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

811–820 of 1001 posts

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

#811

Post by _3u10 »

doug_durham wrote: post #356
simplyluke wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's the part that just seems to be wildly under-discussed to me. If open source models are ~3-6 months behind SOTA, and ~opus4.6 capabilities are good-enough for product market fit, do the frontier labs have half a decade to catch up on their prior burn? AI cost ballooning faster than companies can afford is becoming a very common topic in my circles right now. The era of "I'll pay infinitely more for margin…

Open source models that you can run locally are much more than 3 to 6 months behind. 6 months was the November inflection for Claude. No open source model is as good as Claude Opus 4.6.

Kimi is better.

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

#812

Post by sberens »

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…

> They've got, ballpark, $5t to $10t to make back in the next 5 years

OpenAI's spending commitment is in the ~1T range for the next 5 years, and Anthropic is ~300B.

If they continue to show strong growth, they likely need to be at 100-300B in revenue/yr to support their yearly payments + financing, not 1T.

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

#814

Post by crakhamster01 »

> As further evidence that enterprise agents represent product-market fit for these companies, consider their open job listings.

PMF is one interpretation, but it could also be read as desperation.

In my opinion, we've been at PMF for quite a while now. The November inflection point that's often referenced definitely changed how we interface with models, but as far as coding goes, I feel like Cursor had proven itself useful for at least a year prior to that.

The demand has always been there, the outstanding question is still - how do you build a business on top of these products? None of the frontier models have emerged as uniquely capable, but open weight models are now catching up in capability as well. The explosion in go-to-market roles feels more like an attempt to lock customers into contracts so that they don't consider alternatives.

I assume the hope is that during this 12-month contract they will develop real integrations, something deeper than just a CLI harness. If you've ever worked in procurement or dev tooling at a reasonably sized company, you'll know that this is exactly what teams try to avoid.

It's anyone's guess what will happen this time, but I'm excited to see how the IPOs go.

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

#816

Post by Yoric »

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…

> 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.

Wouldn't they be bragging about it to investors? It feels like something that would matter a lot to them, and at least OpenAI kinda feels desperate to find them.

There's also the small question about whether a drop in inference cost would actually change anything about profitability, when training seems to get exponentially more expensive.

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

#817

Post by palata »

dcre wrote: post #734
plaidfuji wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be additional major leaps forward, and there may not. I kind of struggle to imagine what the next step actually is. Certainly there will be improvements in performance (speed) and cost. But at a point you reach a barrier where the limiting factor is the specificity of the human prompt and our ability to manage all the code we’re generating. Somewhat oversimplifying; writing software and building apps was a…

Judging from the fact that the Opus 4.5 inflection point was not really anticipated, and we still don’t really know what threshold was crossed that suddenly made agentic coding accessible to so many more people, I think it’s safe to say we don’t know what the thresholds will be until they’re crossed. The fact that we don’t know exactly what they’ll be isn’t a good reason to think there won’t be any more.

> The fact that we don’t know exactly what they’ll be isn’t a good reason to think there won’t be any more.

Nor is it a good reason to think there will be more.

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

#819

Post by teaearlgraycold »

fittingopposite wrote: post #806
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree. You have these tipping points when a model is good enough to do some task. Yes, a better model will further improve your capabilities but the unlock is at a certain intelligence level. We see this also with humans. People with very low intelligence can't learn to read. Once you cross a certain threshold of intelligence you can learn to read. More intelligence doesn't really help you in the task of reading. A p…

Have you considered that a smarter person will understand what they have read better?

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

#820

Post by __alexs »

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 don't think the unit economics are too terrible. Expensive, but not impossible.

200m knowledge workers in US and EU. Total salary around $15T/year.

$1T/year in token spending is about $5k/year per person. A big number, but not totally mad. That's the low end for office space per person for example. Probably close to the existing SaaS spend per person for a lot of roles.

We are still early in the deployment cycle for these tools so I would expect them to get better and also cheaper too.

Post reply on HN