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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

#91

Post by Aurornis »

AuthAuth wrote: post #20
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.

They are not directly ingesting the data into their trainning sets but they are in most cases collecting it and will be using it to train future models.

Do you have any source for this at all?

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#92

Post by mjr00 »

lateforwork wrote: post #87

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…

> AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, ensure security, 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.

Yeah it's a fundamental misunderstanding of economies of scale. If you build an in-house app that does X, you incur 100% of the maintenance costs. If you're subscribed to a SaaS product, you're paying for 1/N % of the maintenance costs, where N is the number of customers.

I only see AI-generated code replacing things that never made sense as a SaaS anyway. It's telling the author's only concrete example of a replaced SaaS product is Retool, which is much less about SaaS and much more about a product that's been fundamentally deprecated.

Wake me up when we see swaths of companies AI-coding internal Jira ("just an issue tracker") and Github Enterprise ("just a browser-based wrapper over git") clones.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#93

Post by popalchemist »

Aurornis wrote: post #77
popalchemist wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong, buddy. Many of the top AI services use human feedback to continuously apply "reinforcement learning" after the initial deployment of a pre-trained model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning_from_hu...

RLHF is a training step. Inference (what happens when you use an LLM as a customer) is separate from training. Inference and training are separate processes. Using an LLM doesn’t train it. That’s not what RLHF means.

I am aware, I've trained my own models. You're being obtuse.

The big companies - take Midjourney, or OpenAI, for example - take the feedback that is generated by users, and then apply it as part of the RLHF pass on the next model release, which happens every few months. That's why they have the terms in their TOS that allow them to do that.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#94

Post by danielheath »

GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #25
findjashua wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

providers' ToS explicitly states whether or not any data provided is used for training purposes. the usual that i've seen is that while they retain the right to use the data on free tiers, it's almost never the case for paid tiers

I wonder how much wiggle there is for collect now (to provide service, context history, etc), then later anonymise (some how, to some level) and then train on it? Also I wonder if the ToS covers "queries & interaction" vs "uploaded data" - I could imagine some tricky language in there that says we wont use your word document, but we may at some time use the queries you put against it, not as raw corpus but as a secon…

“We don’t train on your data” doesn’t exclude metadata, training on derived datasets via some anonymisation process, etc.

There’s a range of ways to lie by omission, here, and the major players have established a reputation for being willing to take an expansive view of their legal rights.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#95

Post by nop_slide »

linsomniac wrote: post #86
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 m…

Or just don’t do retro and save even more time and money!

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#96

Post by olyjohn »

Retric wrote: post #37
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.

Companies have already shifting from not using customer data to giving them an option to opt out ex: “How can I control whether my data is used for model training? If you are logged into Copilot with a Microsoft Account or other third-party authentication, you can control whether your conversations are used for training the generative AI models used in Copilot. Opting out will exclude your past, present, and future c…

30 days to opt out? That's skeezy as fuck.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#97

Post by mattas »

andy_ppp wrote: post #41

I’m currently working on an in house ERP and inventory system for a specific kind of business. With very few people you can now instead of paying loads of money for some off the shelf solution to your software needs get something completely bespoke to your business. I think AI enables the age of boutique software that works fantastically for businesses, agencies will need to dramatically reduce their price to compete…

You've just described the magic of spreadsheets.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#98

Post by Retric »

Aurornis wrote: post #71
Retric wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies have already shifting from not using customer data to giving them an option to opt out ex: “How can I control whether my data is used for model training? If you are logged into Copilot with a Microsoft Account or other third-party authentication, you can control whether your conversations are used for training the generative AI models used in Copilot. Opting out will exclude your past, present, and future c…

An enterprise Copilot contract will have already decided this for the organization.

That possibility in no way address the underlying concern here.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#99

Post by dylanzhangdev »

I think the biggest impact will be on SaaS products from startups and side projects. People will think, "I can build something myself with the help of AI, so why should I pay to try your unfinished product?" The barrier to entry has become higher, requiring a more complete product.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#100

Post by innagadadavida »

The ffmpeg wrapper use case is interesting. Reusing some core software for speed and reliability but to get better usability by leveraging LLMs seems like the sweet spot for SaaS use cases. A lot of these CRM products are basically wrappers around DBs and sheets like core products with terrible UI. The new breed will solve the UI ease of use issues.
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