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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

#271

Post by WarmWash »

jeffreygoesto wrote: post #174
adithyassekhar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked claude to generate a frontend and it made the same template. Same san serif and serif fonts together. Same colors. Same typography. Same layout and animations even. It’s wild how similar it is. No not similar it’s the same damn thing.

It produces the "most average" web design unless you really prompt your way out, isn't it? If you don't care enough to prompt, Claude does not care to be individual.

Technically from claude's POV, it's one individual copied millions of times. All claudes are clones.

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

#272

Post by slopinthebag »

simonw wrote: post #4
spprashant wrote: post #2

So it largely sounds like many more people will be able to write software - and will use AI to do it. Existing software engineers will continue to automate their tasks away like they always did, but perhaps at a faster rate. The impact of AI in other fields seems to be muted.

I think it is applicable to a much wider range of knowledge work, but it's also harder to apply there. Software development has the huge advantage that mistakes and hallucinations are very easy to spot: the software works or it doesn't. Spotting errors in a research report or legal brief is a whole lot harder! But... non-software professionals spend a huge amount of their time on tasks that can be safely automated -…

> Software development has the huge advantage that mistakes and hallucinations are very easy to spot: the software works or it doesn't.

Do we not care about code quality, maintainability, performance, extensibility, or understandability anymore? Honest question, not a gotcha, it's just previously getting software to pass all the tests was a small part of what we would consider "working" or perhaps "good" software. Maybe that's different now with LLMs, idk. Maybe we need automated checks for these things as well, like not compiling until the code quality is good enough to let the agent finish it's loop.

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

#273

Post by brokencode »

simonw wrote: post #54
brokencode wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usage costs will come down with better hardware. Hardware is improving rapidly each generation.

That trend held true for the past three years, but it doesn't feel as safe to me now. But memory costs are going way up. And both OpenAI and Anthropic bumped up the price of their frontier models in April.

Yeah, it’s called supply and demand. Demand for memory went way up suddenly. Now supply is going up rapidly as companies try to cash in on that demand.

Supply will eventually catch up with demand. Then the prices will come back down.

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

#274

Post by aspenmartin »

skydhash wrote: post #269
aspenmartin wrote: post #199

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…

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.

Yes, but at scaled companies, where building a simple POC hooked into real systems is nowhere close to easy. To the point where it means that you might as well just do the full thing. That's where the enterprise spend and the impact is.

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

#275

Post by nonethewiser »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #246
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 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.

What models? Last I tried different local modals there was a pretty big difference from frontier.

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

#276

Post by WhrRTheBaboons »

simonw wrote: post #169
hansmayer wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be the top comment. Also, I think its not that many people, including our Simon here, are not good at math. Its more like, some of them seem to be incentivised to not be cough, cough, "good at math". How else will the hype sell?

I thought my post was pretty free of hype. I said that this new revenue "Maybe even enough to start covering their costs!"

that statement is pretty high on hype relative to the actual financials though

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

#277

Post by beambot »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #141
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…

>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…

Google & Meta are illustrative of late-stage capitalism -- it's all about distribution, not innovation. Their job is (mostly) to just acquire the products that have passed the gauntlet, then scale up their monetization through their distribution-focused machine. The same dynamic plays out in virtually every industry (not just tech).

You'll find that most internal "innovation" teams are just lip service. In most cases, the "mothership" will be incapable of reproducing true innovation -- from a statistical perspective, culture perspective (mega corps are anti-scrappy; internal politics), and motivation perspective (startups aren't 9-to-5). It's much easier to have big M&A budgets, a VC arm, and some handwavvy internal innovation group.

Every now and again, you'll get real innovations (Waymo, transistors, GUIs), but even those have a spotty track record of commercialization when created internally.

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

#278

Post by supern0va »

hansmayer wrote: post #128

> 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…

>according to Ed Zitron

So, unsourced vibes from a shady guy whose entire empire is built on being against AI?

I genuinely don't know how folks can continuously buy into anything he has to say after that Wired piece. The credibility there is seriously lacking.

Please, continue to be skeptical of the labs. But people need to stop talking about this dude as if he's the Holy Grail of the anti-AI movement. It's going to blow up in y'alls faces.

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

#279

Post by mirekrusin »

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…

Now try to take back llms from developers and see what happens.

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

#280

Post by sampli »

hansmayer wrote: post #243
pier25 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'll believe it when I see it. Revenue is increasing but so are their costs. Back in 2024 their CEO claimed training costs would rise to $10-100B in the next years. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Their CEO claims a lot of wild shit. He claimed in January this year, that in about 2-3 weeks from this moment, i.e. "in 6 months" that AI will be doing all of SWE work. Lets hold these people accountable for a change!

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