6 ms·

I'm paying for 3 different AI services and our company and most of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff. Sounds like a real industry to me. There's

by dmix 1y ago

I'm paying for 3 different AI services and our company and most of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff. Sounds like a real industry to me. There's just going to be VC losers as always, where usually "losing" is getting bought by a bigger company or aquihires instead of 100xing or going public.

RoyTyrell 1y ago
Those companies are also likely still in the red. They're banking on the hope that one day they will be profitable. I'm sure one of them will be.
- dmix 1y ago
  HN said the same thing about Uber forever.
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    Uber didn't invent anything, they drove taxis out of business then jacked up the prices, squeezed the workers, and now everybody is riding around in regular people's crappy cars for more than a cab cost. And now I need a phone and to maintain my relationship with these two crappy companies rather than to wave at the street (which is what I used to do to get a ride.) That was literally what everybody said would happen.
    - jfengel 1y ago
      I think Uber invented (or at least made widely available) taxi-by-app. Having scores of cab companies, accessed by telephone call, was supremely user-hostile. If the cab companies had gotten together on an app, they might have shortcut Uber and all of its many dubious practices. They finally are starting to but it's much too late.
      - taormina 1y ago
        Taxi-by-app existed pre-Uber, the innovation was making the taxi actual show up. Austin had the apps, and I would order one, and the taxis would get distracted on the way to my house and pick up other fares, so I couldn't go where I wanted. They had every chance to not be outcompeted by Uber, but they couldn't stop being taxis. And, here we are.
        zelphirkalt 1y ago
        Not only did taxi by app exist way earlier, it was also wide spread ... in some big countries.
        eastbound 1y ago
        > the innovation was making the taxi actual show up Uber regularly doesn’t show up, just playing with “4… 3… 6… minutes left”. I always have to wait half an hour at a certain location, with a message “Just book a few minutes before your trip.” I’ve had a friend miss his flight because of Uber not showing up!
        rhetocj23 1y ago
        Im not sure why you got downvoted for that. Ive noticed similar shenanigans with Uber eats - they are definitely playing around with stuff to increase profitability its clear as day.
    - dmix 1y ago
      It completely changed an industry. Just because you don't like the current version doesn't mean it wasn't a major innovation. Uber was just the main player in scaling and marketing a new model across the entire globe, which was a huge and costly endeavor. LLMs have already changed how software can be written and a thousands of other business/consumer usecases, these companies are just battling it out and finding the most profitable niches. It will be a major business for a long time and the technology will mature and plateau pretty quickly. If R&D doesn't scale economically, it will just slow down and existing models will be heavily optimized to be cheaper to run. The dot com boom resulted in very few real industries and comparing the two is not very useful.
    - terminalshort 1y ago
      Uber is way cheaper and better than any cab ever was.
      - sillyfluke 1y ago
        From my experience, this is not the case in many european cities. In those places the main benefit seems to be not having to interact with the cab driver.
        culi 1y ago
        You don't talk to your drivers? I've had a lot of genuinely good conversations in my rides. I always at least feel it out and see how much the driver wants to talk but it feels wrong to not say anything
        sillyfluke 1y ago
        I'm talking about the benefit to whoever is using them. Once you learn it's more expensive, there's little logic to keep on using it unless for the reason stated.
      - _fizz_buzz_ 1y ago
        Is that still true?
    - rjdj377dhabsn 1y ago
      I think you're definitely in the minority. For most of the world, Uber/Grab/Bolt have made transportation cheaper, safer, more convenient, and more comfortable.
    - bloomca 1y ago
      Uber definitely screwed the workers and probably existing taxi companies, but for the users it was a huge W, at least in many parts of the world. Taxi companies are notoriously scammy and it seems to be a very universal experience.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > Uber didn't invent anything They didn't. They innovated, practically implemented ideas that resulted in the introduction of new goods and services [1]. This is a meaningful difference. Uber didn't invent anything. But they did pull ridesharing out of a hat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation
    - j4hdufd8 1y ago
      > rather than to wave at the street (which is what I used to do to get a ride.) Ummm taxis aren't everywhere like NYC or something. Broadly speaking Uber will pick you up in an arbitrary place and take you anywhere.
