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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

#881

Post by kazga »

mold_aid wrote: post #875
MichaelDickens wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being pedantic, but I don't want to lose the meaning of the term: "AI psychosis" doesn't refer to someone who thinks AI is really good. It refers to someone who develops symptoms of psychosis from talking to an LLM, e.g. believing they have developed a new Grand Unified Theory of physics.

I don't know, "workaday professionals will find $200/month a particularly good deal, such that there will be widespread adoption" sounds either credulous enough to support the diagnosis or dishonest enough to dismiss. I am a "knowledge worker" who is doin' fine, has a lot of templated written work/report writing, and there is no way in hell I am justifying that kind of spending to my boss or my family.

"I firmly believe this technology will create business value" is so obviously and categorically different from "Humanity has birthed a silicon god that I have also developed romantic feelings for" that I'm not sure if your comment is even trying to be in good faith

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

#882

Post by ralphael »

overgard wrote: post #482

Anthropic isn't actually profitable from what I'm reading, a discount briefly pushed them into the black. This guy makes the case well: https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle... I'm skeptical that their current price raise is sufficient, and I'm also skeptical that most users/businesses will accept more significant price raises that will be needed. Especially for individual users, $200 a month i…

this - I'm wondering why this isn't getting picked up more in the analysis? Its an accounting trick, which is not sustainable. Time will tell.

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

#883

Post by damnitbuilds »

doug_durham wrote: post #356
simplyluke wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's the part that just seems to be wildly under-discussed to me. If open source models are ~3-6 months behind SOTA, and ~opus4.6 capabilities are good-enough for product market fit, do the frontier labs have half a decade to catch up on their prior burn? AI cost ballooning faster than companies can afford is becoming a very common topic in my circles right now. The era of "I'll pay infinitely more for margin…

Open source models that you can run locally are much more than 3 to 6 months behind. 6 months was the November inflection for Claude. No open source model is as good as Claude Opus 4.6.

To be relevant to this discussion, models running on reasonably-priced local hardware do not have to be as good as the best.

They just have to be useful enough that companies don't need the best.

They are.

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

#884

Post by AYBABTME »

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…

[dead]

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

#885

Post by afavour »

nozzlegear wrote: post #748
aspenmartin wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet it’s backed up by adoption across the industry

MongoDB was once backed up by adoption across the industry. Or for a more recent example, blockchain took off like wildfire across the industry before ultimately fizzling out in all but the most niche applications. Not saying this trend will do the same, just that the industry adopting something doesn't guarantee its success.

I don’t think those are really comparable. The blockchain was trendy hype, relatively few companies actually adopted it. Where did Netflix use the blockchain? Google?

By comparison almost all tech companies I know have leaned heavily into AI.

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

#886

Post by PunchyHamster »

Gigachad wrote: post #605
PunchyHamster wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assuming once they start squeezing people won't just go to deepseek or other cheaper competition > 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. And most research shows people far over-estimating their own gains. Once companies star…

There's a lot of workslop pumping the numbers. People can generate a 300 page PDF in a tiny fraction of the time it would have taken, but now the report is full of mistakes and fluff, and the stuff that would have been learned and caught in the process of making the report is now not happening.

and the recipient pulls that into LLM and generate summary.

It's lossy compression for thoughts at this point

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

#887

Post by smrtinsert »

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…

Let's skip to the part where they put the taxpayer on the hook for a bailout as an industry since they integrated everywhere with big promises

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

#888

Post by vidarh »

plaidfuji wrote: post #693
aspenmartin wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I also find confusing though is that folks seem to ignore trajectory which is maybe the biggest lede to bury. As Simon says, we have had "good enough" coding agents for 6 months, that is a blink of an eye, and at my company my job has now completely changed. It's almost like a dream. And that's just one inflection point. We've had several and there are many more on the horizon. So while I could be convinced that…

There may be additional major leaps forward, and there may not. I kind of struggle to imagine what the next step actually is. Certainly there will be improvements in performance (speed) and cost. But at a point you reach a barrier where the limiting factor is the specificity of the human prompt and our ability to manage all the code we’re generating. Somewhat oversimplifying; writing software and building apps was a…

I am currently eating lunch. Meanwhile Claude is triaging and writing reproducers for 70+ tickets nobody has had time to look at. Next it will attempt to fix them. I have not read the tickets. I will not look at the code until there are review ready PRs and a code review bot have done the first pass.

In other words, most of the prompting will also go away.

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

#889

Post by jreynar »

I may be biased because I work on an AI powered enterprise productivity product, but while I agree they have PMF right now, I wonder whether people's use will evolve in ways that undercut the current PMF. Chatting with an assistant is great if there's no product with tailored UI available that also has the AI capabilities. But once there is, I suspect people may switch, or more importantly enterprises may switch because they'll get the benefits of AI without the clunkiness of a chat only interface. We may see another DOS -> GUI-like shift.

More specialized products will consume tokens but their builders will be incented to optimize token use and switch models as costs and capabilities change. And if search engines become more AI capable, and Google is clearly striving for this, then they may have pressure from two sides that could squeeze the number of use cases for AI chat. AI coding isn't going anywhere and nor is the need for AI in general but I wonder if the products will have to evolve significantly to maintain the current levels of PMF. And then there's the question of profitability...

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

#890

Post by shimman »

aspenmartin wrote: post #639
shimman wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That leaders are completely fine with impoverishing vast swaths of American workers because of "progress?"

I’m so curious: let’s say you’re the president or the CEO of a major tech corporation building frontier AI systems. What are your directives?

I would never be in this position because I'm not an anti-human extremist that wants to hoard wealth and misallocate capital.
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