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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

#921

Post by infecto »

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.

I think is the classic dilemma where people don’t know how to value their time.

Typical tech worker costs a company around $100/hour minimum. That $200 subscription cost can look mighty attractive if it saves some time or mental load.

I don’t think there is anything about addiction or spooky with that math. I suspect a lot of this is coming from tokenmaxxing firms but on the flip side on our small team, we end up spending about $200 per person per month for tokens using tools like Cursor. We feel the spend is justified with measurable value.

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

#922

Post by onceonceonce »

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…

The "+20% velocity" framing misses what's actually shifting.

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

#923

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

stopachka wrote: post #478
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.

I don't quite understand, what would 100K buy you? AFAIK you would get about ~5 concurrent users, with a max context window of ~128K tokens on the larger models. This wouldn't be good enough for coding -- are you guys thinking of using it for something else?

Gigabyte 4x AMD Instinct MI300A rack server (512GB GPU RAM total)

Roughly equivalent to 4x H200's for less than half the price.

Vaguely around 60k tokens per second...

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

#924

Post by motbus3 »

this is an opinion and i would love to debate :) dont hate me too hard

i think the article is momentaneously correct but there are some things that smells to me about the situation overall (not the article!)

(1) i believe gpt 5.5 and opus 4.7 are not as good improvements as their predecessors and there has been not enough evolution in those models to justify the price increases. Unless something big changes in the next few years they will not be able to track these costs (unless A)

(2) they might not be able to keep up improving the data centers if their tech keeps demanding more and more hardware capability. even nvidia does not show signals that they will be able to beat too much their big GPUs and at some point this increased price will be passed to them anyway which will need to be put in the token price (unless A)

(3) i've been trying deepseek v4 and other models and honestly, they are more useful than gpt 5.5 and opus 4.7... i mean, there is still a difference, but it is so little that it does not make sense the cost of opus and gpt 5.5 (unless they are going to A too)

(A) I have the impression is that the plan was the whole time to sideline common folks like us and focus on gov, big techs and military. they only let us play with the toys to gather data and for people to not get mad because they stole the internet from us.

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

#925

Post by bob1029 »

overgard wrote: post #482

Anthropic isn't actually profitable from what I'm reading, a discount briefly pushed them into the black. This guy makes the case well: https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle... I'm skeptical that their current price raise is sufficient, and I'm also skeptical that most users/businesses will accept more significant price raises that will be needed. Especially for individual users, $200 a month i…

I think we could eventually get to a point where $1000/m+ consumption would be considered a bargain.

I currently pay ~$150/m in tokens to cover my 1099 work. If I had to pay $1000 for those same tokens each month, I would still be massively positive on my margins. I bill customers based upon # of completed features & bugs, not total time spent at the computer. Tokens would have to more than 10x in cost before I would start to have a problem on my end.

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

#926

Post by tim333 »

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 maths works like that. They have raised ~$200bn so far and need to make that back. Saying they need to make $5 to $10tn isn't really real. They might need that to meet some extravagant Altman projections but not to justify what they have actually spent.

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

#927

Post by pandoro »

If those companies found PMF we should expect to see the effects of all those tokens burned on the products we all know and use. In my own experience: yes new features can be delivered much more quickly (by orders of magnitude) but knowing what to build and how to evolve a product with taste and direction does not; so ultimately the user-facing gains are marginal.

I suspect that once the technology has been tamed and the hardware and software has been commoditized, the impact will be much less dramatic than we expect and we will realize the importance of a shared vision, experience, taste, intuition and discernment in building good products.

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

#928

Post by lsy »

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…

Yeah, claiming “product-market fit” on coding assistants for this multi-trillion dollar capital expenditure seems premature. Anthropic will post one and only one quarter of “operating profit” (aka losses after taxes and debt obligations) on the back of free-for-all spending by enterprise and engineer tokenmaxxing, neither of which will last. The investment was commensurate to a world-eating AGI, and if all that comes out of it is coding agents and slightly better enterprise software, I don’t think that makes up for the money spent.

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

#929

Post by btown »

lsy wrote: post #928
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…

Yeah, claiming “product-market fit” on coding assistants for this multi-trillion dollar capital expenditure seems premature. Anthropic will post one and only one quarter of “operating profit” (aka losses after taxes and debt obligations) on the back of free-for-all spending by enterprise and engineer tokenmaxxing, neither of which will last. The investment was commensurate to a world-eating AGI, and if all that comes…

The real question is: can you incentivize a non-tokenmaxxing Uber to spend the same amount on AI as they were when tokenmaxxing, just with fewer tokens and higher per-token costs? Even with plateauing improvement in frontier models? I think the answer may be yes.

And part of my reasoning for this is: the only system capable of actually fixing bugs in vibe-created code is an LLM. If we humans couldn't write it without assistance, we certainly won't be able to debug it without assistance. So there's a real stickiness here.

We're signing pacts with demons - we have to, if we want to outcompete the other warlocks - and those pacts are written in the very size of our codebases.

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