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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

#201

Post by cryo32 »

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…

This is never going to materialise. It’s dead in under 2 years.

The market is shrinking and saturated already and it’s not because of AI gains but geopolitical instability and supply chain issues, some of which are caused by AI spending and stupid ass PE firms refocusing on AI supply chains.

Only our pensions and futures burning.

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

#202

Post by deaton »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #117
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…

I thought Anthropic and OpenAI's combined CapEx has been source: https://isaiprofitable.com/

Maybe so far, but they've committed to well over a trillion in future capex.

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

#203

Post by mikeocool »

rvz wrote: post #153
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.

> Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs? They do not care unless these companies can get a bailout. UBI only exists for companies that are too big to fail. Case in point, 2008 and SVB when there was too much money on the line. One of the AI companies attempted to guarantee themselves a way for the government to bail them out if they were close to defaulting on the debt from…

SVB didn't get bailed out, their investors and creditors were wiped out. You could argue depositors were bailed out -- as they took the undue risk of keeping more than $250k in a single bank (though as part of a requirement for getting a loan from SVB, you had to have your operating accounts with them. So lots of companies had no choice, as SVB was one of the few banks that would lend to them).

Arguably, the main impact of securing SVB depositors above the $250k limit is that it prevented thousands of people from being laid off that week, as their employers wouldn't have had the money to make payroll the following Wednesday.

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

#204

Post by krupan »

simonw wrote: post #104
NortySpock wrote: post #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 m…

Claude Code: Input tokens: 52,545,485 Output tokens: 5,767,253 Cache create tokens: 5,112,029 Cache read tokens: 1,475,069,465 Total tokens: 1,538,494,232 Total cost: $1,199.79 OpenAI Codex: Input tokens: 52,598,013 Output tokens: 4,681,867 Reasoning output: 2,091,063 Cached input tokens: 1,153,844,864 Total tokens: 1,211,124,744 Total cost: $980.37 I'm confident I got value out of OpenAI - I've been mainly on Codex…

Are you saying that the software you wrote using those tools generated enough revenue to cover the $2000?

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

#205

Post by kys11 »

roncesvalles wrote: post #198
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…

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.

[dead]

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

#206

Post by Andrex »

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…

> For coding you always want to go with the best model in the category

Will this always be true? There will never be an event horizon/point of diminishing returns where something not-bleeding-edge is "good enough" for 51%+ of users?

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

#207

Post by kmac_ »

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…

Producing a thing has always been cheap since personal computers existed. From mail-order software companies' times to SaaS times, producing a sellable MVP was an initial cost that is relatively small compared to the later cost of expansion and maintenance. Marketing and selling was and still is the hardest part.

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

#208

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#209

Post by deaton »

sowbug wrote: post #195
zero_shift wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Theres no reason to believe, based on recent trends, that AI would lead us to a post-scarcity world, even if it could do all of our jobs better and cheaper.

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

#210

Post by Planktonne »

jgbuddy wrote: post #57
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…

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…

> There will be new value created by these models which people are happy to pay for which simply did not exist at all before

What sort of new value, and why will people pay for it from someone else rather than prompting for it themselves?

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