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AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

martinalderson.com

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Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#81

Post by Oarch »

gaigalas wrote: post #32
Oarch wrote: post #9

Earlier this year I thought that rare proprietary knowledge and IP was a safe haven from AI, since LLMs can only scrub public data. Then it dawned on me how many companies are deeply integrating Copilot into their everyday workflows. It's the perfect Trojan Horse.

What kind of rare proprietary knowledge?

It could be a wide range of things depending on your field: highly particular materials, knowledge or processes that give your products or services a particular edge, and which a company has often incurred high R&D costs to discover.

Many businesses simply couldn't afford to operate without such an edge.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#82

Post by mikert89 »

"It was always possible to clone software, but doing so was costly and time consuming, and the clone would need to be much cheaper, making any such venture financially non-viable.

With AI, that equation is now changing. I anticipate that within 5 years autonomous coding agents will be able to rapidly and cheaply clone almost any existing software, while also providing hosting, operations, and support, all for a small fraction of the cost.

This will inevitably destroy many existing businesses. In order to survive, businesses will require strong network effects (e.g. marketplaces) or extremely deep data/compute moats. There will also be many new opportunities created by the very low cost of software. What could you build if it were possible to create software 1000x faster and cheaper?"

Paul Bucheit

https://x.com/paultoo/status/1999245292294803914

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#83

Post by kankerlijer »

matt-p wrote: post #55
Oarch wrote: post #9

Earlier this year I thought that rare proprietary knowledge and IP was a safe haven from AI, since LLMs can only scrub public data. Then it dawned on me how many companies are deeply integrating Copilot into their everyday workflows. It's the perfect Trojan Horse.

Even if they're were doing this (I highly doubt it) so much would be lost to distillation I'm not convinced there would be much that actually got in, apart from perhaps internal codenames or whatever which will be obvious.

Well, perhaps this is naive of me from the perspective of not fully understanding the training process. However, at some point, with all available training data having been exhausted, gains with synthetic data exhausted, and a large pool of publicly available AI generated code, at what point is it 'smart' to scrape codebases from what you identify as high quality code based, clean it up to remove identifiers, and use that for training a smaller model?

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#84

Post by Aurornis »

leptons wrote: post #18
Aurornis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using an LLM on data does not ingest that data into the training corpus. LLMs don’t “learn” from the information they operate on, contrary to what a lot of people assume. None of the mainstream paid services ingest operating data into their training sets. You will find a lot of conspiracy theories claiming that companies are saying one thing but secretly stealing your data, of course.

> LLMs don’t “learn” from the information they operate on, contrary to what a lot of people assume. Nothing is really preventing this though. AI companies have already proven they will ignore copyright and any other legal nuisance so they can train models.

> Nothing is really preventing this though

The enterprise user agreement is preventing this.

Suggesting that AI companies will uniquely ignore the law or contracts is conspiracy theory thinking.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#86

Post by linsomniac »

hyperpape wrote: post #39

Note that the author does not mention a single specific SaaS subscription he’s cancelled or seen a team cancel. The only named product was Retool.

We just had a $240/year renewal for teamretro.com come due, and while TeamRetro has a lot of components, we are only using the retro and ice breaker components. So I gave Claude Code a couple of prompts and I now have a couple static HTML pages that do the ice breaker (using local storage) and the retro (using a Google sheet as the storage backend, largely because it mimics our pre-teamretro process).

It took me no more than 2 hours to put those together. We didn't renew our TeamRetro

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#87

Post by lateforwork »

This article made no sense to me. It is talking about AI-generated code eating SaaS. That's not what is going to replace SaaS. When AI is able to do the job itself — without generating code — that's what is going to replace SaaS.

AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#88

Post by Oarch »

protocolture wrote: post #46
sotrusting wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>Ah yes, blindly trusting the corpo fascists that stole the entire creative output of humanity to stop now. Stealing implies the thing is gone, no longer accessible to the owner. People aren't protected from copying in the same way. There are lots of valid exclusions, and building new non competing tools is a very common exclusion. The big issue with the OpenAI case, is that they didn't pay for the books. Scanning th…

> Stealing implies the thing is gone, no longer accessible to the owner.

Isn't this a little simplistic?

If the value of something lies in its scarcity, then making it widely available has robbed the owner of a scarcity value which cannot be retrieved.

A win for consumers, perhaps, but a loss for the owner nonetheless.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#89

Post by Aurornis »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #68
Oarch wrote: post #9

Earlier this year I thought that rare proprietary knowledge and IP was a safe haven from AI, since LLMs can only scrub public data. Then it dawned on me how many companies are deeply integrating Copilot into their everyday workflows. It's the perfect Trojan Horse.

Ironically (for you), copilot is the one provider that is doing a good job of provably NOT training on user data. The rest are not up to speed on that compliance angle, so many companies ban them (of course, people still use them).

Do you have a source for this?

There are claims all through this thread that “AI companies” are probably doing bad things with enterprise customer data but nobody has provided a single source for the claim.

This has been a theme on HN. There was a thread a few weeks back where someone confidently claimed up and down the thread that Gemini’s terms of service allowed them to train on your company’s customer data, even though 30 seconds of searching leads to the exact docs that say otherwise. There is a lot of hearsay being spread as fact, but nobody actually linking to ToS or citing sections they’re talking about.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#90

Post by Aurornis »

TheRoque wrote: post #57
Aurornis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using an LLM on data does not ingest that data into the training corpus. LLMs don’t “learn” from the information they operate on, contrary to what a lot of people assume. None of the mainstream paid services ingest operating data into their training sets. You will find a lot of conspiracy theories claiming that companies are saying one thing but secretly stealing your data, of course.

Just read the ToS of the LLM products please

I have. Have you? Can you quote the sections you’re talking about?
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