22 ms·

I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

• madbo1 5mo ago
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• j45 5mo ago
  There is always the next, or other product market fit to find.
• spprashant 5mo ago
  So it largely sounds like many more people will be able to write software - and will use AI to do it. Existing software engineers will continue to automate their tasks away like they always did, but perhaps at a faster rate. The impact of AI in other fields seems to be muted.
  • simonw 5mo ago
    I think it is applicable to a much wider range of knowledge work, but it's also harder to apply there. Software development has the huge advantage that mistakes and hallucinations are very easy to spot: the software works or it doesn't. Spotting errors in a research report or legal brief is a whole lot harder! But... non-software professionals spend a huge amount of their time on tasks that can be safely automated - reformatting documents, extracting numbers from PDFs, all kinds of flavor of data entry. Learning how to use a tool like Claude Cowork can take a big dent out of those.
    • slopinthebag 5mo ago
      > Software development has the huge advantage that mistakes and hallucinations are very easy to spot: the software works or it doesn't. Do we not care about code quality, maintainability, performance, extensibility, or understandability anymore? Honest question, not a gotcha, it's just previously getting software to pass all the tests was a small part of what we would consider "working" or perhaps "good" software. Maybe that's different now with LLMs, idk. Maybe we need automated checks for these things as well, like not compiling until the code quality is good enough to let the agent finish it's loop.
      • simonw 5mo ago
        > Do we not care about code quality, maintainability, performance, extensibility, or understandability anymore? Yes, we should care. I've been writing a whole book about that: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/better-code/ https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...
      • tracerbulletx 5mo ago
        What code quality even means is different now, but also LLMs are capable of producing better quality code at scale in my companies experience. We are able to in fact sort of propagate best practices and structure via the llm to all of the teams even when they're working under time pressure.
  • pianopatrick 5mo ago
    If the AI can write code for robots the impact in other fields may be pretty large. Seems to me a lot of jobs can be automated with software and robots combined. The limit in the past was writing the software to get the robots to work. But if AI can remove that limit...
• CachedaCodes 5mo ago
  Ai has become indispensable but maybe not at all cost. My company just had a company-wide meeting to talk about how they're restricting who can use which models and instructing us the "be more responsible with company's tokens". And it's not an small company by any means.
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• x187463 5mo ago
  I wonder how a focus on per-token API profits will impact the incentives to improve token efficiency and drive down costs through optimized compute. I suppose as long as a few leading labs are competing, we'll see progress in this regard, but it's certainly less in their interest than it is with a flat subscription pricing model.
  • skeledrew 5mo ago
    There's also increasing pressure from China: note the massive permanent price reductions DeepSeek and Xiaomi announced in the past few days, with the possibility of more around the corner. And there's also the constant release of increasingly capable open weight models.
• sourcecodeplz 5mo ago
  With deepseek and xiaomi mimo models slashing their prices 99%, I don't see a great future for openai / antrhopic with regards to their 1T valuations. Maybe 1T valuation will be the whole market, West + East.
  • skeledrew 5mo ago
    They'll still have their dedicated enterprise customers. I think the Chinese providers will pull more of the single users who're paying their own way, than those backed by company budget. And it's a pretty good split as the demand becomes better distributed, resulting in better service (I'll never forgot must how bad access to Claude became until they got access to Colossus) and less potential for lock-in (we really don't want there to be a duopoly, etc on good AI).
  • jillesvangurp 5mo ago
    Most of the corporate world in the EU or North America will be hesitant to rely on Chinese AI providers. There are some very real blockers for that for things like data security, compliance, etc. And recent geopolitics don't help. Legalities aside, you need to look not at the model quality but at the infrastructure needed to scale these models from tens (now) to hundreds (soon) of millions of users. Only a handful of companies actually have the resources and funding to do that. That's what these huge valuations are based on. These companies are gearing up to scale to these levels. That's why they are spending on data centers. Whoever has access to those data centers gets to tap into the revenue stream of people using models running on those. The market for frontier models is roughly split between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. And then you have companies like X/SpaceX, Amazon, and Microsoft being more successful with their infrastructure than their AI products and companies like Apple, Meta that have the money and the aspiration but are so far not really managing to be very successful with their AI strategies. Deepseek is just very poorly positioned to capture a lot of the enterprise revenue in the EU or North America. But they might become very dominant outside the US/EU. And of course China itself is going to be a huge market and equally unlikely to want to be depending on US owner AI companies.
