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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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the COO did not say that. The headline was deliberately misrepresenting what he said.

No, he said exactly that, if you remove the corporate sanitised language designed to not offend the Uber CTO.

I think you're putting way too much weight into what one person said in unprepared remarks at the 27 minute mark in a 32 minute podcast conversation.

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

#262
post #22

200$ per month per seat is nothing . A single 3D CAD license pack for the guys in our R&D group costs multiple thousands of dollars per seat, per month. It's about time software seats get some love too.

Sure. Is CAD going to be used by every working human?

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

#263
post #253
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most work is not coding. And also, people have it wrong… their models are not the main problem anymore. It’s the RAG

Would love to hear more about your thought about the RAG.

I think RAG is a mostly outdated concept now, it's been subsumed by the idea of a "agent harness" which is exactly what Claude Code and Claude Cowork and OpenAI Codex and Claude.ai and ChatGPT themselves have now become.

An agent harness with access to a good search tool is a much more interesting thing than 2024-era RAG systems.

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A literal example is that I can use AI to file my taxes instead of spending a weekend and hundreds of dollars to have an accountant do it for me. It costs me like $5. that 245$ delta is the value of that output to me, as long as I am confident it is correct.

I did my taxes this year too with 5.5 and 3.1

Otherwise normally costs around $800 to do, because I have a small business too.

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

#265

I find this analysis confusing. PMF for coding was likely reached some time last year. Profitability, which is different, we don’t know. The article kind of confuses both without making a strong economic case or using numbers in a compelling way. I don’t understand what the Uber case has to do with this either. The Uber COO clearly said that at least in terms of ROI he’s not seeing the results either. My take is the…

It’s not supposed to be logical, it’s an LLM evangelism blog that rarely, if ever, has any critical analysis that isn’t pro-industry. Read any/all of the other posts and you won’t find much skepticism but you will find a lot of shilling how great it all is.

I like his other posts. He's bullish on AI, which is fine. I'd like to read a mix of bearish and bullish level-headed takes from people who are subject matter experts. His technical credentials are well past discussion - I love Django, and he comes across as a pretty upbeat but level-headed guy. Certainly beats radical takes in either direction from people who have no clue what they're talking about. It's just this article that I find rather confusing.

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

#266

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 work for a tiny little company ($150MM annual rev with 9% net) and we are already looking at dropping $100k on hardware to run local models because, for us, they're "good enough." Our estimated spend for AIaaS would exceed that cost in less than a year. In a few years, there will be hardware capable of running frontier models good enough for most things at accessible prices for even tiny companies.

I’m curious: are you spending on beefy developer machines, or some kind of shared local inference server? Would be interested to know more if it’s the latter.

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

#268
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm sitting in one right now and don't see any smoldering...

lmao. I'm sitting in Hiroshima and nothing is burning

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

#269

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 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…

Pieces of concept and other prototypes have always been cheap (see hackatons). The main issue is that as soon as you’re touching customer data or modifying process they’ve paid you for, you have to be really careful. No one wants to be responsible for an outage that cost the company its biggest customer.

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. I'll also add this: within a large organization, you often need to interact with many different codebases own…

> It's easier to convince a team to sign off/review something than it is to get them to commit to the planning and eventual work.

1000x yes: you have touched on what I think is the single biggest factor here, that is the humongous value of POCs. they are gnarly to build without agents, and so we used to have to get everyone on board so we didn't get screwed in performance reviews, which was monumental task because that means convincing very busy PMs who have a lot on their plate and dont want to take risks on things they don't understand, and now it's like "can we scale this out" and you have a very nicely formatted proposal and POC. It de-risks things very quickly

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