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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

#741

Post by no-name-here »

RevEng wrote: post #733

I usually agree with Simon but I think he is overlooking an important factor. There is a lot of AI usage happening not because it shows benefits, but because the business has mandated its ubiquitous use. Companies having dashboards for token usage and rewarding people for using more tokens is a real thing. I just spoke with someone today who works at Microsoft and they are required to use AI for all of their work - t…

I think token leaderboards are idiotic, however… many companies are requiring AI use, with by far the most likely reason being that they truly believe AI-assisted development gets (or will after the time needed to get employees acclimated) better returns.

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

#742

Post by ggttk »

aspenmartin wrote: post #644
binary0010 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I'm an engineer (20 years most in games/graphics industry) and only use it for code. I've been using glm 5.1 this week a lot. I went in expecting another "decent" but not really "up to standard" open source model. I highly doubt I'll ever use Claude again. I think you are wrong about Claude being any significant level better

Well I think there are a multitude of harder measurements that would disagree with you, but ultimately there is absolutely a use case for cheaper open models (or even cheaper tiers of proprietary models) and in fact the unsolved optimization everyone is trying to get to is how much spend to use for a given task. But there will always be a market, especially in enterprise, for the best performance there is to offer

Why are you boosting so hard? Lmao either you’re a paid poster or you own stock in a frontier firm. Which one?

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

#743

Post by [deleted] »

aspenmartin wrote: post #236
aerhardt wrote: post #132

I find this analysis confusing. PMF for coding was likely reached some time last year. Profitability, which is different, we don’t know. The article kind of confuses both without making a strong economic case or using numbers in a compelling way. I don’t understand what the Uber case has to do with this either. The Uber COO clearly said that at least in terms of ROI he’s not seeing the results either. My take is the…

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…

[deleted]

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

#744

Post by simonw »

m3kw9 wrote: post #737
troyastorino wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tokens do have a clearly calculable intrinsic cost. There's the marginal cost of production (i.e. the inference cost) and the amortized R&D cost that goes into the model producing them. Yes, value is hard to calculate, but luckily market pricing mechanisms exist exactly for this purpose. There isn't a better number to use than what people are willing to pay for them. So he's saying that on an enterprise plan, he'd be…

Enterprises also use 200$ plans, they are not that stupid. They add a spill over API key for over usage.

OpenAI and Anthropic won't let them any more. Once you get above a certain size (I believe 150 seats) they push you onto the enterprise plans.

I don't believe you have the option to keep with the $200/month flat rate subscriptions any more. I'd be happy to be convinced otherwise.

(I dug into this a bit more and couldn't find anything in their consumer terms that say "you cannot use this personal account if your company has more than X people", so I imagine the pressure is more that your big company's purchasing department really doesn't like managing hundreds of individual subscriptions as opposed to a single, stable, predictable negotiated contract.)

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

#745

Post by kopirgan »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #248
materielle wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why on earth would AI labs be bragging about how little the product they sell actually costs them to make? You don't want to do anything that reduces it's perceived value to the user, that might make them less willing to pay for it. Also, inference costs are bound to go way down with more optimized architectures. GPUs are fundamentally not great at inference. No platform where the weights are streamed from a large po…

Went to that URL asked one question - "how is this different from other AI" and it took 598/6144 tokens, not sure what that means.

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

#746

Post by listless »

jeremyjh wrote: post #610
doug_durham wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GLM-5.1 isn't just as good. It is no match for Opus running in Claude Code. Please try it yourself. Open source models are about a year behind at least.

This is profoundly misinformed. I use all three of those models regularly and the difference is just not that big anymore. GLM 5.1 is at least as good as Opus 4.5 - when it’s my dime it’s the primary model I use and switch to GPT 5.5 for planning and review but it’s also very capable at those things. If I had to pay API rates for everything there is no question I would only use GLM 5.1 (and Minimax for exploration ta…

I would agree here. And in my experience Qwen 27B and Deepseek v4 are also extremely good.

None of them are quite opus, but they are damned close and a no brainer if you care at all about cost.

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

#747

Post by outside1234 »

m1coti wrote: post #301
roncesvalles wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outsourcing of knowledge workers didn't work out because at large enough scales, the geographic arbitrage disappeared. Companies mostly always got what they paid for. The determinant of success was only whether the task needed American-tier labor or could make do with sub-American quality labor.

I am not sure this feels right. I agree that the US currently has leading minds in terms of tech, but I am not sure it is too big of difference with the EU knowledge workers. EU is still a lot cheaper then US in terms of wages you would need to pay.

EU workers themselves get a lot less, but the EU is expensive because of 1) the huge payroll tax (45% in France) and 2) the challenges with hiring and firing mean you are carrying people that aren’t contributing.

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

#748

Post by nozzlegear »

aspenmartin wrote: post #637
squeegmeister wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article also treats the word "good" as load-bearing in a way that should have you questioning their analysis: "I’ve called November 2025 the November inflection point because that was when GPT-5.1 and Opus 4.5, combined with their respective coding agent harnesses, got good—good enough that we’ve spent the last six months adapting to agent systems that can reliably get useful work done."

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.

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

#749

Post by Tepix »

girvo wrote: post #542
datadrivenangel wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what models are you using on that? My experiences with apple hardware have convinced me that it is not really good enough for coding locally.

DeepSeek v4 Flash, various quantised versions of Kimi K2.6, MiniMax 2.7, Qwen 3.5 “full sized, with a dual spark setup you can fit some decent setups on here My single spark has me running Qwen 3.6 27B and antirez’s specially quantised DeepSeek v4 Flash (which is shockingly impressive)

Kimi K2.6 does not run well on 256GB.

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

#750

Post by no-name-here »

aniceperson wrote: post #454
hintymad wrote: post #229

The real timing is that we don't have strong enough new business needs for now and we have accumulated enough tech assets, so our work has been increasingly incremental. That means we can build reliable features on top of vast amount of past work - where AI really shines. So, with or without AI, companied would hire fewer software engineers if majority of our work is incremental: add a feature here, fix a bug there,…

> Could AI really answer all the questions about React? yes, due to ICL > Would we use 10x fewer people to build out infra on the public cloud or the entire so-called Big Data platforms? No, cannot solve core problems, makes a mess at scale You are right about the incremental work. But most of the work is historically incremental imo, only few positions are R&D.

ICL = In-Context Learning where LLMs learn to perform new tasks by reading examples directly within the prompt, rather than requiring permanent model retraining.
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