    • sourcecodeplz 5mo ago
• harmonic18374 5mo ago
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• deleted 5mo ago
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• zuzululu 5mo ago
  Great article I know this upsets a lot of people who are used to thinking Anthropic/OpenAI are just lighting cash on fire but they've cornered the market on enterprise who cannot walk away from these $200/month plans However the valuations are still far far away from actual sanity
  • binary0010 5mo ago
    Have you tried the large open source code models? I use glm-5.1 and occasionally deep seek v4. They are as good or better than Claude's latest models. And significantly cheaper. I've converted 3 of my engineer friends as well. All three have dropped their $200 month plans they had with anthropic. We've all been a bit shocked at just how good these models are now. If you "have" tried GLM (I specifically find it shockingly good for code). Did you not think it's not competitive to Claude, and why?
    • BeetleB 5mo ago
      I use GLM-5.1. It's good enough for personal stuff. It doesn't compare to the latest Opus I use at work. You can certainly argue I don't need Opus for work, but there is clearly a difference. Also, at least with z.ai, GLM-5.1 is s l o w! After using Claude at work, I get really impatient with GLM-5.1 at home. When doing "true" vibe coding (i.e. not really examining the code), Opus is a ton faster (easily 5x). But yeah, I'm not willing to personally pay for the frontier models. I won't even renew my annual Z.ai plan - it's become too expensive.
      • dominotw 5mo ago
        task i am working on right now at work is comparing two verisions of apis and documenting responses in their outputs. i suspect a vast majority of work at entrprise is of similar complexity. right now everyone is using latest and greatest to do dumb stuff like that. that would change fast if companies start caring about costs.
      • binary0010 5mo ago
        Hmm, I use opencode subscription, and glm seems just as fast from the tests I've tried to compare between the two. Tbh it mostly took Claude longer (mostly significantly longer) for the same tests. Also, and I know you may not want to answer. But could you give me an idea of the type of thing you found glm to be worse with? I think I've been fairly unbiased in testing a bunch of different development tasks. But am curious if maybe it performs well for some stuff and not others. So if you could share what you feel it's worse at. Also are you an experienced developer or less experience?
• trjordan 5mo ago
  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 know cite +20%-40% velocity with these tools, against the actual work their company cares about doing. +20% speed for +20% spend isn't going to motivate a trillion dollars a year in spending. We're not there yet. This is still the upswing of the hype cycle, and unless we figure out how to make developers 2x, 5x, 10x as productive on stuff that matters, this isn't going to play out well.
  • EGreg 5mo ago
    Here is a serious question.. Can we sell into the hype cycle and on the way down with this: https://safebots.ai/costs.html https://safebots.ai/costs.html
    • adithyassekhar 5mo ago
      I asked claude to generate a frontend and it made the same template. Same san serif and serif fonts together. Same colors. Same typography. Same layout and animations even. It’s wild how similar it is. No not similar it’s the same damn thing.
      • dd8601fn 5mo ago
        I’ve seen the same dashboard for a dozen custom web applications now, including a couple I had it make for me. It really does have a particular lane for each chore, and it’s reproducible.
        • properbrew 5mo ago
          Yep and when you see it in the wild it stands out like a sore thumb, absolutely no thought into a bit of a unique design or branding. I have a few live websites built using LLMs and they will just go for default generic templates and colours if there's no vision.
• binary0010 5mo ago
  So how do openai and anthropic plan to keep customers when GLM-5.1 is just as good and open source and a lot cheaper? I don't see the business model working. My closest friend actually does automation software for large companies. He does not use Claude or openai at all. He primarily uses gpt 120b on cerebras and glm-5.1 for heavy thinking work. And some other small models for various tasks. All open source. And these systems are extremely useful for the businesses and are able to run fully automated pipelines that are very stable and fast. We discuss this a lot, and we both think any business doing heavy agentic work on Claude and openai just aren't aware of exactly how good and cheap open source has gotten on the last year. So... once the legacy businesses and developers catch up, won't Claude and openai be unable to recoup their costs?
  • mesmertech 5mo ago
    For coding you always want to go with the best model in the category, not something that would be the best model if we went 1 year back which GLM 5.1 is, and I'm saying that as a big fan of GLM cause I run a translation site where GLM is good enough for the price. Most of the money right now is in coding. Openai and Anthropic just have to be 6 months ahead of SOTA open source models and they'll capture most of the enterprise and dev market
    • EGreg 5mo ago
      Most work is not coding. And also, people have it wrong… their models are not the main problem anymore. It’s the RAG
      • obsidianbases1 5mo ago
        Depending on RAG is a workflow problem, not an AI problem
      • tomrod 5mo ago
        Would love to hear more about your thought about the RAG.
• mesmertech 5mo ago
  If nothing else this blog did give me the idea that I should split my $200 claude max plan into two $100 CC max and $100 codex plan, esp because Claude is now offering 1.5x weekly limits so its the 5x usage is now more like 7.5x usage.
