Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 1001 posts

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

#121

Post by NortySpock »

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…

Cool! Thanks for the details, and your blog posts are usually interesting food for thought, so thank you for them too!

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

#123

Post by swatcoder »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #60
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…

Source on 200 million knowledge workers worldwide? My understanding is that it's just above 1 billion. I dont think a billion subscriptions at $1000/yr is out of the question but it might take a decade to get roiling

You're suggesting that 1 in 8 people worldwide, including every one from infants and the elderly, are knowledge workers. Are you sure that's what you mean?

I'm not even sure that 1 in 8 people I know would qualify as a knowledge worker, let alone a knowledge worker that might profoundly benefit from on-the-horizon AI. And I'm in a highly skewed population.

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

#124

Post by specproc »

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…

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 technology everyone keeps telling them will make them redundant.

There is no rising tide lifting all boats, just most of us drowning whilst a few whizz past in their yachts.

I honestly hope these guys faceplant ASAP. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.

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

#125

Post by regularfry »

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…

If it were me I'd be asking "How long would it have taken me to do that, and what's the rate I'd have been charging for the work I would have been doing otherwise?"

Personally, I've probably spent $60 or so on OpenRouter in the last month or so and got a working project out of it that it would probably have taken me a fortnight to knock together (which is inevitably an under-estimate because it covered things I'd have to learn but K2.5/6 already knew). There's an orders-of-magnitude gap there.

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

#126

Post by ArcHound »

xoac wrote: post #84
browningstreet wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

somehow the invisible hand of the market is also blind af

Makes sense if you think about it: if all photons pass through you (invisible) then you can't capture them to get info (blind).

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

#127

Post by naravara »

rootusrootus wrote: post #73
HDThoreaun wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source on 200 million knowledge workers worldwide? My understanding is that it's just above 1 billion. I dont think a billion subscriptions at $1000/yr is out of the question but it might take a decade to get roiling

A billion? Really? At 200M you’re already including a lot of people that stretch the definition of knowledge worker.

A lot of those ‘edge cases’ in the definition of “knowledge worker” are probably the stuff that’s most likely to have significant parts of the work augmented or replaced by AI agents. Like, call-centers are almost certainly going to get turned over in a big way. It’s not like the median tier-1 support operator just reading off a script is much better than an LLM anyway.

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

#128

Post by hansmayer »

> Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter

No, its more like their own leak to WSJ and according to Ed Zitron -> seems to be heavily engineered via non-GAAP practices such as counting potential, but not realised revenue as actual revenue - the stuff for which I would be arrested if I did it at my company.

Also it appears according to Ed's analysis - strangely they seem to be projecting only that one quarter as profitable - potentially to calm the investors ahead of the IPO. Investor fraud anyone?

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

#129

Post by AlotOfReading »

avree wrote: post #76
realo wrote: 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.

CATIA licenses which are the most expensive I've seen are roughly $600/month per user. Where are you seeing "thousands of dollars per seat"?

CFD might reasonably be considered part of CAD and something like ansys costs about as much as catia. Still only doubles it though.

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

#130

Post by simonw »

827a wrote: post #108

[flagged]

Fun fact: the $20/month subscription fee for ChatGPT Pro - which set the standard for at least a couple of years - really was an arbitrary decision made based on a Google form: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/12/nick-turley/
Post reply on HN