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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

#191

Post by mtrifonov »

They certainly have, but it relies entirely on the assistant frame, which is a problem in and of itself for the trillion-dollar economics.

Anthropic and OpenAI have shown people want a tool for task offloading, driving predictable token consumption and justifying the math, so long as users stay in that dynamic.

However, knowledge workers using these tools daily are getting exhausted with them. Outputs come out polished but hollow. Talking to a frictionless, frame-completing model all day drains you.

If user behavior drifts away from assistant usage because of that, per-token math implodes. The valuations we're hearing about all the time rely on usage compounding daily. The fatigue is a timer running against that compound.

Anthropic's Constitution is the closest hedge out there, I think. Installing an identity structure into the model through training. But it's still assistant-first, so the fix there is only partial.

I've spent the last year running a product that flips the architecture so identity is primary and the assistant role is secondary. Same frontier models, completely different conversational quality. The fatigue property doesn't really show up.

Whichever labs figure out how to install real identity natively in the weights are going to be the ones with PMF in the next phase.

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

#192

Post by OtherShrezzing »

regularfry wrote: post #107
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…

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

“There’s more capital than good ideas to fund” has been a complaint from the likes of A16z & other VCs for a long time now. It’s why we ended up with stuff like NFTs getting funded.

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

#193

Post by deaton »

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…

Thats the thing; the "increase in productivity" isn't being felt by the general public, the end user. If your "increase in productivity" just means more money being shifted around at the corporate level then it is meaningless.

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

#194

Post by stared »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #155
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're talking about a world where you need 5% of every knowledge workers salary to go into tokens. They are assuming ~10% global GDP growth instead of ~3%. You probably don't need the same %s if the pie grows a ton. I'm highly skeptical we get that growth, but if you aren't, it makes it easier to digest.

And yet the job everyone loves to hate, the humble "burger flipper", continues to resist automation yet command minimum wage labor rates. This future of either being a CEO of a company consisting primarily of AI agents building some monthly subscription-based solution to some trivial digital chores OR manual labor that isn't [yet] fiscally viable to automate seems quite bleak. We'd also need a ton of robot technician…

This would be a Bladerunner future Pope Leo XIV warned against (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265206), though in different words.

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

#195

Post by sowbug »

zero_shift wrote: post #100
sowbug wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The high-risk side of that bet would need to win more like a lifetime supply of Twix. But in a post-scarcity nirvana, everyone already has that. So sure, you're on at even money. See you in two years.

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

#196

Post by _verandaguy »

With respect to Simon, whose writing I've usually agreed with in the past and whose insights I've liked: this is a bad take that overlooks the extent to which corporations are imposing the use of AI on employees, and in particular ICs, who make up a majority of the AI-using workforce by headcount.

Many of us are either openly having our performance reviews tied to AI use, especially at larger enterprises. Whether that's measured by sheer token count or just "how many of your tasks are you using AI for these days" (combined with the implication that question carries at many orgs which are heavily invested in AI).

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

#197

Post by simonw »

hansmayer wrote: post #151
browningstreet wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Funny you should mention Uber. What was it their COO said recently about the AI costs?

I quoted exactly what they said in my piece, under the heading "The AI-failure stories around this are pretty thin": https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/#th...

> But then you sometimes go and talk to your senior engineering leaders and you’re saying, OK, how many projects that were on the cutting room floor got moved above the line because of the productivity gains because 25% of our code commits were via Claude Code last quarter?

> That link is not there yet, right? I think maybe implicitly there’s more that is getting shipped. But it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, OK, now we’re actually producing like 25% more useful consumer features, right? And that line is hard to draw.

That's pretty weak sauce. I don't think that justifies the headlines that came out of it, personally.

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

#198

Post by roncesvalles »

regularfry wrote: post #107
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…

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…

Why do you think of knowledge workers as a fungible commodity?

What makes you think the people who used to build (or would have built) software will switch into the industry of "knowing that the thing was the right thing to build", as opposed to something cooler like surgery, city planning or experimental physics? The roles within a tech company are not the only jobs in the world.

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

#199

Post by aspenmartin »

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…

I don't know, if you've ever tried to build something at companies of that scale you run into incredibly boring problems "what data table do I need for X" and "who is the right person to reach out to for Y" and "they aren't answering me I guess I'll have to escalate"

I don't think there is any shortage of great ideas at these companies, they are just extremely bloated. And I don't think its something like indecision or bad PMs, it's "we have a finite amount of time and resources so we need to be conservative but also not too conservative"

If you have AI systems that can simply build out POCs in days, backtest on real data, show reliable results and numbers, you get a suite of product options you were never able to get before. If you have coding agents that can speed up implementation, you can build more stuff and choose the things that stick.

It changes the cost/benefit calculus of the entire business. I think you are exactly right in that: PMs/leadership are by their nature orchestration machines. Other roles are as well, but I think PM's are at a particular advantage here in that it will be quite awhile I would expect before core product decisions and creativity can be delegated to an AI, but not quite awhile until virtually everything that they're blocked on (legal approvals, POCs, wire frames, etc etc etc) will become less and less of a blocker

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

#200

Post by jrochkind1 »

whatshisface wrote: post #142
layer8 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs? It sounds like the economy would largely reduce to the small minority class of independently wealthy people.

There were no knowledge workers in the middle ages.

Relatively few anyway. Monks (who wrote and edited books and managed libraries, and also taught), artists and musicians, bookkeepers/treasury/exchequer, scribes/chancery (who were the administrators of the kingdoms), and bankers all existed in European "middle ages". But a significantly smaller part of economy/society compared to "western world" now, yes.
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