  • Havoc 5mo ago
    >I should split my $200 claude max plan into two $100 CC max and $100 codex plan You may want to get one of them to check the math on that :p
• prepend 5mo ago
  > $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200 “Tokens” don’t have an intrisic cost or value. Saying that I used $2,180.16 worth of tokens is like relying on the salesperson to convince me I’m getting a billion dollars worth of pots and pans for $19.99. I think it’s funny how we are throwing critical thinking out the window when it comes to evaluating biased sources of info.
  • simonw 5mo ago
    I'm not sure what you're pushing back against here. I spent $200. If I had been paying API pricing it would have been $2,180.16. The article is about how enterprise customers get charged API pricing, which means if I had been employed by one of those companies I would have cost them $2,180.16. What am I missing?
    • OrangeDelonge 5mo ago
      Large enterprises make deals and won’t be paying 2,180.16$ either. Just like with AWS
      • waisbrot 5mo ago
        And "large" just means that AWS will assign an account manager to talk with you. I was at a start-up who spent $300k/year on AWS and that was enough to get special attention and discounts. Enterprise pricing is confusing.
      • simonw 5mo ago
        That doesn't seem to be the case. From what I've seen enterprise deals get API pricing now. Have you seen evidence that's not true?
        • themgt 5mo ago
          I do know of moderate-size companies deploying OSS LLMs on their own GPU clusters, for ownership/security/maybe cost reasons. I'm somewhat surprised F500 companies are apparently just handing over all their data to the model providers. Could be fantastic for small shops while it lasts. The big guys have to pay 10x for precious tokens.
• realo 5mo ago
  200$ per month per seat is nothing . A single 3D CAD license pack for the guys in our R&D group costs multiple thousands of dollars per seat, per month. It's about time software seats get some love too.
  • chatmasta 5mo ago
    Yeah, it’s nothing, and it’s also not the cost that enterprises are paying. As the article states, the price is $20 per seat per month, PLUS per-token API usage. Enterprises are paying consumption billing, not fixed rate oversubscribed “all you can eat per seat.”
  • smokel 5mo ago
    AutoCAD is $175 per user per month [1]. [1] https://www.autodesk.com/products/autocad/buy https://www.autodesk.com/products/autocad/buy
    • bigbuppo 5mo ago
      AutoCAD is still the budget-friendly CAD program it has always been. You don't build big boats in AutoCAD.
      • so_it_be 5mo ago
        Except LLM's even with Vision are still useless at AutoCAD let alone Revit (please dont quote SCAD LLM's at me, useless). Knowledge based approaches still win. I might agree "AutoCAD" is the current level LLM's are at, but wait until your design departments discovers "Revit", its another ballpark (in wasted cots, engineers on site still get "clashes"). Revit costs are high, and the end results are marginally better - but local LLM's tokens are cheaper 24/7 at "AutoCAD" level - "Revit" level tokens will make Ubers CTO/COO weep harder than they already do. While producing results no better than "Revit" does (engineers still face "clashes").
        • goolz 5mo ago
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• Legend2440 5mo ago
  >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 remains enormous. I notice this all over the place. Many people hate AI and want it to fail, and they're willing to invent misinformation if it supports that idea.
  • hansmayer 5mo ago
    Well, it is a big news when the COO of Uber says it no? Not quite some small consultancy shop here.
    • Legend2440 5mo ago
      But the COO did not say that. The headline was deliberately misrepresenting what he said.
      • hansmayer 5mo ago
        No, he said exactly that, if you remove the corporate sanitised language designed to not offend the Uber CTO.
        • simonw 5mo ago
          I think you're putting way too much weight into what one person said in unprepared remarks at the 27 minute mark in a 32 minute podcast conversation.
          • hansmayer 5mo ago
            That "one" person is the COO of Uber. And the other one - the one based on whose statement about burning through yearly AI budget in the first few months - the whole discussion sprung up internally at Uber in the first place is the bloody CTO of that huge company. So yes, their words do have A TON OF WEIGHT. Thats why they are in such important positions, arent they? They're not quite the Derek from the pub, casually commenting on how Liverpool will fare this season.
• dude250711 5mo ago
  > Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter. Is that quarter same as any other quarter in terms of infrastructure costs (e.g. are there any temporary discounts happening coincidentally)?
  • MadxX79 5mo ago
    Didn't xAI basically donate the compute for that quarter so Anthropic could get to say they turned a profit?
    • simonw 5mo ago
      The SpaceX S-1 says they're charging Anthropic $1.25b a month.
      • travelalberta 5mo ago
        It also states that the first few months (this current quarter where Anthropic are reporting profit) are discounted.
  • travelalberta 5mo ago
    Hey man, that discounted rate on Colossus 1 inference is purely coincidental...
