Live data from Hacker News

AI is a business model stress test

dri.es

331–340 of 361 posts

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#331

I know for a fact that all SOTA models have linux source code in them, intentionally or not which means that they should follow the GPL license terms and open-source part of the models which have created derivative works out of it. yes, this is indirectly hinting that during training the GPL tainted code touches every single floating point value in a model making it derivative work - even the tokenizer isn't immune t…

When you say “in” them, are you referring to their training data, or their model weights, or the infrastructure required to run them?

GPL can be considered like a virus, something based on GPL licensed code (unless explicitely excluded by the license) is now GPL licensed so the 'injected' training data becomes GPL licensed which means that created model weights from them in theory should also become GPL licensed.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't that simple. One of the implicit tradeoffs you make buying SaaS is that the overall cost of evolution (development and ongoing maintenance) is subsidized across all of the investment resources and customer base of the vendor. With CRM in particular, ecosystem integration is one of the heaviest buildouts there is because each point solution integration can very significantly in complexity and is also where th…

100%. As an EA you always examine and explain the trade-offs to the business. In many cases that trade-off will remain and buy vs build leans towards buying. My point is the decision point has moved. Where five years ago there’d be zero discussion of building internally, those discussions are going to be very different. I believe many tech oriented companies will pull SaaS capabilities inside and as GenAI developer t…

A view I have which feels controversial these days is that GenAI code tools are a net asset to code being held by entities that "should" hold them (ie workloads where code is a profit center not a cost center) and a net liability to the opposite. SaaS is a very squishy word and includes a lot things which are more accurate to call tech enabled services; Salesforce being one of the best examples (but you could say the same about many ERPs).

Maybe my biggest disagreement with your view is I think it is simultaneously far too conservative and far too aggressive at the same time. Where there was previously a decision about buy vs build, I disagree with the belief that many tech oriented companies will pull SaaS capabilities inside as GenAI developer tools improve because the cost of "build" is actually not going to get comparatively cheaper compared to the risk of "buying" - if anything, the risk of "building" internally with GenAI tooling that you were considering "buying" is significantly higher unless you are prepared to truly own it, that is go head to head with the entire rest of the market focuses on building and selling that tool as their full-time corporate focus. The actual risk of owning a tool internally making allowances for GenAI tooling is a lot higher than folks realize because GenAI tooling has a lot more risk of creating vibeslop and the only way to avoid that is to be dedicated to producing that tool as one's full time job and serving the needs of the entire market that needs it in that process. This is impossible to do with an internal tool.

The flip side of that same realization is why I also believe that your view is too conservative. The company that might be more empowered to consider building Salesforce internally with better tooling is not competing with Salesforce -- they are competing with the market that is going to /takedown/ Salesforce and a future version of themselves that would've used the future successor to Salesforce. Such a company is probably not in the business of building and selling CRMs although they are likely in the business of using such a CRM. The risk of making that conflation would be to stretch existing resources thin and turn the high interest credit card of tech debt and turn it into a payday loan with GenAI vibeslop.

I do not view GenAI as a democratizer. I view it as an accelerator with the capabilities to accelerate not just "winners take all" dynamics for the top companies that invest enough to avoid vibeslop, but "losers lose all" dynamics in the supply chain for everyone else who tries to wing it to capitalize before inevitably losing against future incumbents, or try in vain to turn a legacy firm into an innovator before inevitably losing against tech debt.

Everyone likes to believe they'll be able to use these great tools to become a future incumbent. But becoming a future incumbent is something that is very hard to do unless your org + book of business + funding + tools is better than someone else's org + book of business + funding + tools. That is why I don't think it actually changes the buy vs build decision that much; the decision should probably still be to buy, it's just changing the question of what exactly should be bought.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#333

This goes way deeper than open source businesses. Imagine I’m a company just big enough to entertain adopting Salesforce for CRM. It’s a big chunk of money, but our sales can absorb the pain. With GenAI as an enterprise architect, one of the options I’m now recommending is to create a custom CRM for our business and skip the bloated enterprise SaaS platform. We can gather CRM requirements fast, build fast, and delive…

>> Our sales people can make feature requests I can tell you with near-100% certainty. This isn’t what you want to happen. Disaster in the making. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. There is very little competitive advantage to be gained from this type of effort in most companies.

Agreed. We went from “internalise your core business and contract what doesn't give you an edge” to “actually just build everything in-house with AI”. Maybe that’ll be the better option in the end, but for now it looks like tons of wasted effort. 100x developers working on the wrong thing.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. As an EA you always examine and explain the trade-offs to the business. In many cases that trade-off will remain and buy vs build leans towards buying. My point is the decision point has moved. Where five years ago there’d be zero discussion of building internally, those discussions are going to be very different. I believe many tech oriented companies will pull SaaS capabilities inside and as GenAI developer t…

A view I have which feels controversial these days is that GenAI code tools are a net asset to code being held by entities that "should" hold them (ie workloads where code is a profit center not a cost center) and a net liability to the opposite. SaaS is a very squishy word and includes a lot things which are more accurate to call tech enabled services; Salesforce being one of the best examples (but you could say the…

Excellent response. I think my position is that I don’t vibe code and most senior/deeply experienced dev/arch’s are doing something else.

We’re not coding. We’re orchestrating well constructed applications that follow proven principles (DDD, behavior focused, packaged business capabilities, behavior unit testing).

We’re extracting high value from GenAI.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don’t like big corps getting ever richer by hiding behind copyright. How about my books? I’ve published a few, make maybe $500 a month from them. Is it fine for the LLMs to rip them off?

> Is it fine for the LLMs to rip them off? Yes. It is good (and IMO should be encouraged) that derivative works can are made, even if it would make you less money.

Now you’ve taken away the incentive for me to write more, or for any new author to write a book. Goodbye books I guess.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSS has come a long way. I used to include Bootstrap in all of my projects, effectively by default. Now it's obsolete. Especially with Grid and Flex. Do people even know what they can do with CSS these days? https://lyra.horse/blog/2025/08/you-dont-need-js/

FWIW the radio button vedi vidi vici example has the round radio buttons overlaid with the text on Firefox.

> I’ve made the radio buttons half-visible in the demo for clarity, but with the opacity: 0 they would not actually be visible.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW the radio button vedi vidi vici example has the round radio buttons overlaid with the text on Firefox.

> I’ve made the radio buttons half-visible in the demo for clarity, but with the opacity: 0 they would not actually be visible.

Okay, thanks. That was highly unintuitive when skimming.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not irony so much as the reason. BYO semantics (using React most likely) It is style assembler.

It is horrible and I would never choose to use it.

Fine, it is a contraversial tool.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it fine for the LLMs to rip them off? Yes. It is good (and IMO should be encouraged) that derivative works can are made, even if it would make you less money.

Now you’ve taken away the incentive for me to write more, or for any new author to write a book. Goodbye books I guess.

I'm more than happy to read from authors writing freedom-respecting works instead, thanks.

Although getting rid of the copyright/IP nonsense for works that already exist is a big win on its own.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you’ve taken away the incentive for me to write more, or for any new author to write a book. Goodbye books I guess.

I'm more than happy to read from authors writing freedom-respecting works instead, thanks. Although getting rid of the copyright/IP nonsense for works that already exist is a big win on its own.

> I'm more than happy to read from authors writing freedom-respecting works instead, thanks.

You missed the point entirely.

Nobody will write books when big companies will just rip them off and take the profits.

Post reply on HN