I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by pzo » Wed, May 27, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

> If you are a heavy user of coding agents these plans are a fantastic deal. I just ran the ccusage tool on my laptop to get an estimate of how much I would have spent if I were to pay for API tokens in the past 30 days and got

You think this is fantastic deal only because they use similar like tricks where they inflate the price and tell you something supposed to cost $1000 but they have this today promo for $100.

I was there too and paying for a while. Few weeks ago I tried DeepSeek V4 Pro - expected its gonna be shit but its actually pretty good.

The deal is I pay daily ~$1 for DSV4-pro for ~100M API token usage. And they probably not getting broke because >90% of those token in practice is cache read and they very well optimized for that.

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

#182

Post by lunar_mycroft » Wed, May 27, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

solenoid0937 wrote: post #138

trjordan wrote: post #11

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…

> 20% if you're a developer. That's a _huge_ shift. Most people I know cite +20%-40% velocity with these tools, against the actual work their company cares about doing. +20% speed for +20% spend isn't going to motivate a trillion dollars a year in spending. Of course it will. The value of an employee is a multiple of what they get paid. If you pay an employee $500k and they make $2M for your company (like Meta), then…

The difference between what the employer makes per employee and what they spend in compensation doesn't matter. If the increase in productivity isn't greater than the increase in cost, there isn't a reason to pay for AI over hiring more developers.

Imagine an employer with 10 employees paying $500k per employee and making $2M per employee in revenue (to use your numbers). They could hire two more employees and spend an extra $1M (+20%), but make an extra $4M in revenue (+20%). Alternatively, they could buy all ten employees a $100k AI subscription, for a total of $1M extra spending (+20%) but an extra $4M in revenue (+20%). You'll notice both scenarios are identical, so an employer optimizing for profit would have no reason to prefer one over the other.

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

#183

Post by therealdrag0 » Wed, May 27, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

binary0010 wrote: post #21

zuzululu wrote: post #10

Great article I know this upsets a lot of people who are used to thinking Anthropic/OpenAI are just lighting cash on fire but they've cornered the market on enterprise who cannot walk away from these $200/month plans However the valuations are still far far away from actual sanity

Have you tried the large open source code models? I use glm-5.1 and occasionally deep seek v4. They are as good or better than Claude's latest models. And significantly cheaper. I've converted 3 of my engineer friends as well. All three have dropped their $200 month plans they had with anthropic. We've all been a bit shocked at just how good these models are now. If you "have" tried GLM (I specifically find it shocki…

What is the best IDE UI to use them? I don’t like CLIs.

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

#184

Post by mbesto » Wed, May 27, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

> but I suspect there’s a more important factor here: I think they’ve finally found product-market fit

Ahhh the classic startup term that's definition is nebulous. But also, since when does any definition of product/market fit mean a product is profitable? And profitable in what sense? Unit economics? Overall company?

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

#185

Post by pier25 » Wed, May 27, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

hansmayer wrote: post #128

> Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter No, its more like their own leak to WSJ and according to Ed Zitron -> seems to be heavily engineered via non-GAAP practices such as counting potential , but not realised revenue as actual revenue - the stuff for which I would be arrested if I did it at my company. Also it appears according to Ed's analysis - strangely they seem to be…

Yeah I'll believe it when I see it. Revenue is increasing but so are their costs.

Back in 2024 their CEO claimed training costs would rise to $10-100B in the next years.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

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

#186

Post by blackjack_ » Wed, May 27, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

mesmertech wrote: post #15

binary0010 wrote: post #12

So how do openai and anthropic plan to keep customers when GLM-5.1 is just as good and open source and a lot cheaper? I don't see the business model working. My closest friend actually does automation software for large companies. He does not use Claude or openai at all. He primarily uses gpt 120b on cerebras and glm-5.1 for heavy thinking work. And some other small models for various tasks. All open source. And thes…

For coding you always want to go with the best model in the category, not something that would be the best model if we went 1 year back which GLM 5.1 is, and I'm saying that as a big fan of GLM cause I run a translation site where GLM is good enough for the price. Most of the money right now is in coding. Openai and Anthropic just have to be 6 months ahead of SOTA open source models and they'll capture most of the en…

This is a silly take. There is a line of "good enough" for most coding (most CRUD apps and APIs are nothing special), and once we are past that, nobody will care about having the "newest, best" model except extreme outliers. And this base "good enough" model will become an ultra cheap commodity as we already see with GLM, deepseek, etc.