  • jnewton_dev 5mo ago
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• smallerfish 5mo ago
  I think the reasons for them going with API pricing will become abundantly clear when the S-1s become available. If they don't have a story covering how they can get revenue closer to expenses, then they're relying on the market to believe the pixie dust version of their profitability story, which I think people increasingly don't.
• antman 5mo ago
  The costs are exorbitant and most software is not produced by companies with such a huge moat. Anthropic made a profit through their recent bait amd switch pricing. There is zero useful insights online to indicate whether this might die due to commoditisation with good enough open models or fail the race to get more people subsidising unsustainable growth with other people’s money. Who knows? In any case they dont seem to be able to drop usage costs so the business model seems based on wishes
  • brokencode 5mo ago
    Usage costs will come down with better hardware. Hardware is improving rapidly each generation.
    • simonw 5mo ago
      That trend held true for the past three years, but it doesn't feel as safe to me now. But memory costs are going way up. And both OpenAI and Anthropic bumped up the price of their frontier models in April.
      • StrauXX 5mo ago
        Algorithms are also improving. I believe it's very unlikely for these two improvements together to not result in one to two orders of magnitude cheaper cost per "intelligence". Of course, that might just make use cases that are too expensive today viable and thereby increase usage further.
      • brokencode 5mo ago
        Yeah, it’s called supply and demand. Demand for memory went way up suddenly. Now supply is going up rapidly as companies try to cash in on that demand. Supply will eventually catch up with demand. Then the prices will come back down.
    • eikenberry 5mo ago
      Costs will plummet as better hardware becomes available and priced reasonable so that people can more easily run their own open models locally. But that won't help Antropic/OpenAI make more money, quite the opposite.
• darth_avocado 5mo ago
  How is the lack of bad news declaring a victory for AI? I am yet to see any company concretely publish analysis about the ROI from AI. Most companies as far as I know are still treating AI investment as sunk cost with no expectation of returns at the moment. We could very well see a world where companies heavily scale back investment.
• smokel 5mo ago
  Does this analysis factor in potential caching of tokens on the server side? It seems that if they organize things well (as a model provider), they can save quite a lot on that. Looking at my Cursor statistics makes it clear that the token calculations are not at all trivial.
  • simonw 5mo ago
    I believe the ccusage tool I used takes cached token pricing into account.
• trusted_bro 5mo ago
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• osigurdson 5mo ago
  Realistically, OpenAI found product market fit with the OpenAI API playground in 2021. People were using that as ChatGPT at the time.
• airstrike 5mo ago
  Who's to say those enterprises won't churn after XYZ comes out with a decent enough model that costs 10x less to use? There's a whole bag of clever tricks you can play to juice short term results leading to an IPO that may not work longer term. I'll believe they've found product-market fit when they have a product. Right now they're selling the infrastructure, in a highly subsidized and undifferentiated way (at least over a sufficient long period of time of, say, a couple of years).
• stanleydupreez 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• CuriouslyC 5mo ago
  Companies are kool-aid drinking now due to hype, but given how much they're spending, if they don't see REAL, BIG wins from it soon, they're going to scale it back quickly and switch to Chinese models. Claude isn't worth the API cost for a lot of development work, and once companies have had time to collect and crunch data they'll see this.
  • grttq 5mo ago
    Swear people like you were hyping the frontier labs so hard not long ago. Funny to see the change of tone - a lesson for people not to get too ahead of themselves.
    • CuriouslyC 5mo ago
      There's no change in tone, I'm still very bullish on the tech, Claude in particular just isn't worth the API price, which I've always felt was too damn high. I have paid for Gemini 2.5 Pro, Deepseek 3.2/4 and GLM 5 tokens happily though.
      • grttq 5mo ago
        Lmao you won’t admit it will you? You financially benefit from stuff like agents. Of course you will be the last to admit publicly when things aren’t quite heading in the right direction. The gap between hype and reality is ever increasing.
        • CuriouslyC 5mo ago
          You misread my comment because of your personal bias, and now you're acting like it's some sort of own? Come on bro. The models are putting in work, that's indisputable, the thing I'm calling out is that Anthropic's price and hype are running ahead of the value it's delivering. Agents are a great boost at <=5% of SWE salary, a mediocre tradeoff/risk at 20%+, and insane at SV tokenmaxxing levels.
• enraged_camel 5mo ago
  I wonder how Ed Zitron will shift goal posts this time, and how long it will take for that article, when published, to reach HN front page.
• firesteelrain 5mo ago
  Anyone actually making money paying all of these monthly fees? Or just hobbyists? I have yet to see any real ROI posted anywhere.
