as regulation and business models settle. > H1 2026 losses of $8.7B at Anthropic and $21.6B at OpenAI, excluding non-cash charges, rule out earnings multiples, making ARR the AI equivalent of dot-com eyeballs and social-media user counts. > ARR has no standard: OpenAI’s $50B counts partner sales net, Anthropic’s $65B counts them gross, and grossing up OpenAI produced the roughly $70B figure investors circulated. Both annualize monthly, a choice either can change. > VC rounds here price the IPO rather than value the business: Anthropic’s May round raised $65B at $965B post-money when expected IPO pricing was $1.15T, a haircut for delay or disappointment. > Pricing will likely migrate to 2030 or 2036 revenue and earnings, where 25 times 2036 earnings looks cheap only when wrongly compared with today’s multiples on current earnings. > The cheaper lab depends on the yardstick: at $1.5T to $2T, Anthropic looks cheaper on current and year-end ARR, OpenAI on 2030 revenue, compute and users, and both may simply be overpriced. > No listed pure-play peer exists, since Gemini sits inside Alphabet, xAI inside SpaceX and Muse inside Meta, so Anthropic will be priced against OpenAI’s private rounds or the Mag 7 and SpaceX.