  - Analemma_ 1y ago
    Uber sold something like $50 billion in equity and debt before it went public, and although they're profitable now, to me it doesn't seem like they have answer to Waymo coming up fast in the rear-view mirror. I think Uber is still a scam, just one where the earlier investors fleeced the later ones who are never going to see the returns they paid for.
    - tyre 1y ago
      Uber is still >$10bn net negative over its lifetime. Claude estimates about –$19bn. It's still quite possible that Uber doesn't make that up in the near future.
  - TrackerFF 1y ago
    For almost 20 year, Amazon has been the poster child of "A company can be unprofitable for years and still turn out a winner", but of course - not all companies can pivot from being a regular e-commerce company to cloud infrastructure/hosting, and become a money machine. So the question, at least to me, is how these AI companies will find a product or service that makes them profitable. Other than becoming actual monopolies in their current domains.
mxschumacher 1y ago
are you paying them enough to have profitable unit economics? How hard would it be for you to switch from one provider to another?
- dmix 1y ago
  there's some lock-in for both chatgpt (the history and natural chat personalization feature is super useful) and with Cursor I'm fully invested in the IDE experience. The lie is that LLMs are the product itself rather than the endless integration opportunities via APIs and online services.
themafia 1y ago
> 3 different AI services Why three? Will you ever be in a position where one will do it for you? > and most of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff. And what are they using it for? > Sounds like a real industry to me. Sounds like early adopter syndrome to me. We'd have to know more about your business to take this out of the realm of hazy anecdotes.
- dmix 1y ago
  > Why three? Will you ever be in a position where one will do it for you? I believe LLMs will be niche tools like databases, you pay for the product not 'gpt' vs 'claude'. You choose the right tool for the job. I have a feeling coding tool with be separate a niche like Cursor, which LLM it uses doesn't matter. It's the integration, guard rails, prompt seeding, and general software stuff like autocomplete and managing long todos. Then I pay for ChatGPT because that's my "personal" chat LLM that knows me and knows how I like curt short responses for my dumb questions. Finally I pay for https://www.warp.dev/terminal https://www.warp.dev/terminal as a terminal which replaced Kitty terminal on macos (don't use it for coding) which is another niche. Cursor could enter that arena but VSCode terminal is kinda limited for day-to-day stuff given it's hidden in an larger IDE. Maybe a pure CLI tool will do both better.
someuser54541 1y ago
My team is doing the same, and yet all of us still aren't sure that we're actually more productive overall. If anything it seems to me like we've just swapped coding with what is effectively a lot more code review (of whatever the LLM spits out), at the cost of also losing that long term understanding of a block of code that actually comes from writing it yourself (let's not pretend that a reviewer has the same depth of understanding of a piece of code as an author).
- mirekrusin 1y ago
  If you work in a team then you are likely already not writing most of the code yourself. There will be point where ai will consistently write better prs - you can already start to see it here and there - finding and fixing bugs in existing code, refactoring, writing tests, writing and updating documentation and prototyping are some examples of areas where it often surpasses human contribution.
  - dandellion 1y ago
    All the comments of AI writing code and making PRs remind me a lot of all the promises about self driving cars. That was more than 10 years ago and today I still don't know anybody that has a car that drives itself. Will AI write useful PRs one day? Probably. Will it do that before I retire or die of old age? Considering I have been using agents for about a year or so, and seen little to no improvement in that time, I'm afraid the current version of AI probably has already peaked and we'll only see marginal improvement due to diminishing returns.
- rhetocj23 1y ago
  Yes there is a very real trade off between labour and capital. In the past the tradeoff has been very straight forward. But this is a unique situation because it involves knowledge and not just the physicality of the human in regards to productivity.
qudat 1y ago
The problem is the hype machine that is claiming it will replace human labor which justifies the insane losses. These companies are burning cash to support the current formulation of AI services. These services will survive because they are useful but probably not at its current cost
raincole 1y ago
A real industry can be a bubble too. Not every bubble looks like tulips. For example: - Dotcom bubble. Of course making website was and is a real industry. - Japanese real estate bubble. Of course building houses was and still is a real industry. It's so real people call it real estate, right.