  • rvz 5mo ago
    This is the same question I said about people running OpenClaw. You don't hear about anymore. Other than the hosting providers, I am also yet to see anyone directly making money from their OpenClaw agent.
  • lugu 5mo ago
    Ask yourself: what is the ROI I provide? It isn't trivial most of the time.
    • firesteelrain 5mo ago
      We measure ROI of employees annually via ranking systems, who gets bonuses, promotions etc
  • brazukadev 5mo ago
    Ironically, we had more new interesting things launched daily 5 years ago before AI.
• asim 5mo ago
  Love how everyone boasted about replacing all the software with ChatGPT and then we end up with coding agents meaning the software engineer are STILL important. The sell is the development tool. It's classic cloud. Where did all the ops people go, many got subsumed by the cloud companies YET every company still has DevOps people to manage cloud infrastructure. The layer of abstraction went up but we still need the people to write the glue code and understand the business. OK great there's a new cash printer in the room. There's a new tool. Let's just start to ground the tooling in its new found gravity, profitability and IPO market dynamics... Reality has set in. The hype cycle is about to explode... Do you remember ride hailing and just how much cash was burned on credits pre Uber IPO. Then remember the IPO itself? These companies are not the new Google. They are a layer on top. Google was still the most efficient cash printing machine in history beyond the the US government and might still be. Will be interesting to see what the trillion dollar IPOs turn into. I'm going to say we see those prices get cut to a third in less than 5 years and scale back up over the next 15-20 years.
  • thewebguyd 5mo ago
    > The sell is the development tool. I've been calling that out for a couple years now. LLMs best and most viable use case is still just as a dev tool. Even for non-programming tasks, I still get better results from the LLM if I instruct it to write code to do the task...look at Claude Cowork for example, it's everything I used to do with python myself. It's not really a novel capability, it's just using python & bash for automations that any sysadmin has been doing for decades. Yeah, that's valuable for a non-techincal audience but is it $1T valuable? I don't think so. When has an IDE or other dev tool ever commanded a $1T valuation? These things get lost in discussions because people conflate "overvalued" with "not useful." LLMs are useful, particularly as dev tool, but Anthropic & OpenAI are definitely way overvalued.
• NortySpock 5mo ago
  "[would have spent] $1,199 with Anthropic, $980 with OpenAI" How many tokens is that, input/output-wise? (a) I'm curious if you feel like you got $2000 worth of value out of them in the last month? (b) I'm also curious if you would have gotten similar quality out of a slightly lower-cost provider of an open-weight model? (e.g. Kimi K2.6 and DeepSeek v4 Pro) and what the spend would have been for that. I myself have managed to spend not quite $4 on OpenRouter and have felt it was very worth it; I just have much smaller, or more targeted requests I guess. (Lately, adding features to a static site generator in Python, or setting up log forwarding via a docker compose file)
  • simonw 5mo ago
    Claude Code: Input tokens: 52,545,485 Output tokens: 5,767,253 Cache create tokens: 5,112,029 Cache read tokens: 1,475,069,465 Total tokens: 1,538,494,232 Total cost: $1,199.79 OpenAI Codex: Input tokens: 52,598,013 Output tokens: 4,681,867 Reasoning output: 2,091,063 Cached input tokens: 1,153,844,864 Total tokens: 1,211,124,744 Total cost: $980.37 I'm confident I got value out of OpenAI - I've been mainly on Codex for the last few weeks. Not so sure I got that value from Claude, just because I've been using it a lot less and somehow the price came to about the same as OpenAI. Given the code I've been able to build in the past month I genuinely do think I got value for the API price version, and (don't tell OpenAI or Anthropic) I think I'd have paid full price. I've not spent nearly enough time with GLM-5.1 and co to compare, but I do know that the prompts I'm using with the agents are not prompts I would have expected to work just three months ago.
    • NortySpock 5mo ago
      Cool! Thanks for the details, and your blog posts are usually interesting food for thought, so thank you for them too!
    • krupan 5mo ago
      Are you saying that the software you wrote using those tools generated enough revenue to cover the $2000?
• 827a 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • simonw 5mo ago
    Fun fact: the $20/month subscription fee for ChatGPT Pro - which set the standard for at least a couple of years - really was an arbitrary decision made based on a Google form: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/12/nick-turley/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/12/nick-turley/
  • tomhow 5mo ago
    We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297777 and marked it off topic. The guidelines specifically ask us to avoid nasty comments like this. These lines in particular make it clear why your comment is out of line: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• rubiquity 5mo ago
  I think it's fair to say they had achieved product-market fit when their revenues were growing deep triple digits month over month. What we're seeing now is that perhaps they have achieved profitability or at the least a more sustainable balance sheet.
