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

911–920 of 1001 posts

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

#911

Post by arcticfox »

mold_aid wrote: post #875
MichaelDickens wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being pedantic, but I don't want to lose the meaning of the term: "AI psychosis" doesn't refer to someone who thinks AI is really good. It refers to someone who develops symptoms of psychosis from talking to an LLM, e.g. believing they have developed a new Grand Unified Theory of physics.

I don't know, "workaday professionals will find $200/month a particularly good deal, such that there will be widespread adoption" sounds either credulous enough to support the diagnosis or dishonest enough to dismiss. I am a "knowledge worker" who is doin' fine, has a lot of templated written work/report writing, and there is no way in hell I am justifying that kind of spending to my boss or my family.

You can't justify $200/month in spending to your boss? Many people charge more than that per single billable hour. I would put your salary side by side with that number, which is your boss's perspective, and reconsider.

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

#912

Post by ludwigvan »

Just to be clear, enterprise companies are using the enterprise option for security/auditing/enforcement reasons, not because OpenAI or Anthropic forbids them from buying a 200$/month plan for each engineer, right? Do they have any clause forbidding using those individual plans in a company?

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

#913

Post by lumost »

byzantinegene wrote: post #807
lumost wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For equal capability tokens, there has been about a 10x drop in cost every 6 months. We are still chasing the best because the best is moving rapidly, but it’s a simple thought experiment to work out what the cost to serve an 8B model from 2 years ago is in a world of 2T models. Note: parameter counts are illustrative. Concretely, qwen3.6 27B delivers opus 4.5 capability at 1/27th the cost on openrouter. Single chip…

8B models would be consider obsolete in the world of 2T models, at least if we're talking about the competitiveness of OpenAI/Anthropic. The only reason why they are valued so highly is their supposed dominance at the top end.

The main story of agent use cases is in enterprise so far. An enterprise will only pay for a model capable of handling the task and no more. Most enterprise's see no need to hire PhDs as factory line workers.

Coding is an interesting case as [1] the pace of progress has been absurd and [2] it's hard to put an upper bound on required capability. However hard to put a bound on and will are different, it's quite possible that the average engineer will cease to see the benefit of rapid progress - or that their employer will be satisfied with lower tier models.

How smart of a model do you need to build a high quality CRUD app for internal users? Or build a scalable web service?

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

#914

Post by BloondAndDoom »

noddingham wrote: post #530

I feel like there's a bit of AI psychosis in this particular post. >"These are tools which burn vastly more tokens, but are also quickly becoming daily drivers for the work carried out by extremely well-compensated professionals." >"Somehow this fragment turned into headlines like Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify the money spent on AI tokenmaxxing, because the market for stories about AI failures remain…

I just cannot imagine zero net productivity gain from AI usage by a somehow experienced developer. Even if it’s happening right now it’s matter of time for people to figure out how to utilize it right. Only exception would be if people are getting the same output but working less, which is still a net positive (just not in terms of output).

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

#915

Post by mold_aid »

arcticfox wrote: post #911
mold_aid wrote: post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, "workaday professionals will find $200/month a particularly good deal, such that there will be widespread adoption" sounds either credulous enough to support the diagnosis or dishonest enough to dismiss. I am a "knowledge worker" who is doin' fine, has a lot of templated written work/report writing, and there is no way in hell I am justifying that kind of spending to my boss or my family.

You can't justify $200/month in spending to your boss? Many people charge more than that per single billable hour. I would put your salary side by side with that number, which is your boss's perspective, and reconsider.

>You can't justify $200/month in spending to your boss?

No. What? Of course not.

>Many people charge more than that per single billable hour.

hrmmmm not so sure about the work that "many" is doing there

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

#917

Post by m3kw9 »

I think the product market fit is still how you interface with increasingly powerful AI. Right now is Codex/Claude code, and they just added computer use/web browsing into them. The product is the speed at which you can interface it and to be able to serve it with infrastructure.

Traditional product market fit isn't really applicable with tech evolving so fast.

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

#918

Post by bethekind »

regularfry wrote: post #502
cogman10 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same argument that has been historically made for outsourcing developers. Get 20 more devs for the cost of 1 dev in the US. I suspect that AI will fail to pan out to the same extent for the same reason why outsourcing hasn't fully panned out (even though every company tries it after getting big enough). The problems that will come up will be and always have been ongoing maintenance. AI is great at writing…

> I suspect that AI will fail to pan out to the same extent for the same reason why outsourcing hasn't fully panned out My mental model for that is that outsourcing fails where the work is being done organisationally far from the knowledge needed to do it. We know that's true of teams inside organisations, there's been a lot of research on how distance in the organisational tree negatively impacts productivity. Outso…

> mostly stuff that works for humans also works for AIs but you need to know to ask for it

I'm most curious about this sentence. What have you noticed about the similarities? I'm getting really good at asking for confidence levels, tests and pushing back, but I'm curious what you found

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

#919

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #232
_verandaguy wrote: post #196

With respect to Simon, whose writing I've usually agreed with in the past and whose insights I've liked: this is a bad take that overlooks the extent to which corporations are imposing the use of AI on employees, and in particular ICs, who make up a majority of the AI-using workforce by headcount. Many of us are either openly having our performance reviews tied to AI use, especially at larger enterprises. Whether tha…

Are you saying that Anthropic's huge leaps in revenue are caused by stupid company policies and token leaderboards, and the moment companies stop imposing AI on their employees revenue will drop to a point where Anthropic are unlikely to be profitable? I don't think that's the case. I think the token leaderboard thing (which is clearly ridiculous) affects a tiny portion of companies and is already going out of fashio…

[deleted]

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

#920

Post by noddingham »

MichaelDickens wrote: post #686
noddingham wrote: post #530

I feel like there's a bit of AI psychosis in this particular post. >"These are tools which burn vastly more tokens, but are also quickly becoming daily drivers for the work carried out by extremely well-compensated professionals." >"Somehow this fragment turned into headlines like Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify the money spent on AI tokenmaxxing, because the market for stories about AI failures remain…

Being pedantic, but I don't want to lose the meaning of the term: "AI psychosis" doesn't refer to someone who thinks AI is really good. It refers to someone who develops symptoms of psychosis from talking to an LLM, e.g. believing they have developed a new Grand Unified Theory of physics.

Fair and I would edit if I still had time. How about "AI brain fry"?
Post reply on HN