by dmix 1y ago

RoyTyrell 1y ago

Those companies are also likely still in the red. They're banking on the hope that one day they will be profitable. I'm sure one of them will be.

dmix 1y ago
HN said the same thing about Uber forever.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  Uber didn't invent anything, they drove taxis out of business then jacked up the prices, squeezed the workers, and now everybody is riding around in regular people's crappy cars for more than a cab cost. And now I need a phone and to maintain my relationship with these two crappy companies rather than to wave at the street (which is what I used to do to get a ride.) That was literally what everybody said would happen.
  - jfengel 1y ago
    I think Uber invented (or at least made widely available) taxi-by-app. Having scores of cab companies, accessed by telephone call, was supremely user-hostile. If the cab companies had gotten together on an app, they might have shortcut Uber and all of its many dubious practices. They finally are starting to but it's much too late.
    - taormina 1y ago
      Taxi-by-app existed pre-Uber, the innovation was making the taxi actual show up. Austin had the apps, and I would order one, and the taxis would get distracted on the way to my house and pick up other fares, so I couldn't go where I wanted. They had every chance to not be outcompeted by Uber, but they couldn't stop being taxis. And, here we are.
      - zelphirkalt 1y ago
        Not only did taxi by app exist way earlier, it was also wide spread ... in some big countries.
      - eastbound 1y ago
        > the innovation was making the taxi actual show up Uber regularly doesn’t show up, just playing with “4… 3… 6… minutes left”. I always have to wait half an hour at a certain location, with a message “Just book a few minutes before your trip.” I’ve had a friend miss his flight because of Uber not showing up!
        rhetocj23 1y ago
        Im not sure why you got downvoted for that. Ive noticed similar shenanigans with Uber eats - they are definitely playing around with stuff to increase profitability its clear as day.
  - dmix 1y ago
    It completely changed an industry. Just because you don't like the current version doesn't mean it wasn't a major innovation. Uber was just the main player in scaling and marketing a new model across the entire globe, which was a huge and costly endeavor. LLMs have already changed how software can be written and a thousands of other business/consumer usecases, these companies are just battling it out and finding the most profitable niches. It will be a major business for a long time and the technology will mature and plateau pretty quickly. If R&D doesn't scale economically, it will just slow down and existing models will be heavily optimized to be cheaper to run. The dot com boom resulted in very few real industries and comparing the two is not very useful.
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    Uber is way cheaper and better than any cab ever was.
    - sillyfluke 1y ago
      From my experience, this is not the case in many european cities. In those places the main benefit seems to be not having to interact with the cab driver.
      - culi 1y ago
        You don't talk to your drivers? I've had a lot of genuinely good conversations in my rides. I always at least feel it out and see how much the driver wants to talk but it feels wrong to not say anything
        sillyfluke 1y ago
        I'm talking about the benefit to whoever is using them. Once you learn it's more expensive, there's little logic to keep on using it unless for the reason stated.
    - _fizz_buzz_ 1y ago
      Is that still true?
  - rjdj377dhabsn 1y ago
    I think you're definitely in the minority. For most of the world, Uber/Grab/Bolt have made transportation cheaper, safer, more convenient, and more comfortable.
  - bloomca 1y ago
    Uber definitely screwed the workers and probably existing taxi companies, but for the users it was a huge W, at least in many parts of the world. Taxi companies are notoriously scammy and it seems to be a very universal experience.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Uber didn't invent anything They didn't. They innovated, practically implemented ideas that resulted in the introduction of new goods and services [1]. This is a meaningful difference. Uber didn't invent anything. But they did pull ridesharing out of a hat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation
  - j4hdufd8 1y ago
    > rather than to wave at the street (which is what I used to do to get a ride.) Ummm taxis aren't everywhere like NYC or something. Broadly speaking Uber will pick you up in an arbitrary place and take you anywhere.
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  Uber sold something like $50 billion in equity and debt before it went public, and although they're profitable now, to me it doesn't seem like they have answer to Waymo coming up fast in the rear-view mirror. I think Uber is still a scam, just one where the earlier investors fleeced the later ones who are never going to see the returns they paid for.
  - tyre 1y ago
    Uber is still >$10bn net negative over its lifetime. Claude estimates about –$19bn. It's still quite possible that Uber doesn't make that up in the near future.
- TrackerFF 1y ago
  For almost 20 year, Amazon has been the poster child of "A company can be unprofitable for years and still turn out a winner", but of course - not all companies can pivot from being a regular e-commerce company to cloud infrastructure/hosting, and become a money machine. So the question, at least to me, is how these AI companies will find a product or service that makes them profitable. Other than becoming actual monopolies in their current domains.