• bellowsgulch 5mo ago
  How will they stay profitable if every business lays off engineers because of AI and there are no engineers to use it? /s
• hansmayer 5mo ago
  > Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter No, its more like their own leak to WSJ and according to Ed Zitron -> seems to be heavily engineered via non-GAAP practices such as counting potential, but not realised revenue as actual revenue - the stuff for which I would be arrested if I did it at my company. Also it appears according to Ed's analysis - strangely they seem to be projecting only that one quarter as profitable - potentially to calm the investors ahead of the IPO. Investor fraud anyone?
  • duped 5mo ago
    AI companies/users are filled with liars and grifters, so any numbers/outlook they report should be highly suspect.
    • bflesch 5mo ago
      There's a saying "the fish stinks from the head".
    • supern0va 5mo ago
      I must admit that I am going to find it fascinating when we hit the point where it becomes nearly impossible to deny the efficacy of these tools. I have straight up had people, even in real life, suggest that I'm lying about my productivity gains or what I'm able to accomplish with them. Like, I understand the reasonable arguments against (I even agree with a few), but it's clear that some people have fully inserted their head into the sand and just don't want to believe any of this could be true. Which will be harsh, since I think getting hit with this train all at once in the future is going to be a rougher ride than a slower coming-to-terms-with, even if the result is one we're unhappy with.
      • hansmayer 5mo ago
        In the meanwhile, Google AI search still says the next year after 2026 will be 2028.
        • 5mo ago
• aerhardt 5mo ago
  I find this analysis confusing. PMF for coding was likely reached some time last year. Profitability, which is different, we don’t know. The article kind of confuses both without making a strong economic case or using numbers in a compelling way. I don’t understand what the Uber case has to do with this either. The Uber COO clearly said that at least in terms of ROI he’s not seeing the results either. My take is the product has been very useful for coding (PMF) for months. But it’s certainly not useful at any cost…
  • 0xDEAFBEAD 5mo ago
    And what happens when open models catch up in 6 months or so?
  • righthand 5mo ago
    It’s not supposed to be logical, it’s an LLM evangelism blog that rarely, if ever, has any critical analysis that isn’t pro-industry. Read any/all of the other posts and you won’t find much skepticism but you will find a lot of shilling how great it all is.
    • simonw 5mo ago
      308 posts on AI ethics: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics/ 52 on AI misuse: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-misuse/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-misuse/ 149 on the unsolved challenge of prompt injection: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/ 40 on slop: https://simonwillison.net/tags/slop/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/slop/ If you want an "LLM evangelism blog that rarely, if ever, has any critical analysis that isn’t pro-industry" there are plenty out there. I'm not one of them.
      • alexchamberlain 5mo ago
        I think you should highlight your exemplary pre-AI writing too.
      • csomar 5mo ago
• hansmayer 5mo ago
  > I currently subscribe to the $100/month Max plan from Anthropic and the $100/month Pro plan from OpenAI. If you are a heavy user of coding agents these plans are a fantastic deal. Agreed. But its only a great deal because it is heavily subsidized, as you said yourself. Enjoy while it lasts, but in my book, product-market fit means something along the lines of "product which enjoys a loyal customer base, sold at a price perceived fair by the customers, and generating profit. How many of these does your definition of product-market fit hit here?
• Havoc 5mo ago
  What baffles me is the range of estimates. Operating profit is both post depreciation and fees paid to third parties for hire. So aside from shenanigans like RSUs and financing interest that's already somewhat close to actual economics. Meanwhile we've got commenters here talking of 5-10 trillion with a T revenue shortfall. Those are very different takes on reality
• mschuller 5mo ago
  yep, and the issue is, they took investment
• Hasz 5mo ago
  Mentioned in the article, but it cracks me up that both openai and anthropic are utilizing fairly traditional enterprise GTM plans segmented by verticals. So many startups trying to automate sales, but somehow the two biggest frontier labs have decided that the best GTM strategy is firmly human-in-the-loop.
• pzo 5mo ago
  > If you are a heavy user of coding agents these plans are a fantastic deal. I just ran the ccusage tool on my laptop to get an estimate of how much I would have spent if I were to pay for API tokens in the past 30 days and got You think this is fantastic deal only because they use similar like tricks where they inflate the price and tell you something supposed to cost $1000 but they have this today promo for $100. I was there too and paying for a while. Few weeks ago I tried DeepSeek V4 Pro - expected its gonna be shit but its actually pretty good. The deal is I pay daily ~$1 for DSV4-pro for ~100M API token usage. And they probably not getting broke because >90% of those token in practice is cache read and they very well optimized for that.
  • sourcecodeplz 5mo ago
    Yep, exactly this. And I have so much less anxiety that I have to use my 5-hour/weekly usage or I lose it... with deepseek api the credits never expire, I can use them when I want, how much I want and the prices are ridiculously low for the quality/intelligence/performance.
