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I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

simonwillison.net

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Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#91
Love how everyone boasted about replacing all the software with ChatGPT and then we end up with coding agents meaning the software engineer are STILL important. The sell is the development tool. It's classic cloud. Where did all the ops people go, many got subsumed by the cloud companies YET every company still has DevOps people to manage cloud infrastructure. The layer of abstraction went up but we still need the people to write the glue code and understand the business. OK great there's a new cash printer in the room. There's a new tool. Let's just start to ground the tooling in its new found gravity, profitability and IPO market dynamics... Reality has set in. The hype cycle is about to explode... Do you remember ride hailing and just how much cash was burned on credits pre Uber IPO. Then remember the IPO itself? These companies are not the new Google. They are a layer on top. Google was still the most efficient cash printing machine in history beyond the the US government and might still be. Will be interesting to see what the trillion dollar IPOs turn into. I'm going to say we see those prices get cut to a third in less than 5 years and scale back up over the next 15-20 years.

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#92
post #72
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't xAI basically donate the compute for that quarter so Anthropic could get to say they turned a profit?

The SpaceX S-1 says they're charging Anthropic $1.25b a month.

It also states that the first few months (this current quarter where Anthropic are reporting profit) are discounted.

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#93

They've got, ballpark, $5t to $10t to make back in the next 5 years, or the hardware buildouts will start getting written down. This means we're going to need $1t+ per year in spending, per year, on tokens. 200m knowledge workers in the world, 30m developers. We're talking about a world where you need 5% of every knowledge workers salary to go into tokens. 20% if you're a developer. That's a _huge_ shift. Most people…

There is also the EV (expected value) of developing AGI. Even if you personally believe the probability is low within the lifetime of either of these companies, the value would still be extraordinarily high, enough to forgive a $5T or so miscalculation here or there.

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#95

They've got, ballpark, $5t to $10t to make back in the next 5 years, or the hardware buildouts will start getting written down. This means we're going to need $1t+ per year in spending, per year, on tokens. 200m knowledge workers in the world, 30m developers. We're talking about a world where you need 5% of every knowledge workers salary to go into tokens. 20% if you're a developer. That's a _huge_ shift. Most people…

Somehow Uber and WeWork survived the same kind of grand projections that they never met.

uber sure....but how did wework survive? they are a smoldering husk of a failed company looted by its founder

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#96
"[would have spent] $1,199 with Anthropic, $980 with OpenAI"

How many tokens is that, input/output-wise?

(a) I'm curious if you feel like you got $2000 worth of value out of them in the last month?

(b) I'm also curious if you would have gotten similar quality out of a slightly lower-cost provider of an open-weight model? (e.g. Kimi K2.6 and DeepSeek v4 Pro) and what the spend would have been for that.

I myself have managed to spend not quite $4 on OpenRouter and have felt it was very worth it; I just have much smaller, or more targeted requests I guess. (Lately, adding features to a static site generator in Python, or setting up log forwarding via a docker compose file)

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#97
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're pushing back against here. I spent $200. If I had been paying API pricing it would have been $2,180.16. The article is about how enterprise customers get charged API pricing, which means if I had been employed by one of those companies I would have cost them $2,180.16. What am I missing?

Large enterprises make deals and won’t be paying 2,180.16$ either. Just like with AWS

Claude is so in demand at the moment that there aren't really volume discounts. Anthropic sets the terms and you either accept them or get lost they have that much of a lead (mindshare/desirability wise).

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source on 200 million knowledge workers worldwide? My understanding is that it's just above 1 billion. I dont think a billion subscriptions at $1000/yr is out of the question but it might take a decade to get roiling

A billion? Really? At 200M you’re already including a lot of people that stretch the definition of knowledge worker.

Yeah, just looked into this. Knowledge workers is a big group and probably much larger than you think it is.

Basically if you're not doing manual labor, it's probably knowledge work.

Roughly 1/3rd of the working population.

Some data tucked in here: https://gist.github.com/danielmiessler/2dc039762a202b083753b...

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#99
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use GLM-5.1. It's good enough for personal stuff. It doesn't compare to the latest Opus I use at work. You can certainly argue I don't need Opus for work, but there is clearly a difference. Also, at least with z.ai, GLM-5.1 is s l o w! After using Claude at work, I get really impatient with GLM-5.1 at home. When doing "true" vibe coding (i.e. not really examining the code), Opus is a ton faster (easily 5x). But yea…

Hmm, I use opencode subscription, and glm seems just as fast from the tests I've tried to compare between the two. Tbh it mostly took Claude longer (mostly significantly longer) for the same tests. Also, and I know you may not want to answer. But could you give me an idea of the type of thing you found glm to be worse with? I think I've been fairly unbiased in testing a bunch of different development tasks. But am cu…

Perhaps opencode zen isn't using z.ai as a provider?

Re: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

#100
post #93

They've got, ballpark, $5t to $10t to make back in the next 5 years, or the hardware buildouts will start getting written down. This means we're going to need $1t+ per year in spending, per year, on tokens. 200m knowledge workers in the world, 30m developers. We're talking about a world where you need 5% of every knowledge workers salary to go into tokens. 20% if you're a developer. That's a _huge_ shift. Most people…

There is also the EV (expected value) of developing AGI. Even if you personally believe the probability is low within the lifetime of either of these companies, the value would still be extraordinarily high, enough to forgive a $5T or so miscalculation here or there.

I don't think AGI was ever a serious endeavour, just something the labs talked up to grab attention.

I am willing to bet a Twix we'll look back on that stuff in 2 years with a lot of embarrassment

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