mxschumacher 1y ago

are you paying them enough to have profitable unit economics? How hard would it be for you to switch from one provider to another?

dmix 1y ago
there's some lock-in for both chatgpt (the history and natural chat personalization feature is super useful) and with Cursor I'm fully invested in the IDE experience. The lie is that LLMs are the product itself rather than the endless integration opportunities via APIs and online services.

themafia 1y ago

> 3 different AI services Why three? Will you ever be in a position where one will do it for you? > and most of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff. And what are they using it for? > Sounds like a real industry to me. Sounds like early adopter syndrome to me. We'd have to know more about your business to take this out of the realm of hazy anecdotes.

dmix 1y ago
> Why three? Will you ever be in a position where one will do it for you? I believe LLMs will be niche tools like databases, you pay for the product not 'gpt' vs 'claude'. You choose the right tool for the job. I have a feeling coding tool with be separate a niche like Cursor, which LLM it uses doesn't matter. It's the integration, guard rails, prompt seeding, and general software stuff like autocomplete and managing long todos. Then I pay for ChatGPT because that's my "personal" chat LLM that knows me and knows how I like curt short responses for my dumb questions. Finally I pay for https://www.warp.dev/terminal https://www.warp.dev/terminal as a terminal which replaced Kitty terminal on macos (don't use it for coding) which is another niche. Cursor could enter that arena but VSCode terminal is kinda limited for day-to-day stuff given it's hidden in an larger IDE. Maybe a pure CLI tool will do both better.

someuser54541 1y ago

My team is doing the same, and yet all of us still aren't sure that we're actually more productive overall. If anything it seems to me like we've just swapped coding with what is effectively a lot more code review (of whatever the LLM spits out), at the cost of also losing that long term understanding of a block of code that actually comes from writing it yourself (let's not pretend that a reviewer has the same depth of understanding of a piece of code as an author).

mirekrusin 1y ago
If you work in a team then you are likely already not writing most of the code yourself. There will be point where ai will consistently write better prs - you can already start to see it here and there - finding and fixing bugs in existing code, refactoring, writing tests, writing and updating documentation and prototyping are some examples of areas where it often surpasses human contribution.
- dandellion 1y ago
  All the comments of AI writing code and making PRs remind me a lot of all the promises about self driving cars. That was more than 10 years ago and today I still don't know anybody that has a car that drives itself. Will AI write useful PRs one day? Probably. Will it do that before I retire or die of old age? Considering I have been using agents for about a year or so, and seen little to no improvement in that time, I'm afraid the current version of AI probably has already peaked and we'll only see marginal improvement due to diminishing returns.
rhetocj23 1y ago
Yes there is a very real trade off between labour and capital. In the past the tradeoff has been very straight forward. But this is a unique situation because it involves knowledge and not just the physicality of the human in regards to productivity.

qudat 1y ago

The problem is the hype machine that is claiming it will replace human labor which justifies the insane losses. These companies are burning cash to support the current formulation of AI services. These services will survive because they are useful but probably not at its current cost

raincole 1y ago

A real industry can be a bubble too. Not every bubble looks like tulips. For example: - Dotcom bubble. Of course making website was and is a real industry. - Japanese real estate bubble. Of course building houses was and still is a real industry. It's so real people call it real estate, right.