  • conradkay 5mo ago
    GPT 5.5 is maybe 4x the size of v4 pro, hard to compare price since cache hit is basically free with Deepseek, but 40x cheaper (with their 75% off) seems about right. So ballpark same price per parameter as Simon.
• mbesto 5mo ago
  > but I suspect there’s a more important factor here: I think they’ve finally found product-market fit Ahhh the classic startup term that's definition is nebulous. But also, since when does any definition of product/market fit mean a product is profitable? And profitable in what sense? Unit economics? Overall company?
  • simonw 5mo ago
    Oh I'm absolutely taking advantage of the fact that "product-market fit" has a bit of a nebulous meaning here. It's a great hook to build an article around. My core point is more that April 2026 was the point when Anthropic and OpenAI finally appeared to have figured out a credible business model.
    • mbesto 5mo ago
      > My core point is more that April 2026 was the point when Anthropic and OpenAI finally appeared to have figured out a credible business model. How so? What's specifically changed? We still don't know what their unit economics are and everything you've documented is basically speculation at this point.
      • simonw 5mo ago
        > What's specifically changed? 1. Both Anthropic and OpenAI significantly increased the prices of their latest models. They're clearly not trying to offer the lowest-price-possible to drum up demand any more. 2. Both Anthropic and OpenAI no longer let enterprise companies buy discounted almost-all-you-can-eat subscriptions. Those big enterprises are now paying full API prices. 3. According to reasonably well-sourced leaks, Anthropic may be about to have their first profitable quarter. And I didn't even say "profitable", I said "credible business model". I think getting companies to spend hundreds of dollars per month per seat, WITHOUT crazy subscription discounts, is a credible business model.
        • overgard 5mo ago
          I suspect it might end up being a credible business model for whoever buys the IP eventually (Microsoft, Google?), but I think OpenAI and Anthropic are so far in the hole debt wise that simply having a credible business model won't be enough to save them - it needs to be wildly successful.
• mtrifonov 5mo ago
  They certainly have, but it relies entirely on the assistant frame, which is a problem in and of itself for the trillion-dollar economics. Anthropic and OpenAI have shown people want a tool for task offloading, driving predictable token consumption and justifying the math, so long as users stay in that dynamic. However, knowledge workers using these tools daily are getting exhausted with them. Outputs come out polished but hollow. Talking to a frictionless, frame-completing model all day drains you. If user behavior drifts away from assistant usage because of that, per-token math implodes. The valuations we're hearing about all the time rely on usage compounding daily. The fatigue is a timer running against that compound. Anthropic's Constitution is the closest hedge out there, I think. Installing an identity structure into the model through training. But it's still assistant-first, so the fix there is only partial. I've spent the last year running a product that flips the architecture so identity is primary and the assistant role is secondary. Same frontier models, completely different conversational quality. The fatigue property doesn't really show up. Whichever labs figure out how to install real identity natively in the weights are going to be the ones with PMF in the next phase.
• _verandaguy 5mo ago
  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 that's measured by sheer token count or just "how many of your tasks are you using AI for these days" (combined with the implication that question carries at many orgs which are heavily invested in AI).
  • simonw 5mo ago
    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 fashion.
    • _verandaguy 5mo ago
      I'm saying that the truth lies somewhere in between, and that Anthropic's current revenue is being, in part, propped up artificially. We're also in a place where a lot of the usage guidance around these tools is still nascent. People are cowboying a lot of stuff, even as larger companies start to organize AI policy/safety/responsible use working groups to try and policy around the shortfalls of the technology. IMO: if this technology persists, and if we figure out a way to use it in a broadly safe way, the value proposition will probably trend down rather than up, at least on the code generation front. As a research tool, it shows some promise, though I still find the ethics of the technology disgusting.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
• cj 5mo ago
  > Coding agents really did change everything. These are tools which burn vastly more tokens The assumption here is that this is a positive thing. But this very well could end up being a major negative long term by increasing the cost per user, reducing margins. More usage = more cost = less profit. It's not obvious that more usage is good. It's only good if revenue per user increases more than cost does. I'm skeptical about that.
  • simonw 5mo ago
    > It's only good if revenue per user increases more than cost does. That's why it's so important for these labs that they're selling API tokens for more than the compute+energy costs needed to generate them. Every indicator I've seen is that they do have a positive margin on that. If they don't, they're screwed.
    • mattas 5mo ago
      What's an example of an indicator? Genuinely curious!
