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

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

#961

Post by lofaszvanitt » Thu, May 28, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

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…

Doesn't matter, it will be pushed and forced down people's throats because someone invisible thinks it's the new way forward. And for that you need more money for NVDA and the like, and now people have to be made cultists in order to let the money flow in.

Same happened and happens in gaming. The gamers "invested" into NVDA by eating all the bullshit about ray tracing and the like. And they kept buying all the crappy 1000$+ gpus because youtubers said that the extra 1000 dollars worth those +15 fps plus the ray tracing....

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

#962

Post by supern0va » Thu, May 28, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

duped wrote: post #487

supern0va wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must admit that I am going to find it fascinating when we hit the point where it becomes nearly impossible to deny the efficacy of these tools. I have straight up had people, even in real life, suggest that I'm lying about my productivity gains or what I'm able to accomplish with them. Like, I understand the reasonable arguments against (I even agree with a few), but it's clear that some people have fully inserted…

I don't deny their efficacy, I'm saying that there's a massive crop of grifters and liars building them and using them.

What is the motivation for us users to lie about our experiences? It's to the degree now that people simply refuse to believe that I'm honestly describing my experiences with these tools?

I understand the motivations for the labs to lie, but what do you think mine is?

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

#963

Post by kkarpkkarp » Thu, May 28, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

mock-possum wrote: post #789

kkarpkkarp wrote: post #783

> I currently subscribe to the $100/month Max plan from Anthropic and the $100/month Pro plan from OpenAI. If you are a heavy user of coding agents these plans are a fantastic deal. Guys, what - in your opinion - does "heavy user" mean? I thought I am heavy user (I am using AI to code every day 8hr a day + side projects) but 20 USD/month Cursor plan is always enough. What should I be doing to extend my license to hig…

How many sessions are you running simultaneously, how careful are you being about token consumption and context window management, and what level of reasoning are you using (with which models?) 8hrs a day doesn’t really mean anything without a lot additional qualifiers. fwiw lately I’ve been straddling 2 or 3 claude codes and one Claude cowork, primarily on 4.7 with high effort - the company’s paying for it, so I’m d…

at most I run 2-3, but usually one.

About token consumption and models: that's the thing. I hear this question often, but my answer is always the same. As I am Cursor user, I run it always in Auto mode (so Cursor decides which model to use, I don't even know which is in use).

Sometimes I switch from Auto to defined model but I found it quickly triggers "you are out of tokens" notices so nope: I stick to Auto :) 20 usd / month and that's it

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

#964

Post by arcanemachiner » Thu, May 28, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

mock-possum wrote: post #797

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…

Do you have a good source to refer to, to map out migration from Claude code to a cheap setup using small open source models like you’re describing? I’d certainly like to experience how good they’ve gotten.

Download OpenCode and try OpenCode Go for a month. It's $5 USD for the first month. This will give you a taste of what the open model experience is like.

If you want to try the smaller models, just use them on an API service first. There is no model you can run locally (for less than $100k) that compares to GLM 5.1 though.

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

#965

Post by r0b05 » Thu, May 28, 2026, 6:20 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…

Why do need to go with the best model for coding?

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

#966

Post by londons_explore » Thu, May 28, 2026, 6:22 PM UTC

an0malous wrote: post #688

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…

> 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? They know they do not and that’s why they’re all trying to IPO right now, so they can pass the bag to consumer investors

The printing press was good enough for product market fit back in the 1700's. But now it isn't.

Last year's AI models will be the same. Do you want to spend 3 hours prompting free AI to fix your code or 1 hour prompting AI you paid $20 for?

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

#967

Post by londons_explore » Thu, May 28, 2026, 6:25 PM UTC

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.

Deepseek v4 pro is damn close to Claude 4.6, and whilst you'll pay quite a lot for a rig able to run it, it is open source.

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

#968

Post by mbesto » Thu, May 28, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #510

mbesto wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. How so? What's specifically changed? We still don't know what their unit economics are and everything you've documented is basically speculation at this point.

> What's specifically changed? 1. Both Anthropic and OpenAI significantly increased the prices of their latest models. They're clearly not trying to offer the lowest-price-possible to drum up demand any more. 2. Both Anthropic and OpenAI no longer let enterprise companies buy discounted almost-all-you-can-eat subscriptions. Those big enterprises are now paying full API prices. 3. According to reasonably well-sourced…

> And I didn't even say "profitable", I said "credible business model".

What's the difference? I would assume a business model that rewards profit (and therefore can sustain) would be considered credible...and not much else.

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

#969

Post by brookst » Thu, May 28, 2026, 7:05 PM UTC

materielle wrote: post #211

whatshisface wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a few thoughts: - The publicly available information about how inference costs compare to training costs is conflicted. EEs involved in datacenters talk about power usage spikes during training runs as if they were a major factor in the designs, but academic papers discussing cost-optimal scaling confidently treat inference-time compute as a major factor. - On the side of the balance indicating that training…

I'm about to leave a shallow comment, but I am a bit skeptical of the supposed drop in inference costs. If AI labs saw a lot of potential there, they'd surely be bragging about it non-stop? So the fact that publicly available information is conflicted is probably a sign that at the very least, the numbers aren't amazing. Yes I know there's no evidence and this is lazy reasoning. But there's probably a bit of truth to…

What other companies brag about lowered costs? Isn’t that just a complicated way of asking customers to demand lower prices?

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

#970

Post by overgard » Thu, May 28, 2026, 7:08 PM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #945

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…

If you're an investor in Anthropic you probably _don't want them_ to be profitable right now. They should be spending literally 100% of their money and then some on training and compute.

If the main improvements are coming from improving the harnesses and other things around the AI, I can't help but wonder if the incremental improvement in each model is worth the training costs. I know these companies are in a "race" (where's the finish line, though?), but personally I don't see a huge difference between like Opus 4.7 vs 4.6 vs 4.5, and the newer Codex seems very expensive for the gains it theoretically provides.