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

#187

Post by dirck-norman » Wed, May 27, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

specproc wrote: post #124

jgbuddy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making the assumption that the models are only used / paid for by 2.5% of the population (your knowledge workers value). There will be new value created by these models which people are happy to pay for which simply did not exist at all before. It is also naive to say that the hyperscalers are going to be expecting a return on this in 5 years, it will be entirely propped up by investments / IPOs as has been t…

I'm sorry, what the feck does "value creation" mean here? I live in a place where people are so, insanely squeezed from every angle. Wages are stagnant, prices rocketing. Where is the money to pay for this value going to come from? No one I know feels richer than they did a decade back. I've not been able to meaningfully put up my prices for a decade. People are tired and stressed and scared, particularly scared of a…

Feelings aren’t fact. A lot of data shows the doomerism is not reflected in the actual numbers and much of it has to do with rapid inflation and continued vibes.

Consumption has risen, inflation adjusted wages have risen for blue collar and white collar alike. Most social mobility has been the middle class moving into the upper middle class, not moving to the lower class.

The main thing holding people back is the housing crisis. This is orthogonal to the value creation of businesses.

Value creation is growth. If it didn’t exist the S&P would still be 42.55$.

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

#188

Post by hansmayer » Wed, May 27, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #169

hansmayer wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be the top comment. Also, I think its not that many people, including our Simon here, are not good at math. Its more like, some of them seem to be incentivised to not be cough, cough, "good at math". How else will the hype sell?

I thought my post was pretty free of hype. I said that this new revenue "Maybe even enough to start covering their costs!"

Well, your title certainly was not, in any case!

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

#189

Post by Figs » Wed, May 27, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

seanp2k2 wrote: post #141

regularfry wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bottleneck has moved from producing a thing that works to knowing that the thing was the right thing to build. The more of the latter they can take on, the fewer knowledge workers are needed at all . So rather than 5% of every knowledge worker's salary going into tokens, 100% of the knowledge worker's total employment cost goes into tokens and you get a 20x productivity boost as a theoretical minimum across those…

>The bottleneck has moved from producing a thing that works to knowing that the thing was the right thing to build I would argue that that's been the case for quite some time before AI. As an example, what innovative amazing world-changing products have Google or Meta launched in the past decade with their very high numbers of very talented and highly-compensated engineers? The issue with most big tech companies are…

> AI for product development and management would be far more impactful than automating rote coding tasks [...]

Yeah, if this stuff actually worked that well already, OpenAI et al. would just run AI CEOs and engineers. Why get some other company to pay you at all when you can automate every other company out of existence and take all the money they make?

The fact of the matter is that while the tech has some uses, it sure as hell isn't a full scale replacement and you almost always actually have to massage the input into LLMs to get anything decent back out in practice. Some CEOs and managers can learn to do this, of course, and some already are... but that quickly turns into a second full time job. A "programmer" is still needed. The job might change from mostly hand-writing C++/JS/Python to prompt engineering + some manual coding to fix all the stupid fuck-ups that the bots can't solve themselves, but you still need someone to actually prompt the bot.

When that changes, it won't just be engineers losing work; there will be no reason to even have a human CEO any more.

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

#190

Post by simonw » Wed, May 27, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #184

> but I suspect there’s a more important factor here: I think they’ve finally found product-market fit Ahhh the classic startup term that's definition is nebulous. But also, since when does any definition of product/market fit mean a product is profitable? And profitable in what sense? Unit economics? Overall company?

Oh I'm absolutely taking advantage of the fact that "product-market fit" has a bit of a nebulous meaning here.

It's a great hook to build an article around. My core point is more that April 2026 was the point when Anthropic and OpenAI finally appeared to have figured out a credible business model.