      • simonw 5mo ago
        Insider tips from Google and AWS telling me that they run inference at a profit (though that was over a year ago now). Dario telling Dwarkesh three months ago that they have a margin on inference: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dario-amodei-2?timestamp=3528.0 https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dario-amodei-2?timestamp=3528.0
        • infinitezest 5mo ago
          Are these sources not incentivized to say exactly this, regardless of whether it's true?
          • simonw 5mo ago
            The insiders tips? I don't think so, they were people I trust. They had all the incentive in the world to say "I'm not going to talk about that."
• stego-tech 5mo ago
  The big assumption with all of these sorts of analyses is that things will continue as they are for the foreseeable future. In hype-driven markets, you cannot be certain of that. Let's take a view that the author is right: coding agents and their associated harnesses were the inflection point for some degree of profitability and widespread consumption, and that these tools are now yet another SaaS subscription or API bucket expense to bake into every single developer (or developer-adjacent) in the organization alongside your collab suite, HR seat, CRM seat, design seat, etc. To be fair I honestly think that's a safe assumption to make for highly technical firms whose image is derived from remaining on the cutting edge of things. That begs the following questions, which we won't know until IPOs start happening: * Are subscriptions profitable, or just API consumption? * What's the run rate when we just consider subscription-based usage like Claude Code and Codex? What about API calls? * Is there any profitable pathway forward at which enterprises can get unlimited usage but at fixed rates via subscription? * What does customer churn look like for subscription users versus API users? We also have a number of questions for customers that I suspect we'll start seeing receipts for in the coming months, at least from the early adopters: * What was the net gain (loss) from leveraging coding agents? * What's the cost of a developer with or without access to a coding agent + harness? Is it cheaper to hire an outsourced worker with a coding agent subscription, or a domestic worker without one? * At what point does further AI spend result in diminishing returns, i.e. where's the 'sweet spot' for spend? * Did AI boost actual revenue and outcomes, or did it just gamify KPIs? * What roles or work did AI actually replace, versus merely displace during the hype cycle? Not to mention the questions regarding the technology itself: * Will we develop the means to run foundational/frontier models at edge using less resources through some existing (e.g. distillation) or new technology, thus cutting off the profit centers of these firms? * When the market mismatch between supply and demand is resolved, won't it be more affordable for consumers and companies to operate their own AI infrastructure rather than support further centralized buildouts? * Will coding agents improve to the point of being able to bootstrap and self-orchestrate on edge/consumer hardware without substantial technical expertise, or at least improve to the point that traditional IT teams can securely operate them internally without an expensive subscription or API token bucket? All of these will influence the long tail of this bubble, because it is a bubble at this point. Even if these companies are indeed profitable thanks to the coding agent inflection point, there's still so many unanswered questions about utility beyond coding that it's impossible to extrapolate a future. If coding agents are indeed the extent of utility for profitability, then there's no possible way these entities will recoup the investment already sunk into their infrastructure buildouts. Even if more profitable uses are discovered, does this offset or replace the firms disappearing due to AI speculation and their associated contributions to the economy as a whole (RE: the consumer compute industry at present, higher energy costs due to datacenter builds, opportunity cost from harms to local infrastructure from haphazard builds, etc)? Should these firms indeed be runaway successes and immensely profitable to the point of paying off their investors and growing the larger economy, does this end up stifling innovation in a world where most new ideas are fed into LLMs for R&D that are then controlled by only a handful of companies and immensely wealthy people, via systems that are easily surveilled and stolen from without recourse? So many, many questions yet to be answered. Betting the farm because of coding agents is one hell of a gamble.
• hintymad 5mo ago
  The real timing is that we don't have strong enough new business needs for now and we have accumulated enough tech assets, so our work has been increasingly incremental. That means we can build reliable features on top of vast amount of past work - where AI really shines. So, with or without AI, companied would hire fewer software engineers if majority of our work is incremental: add a feature here, fix a bug there, tweak a configuration and etc, then we wouldn't need as many software engineers anyway. AI just accelerated such squeeze. In contrast, imagine if we had the same AI 20 years or so ago. Could AI really write Jersey? I guess not as people were still trying to understand JAX-RS. Could AI really answer all the questions about React? I guess not as React was just invented. Would we use 10x fewer people to build out infra on the public cloud or the entire so-called Big Data platforms? I guess not, as they were still rapidly evolving and we'd need so many engineers to explore so many different possibilities? Could we use AI to build our ML ecosystem with 10X fewer people? I highly doubt so. Heck, 20 years ago R was all the rage and Python's ecosystem was not mature at all. Oh, and mobile computing, could AI lead to 10X fewer people to build all the mobile apps and the underlying infra?
  • aniceperson 5mo ago
    > Could AI really answer all the questions about React? yes, due to ICL > Would we use 10x fewer people to build out infra on the public cloud or the entire so-called Big Data platforms? No, cannot solve core problems, makes a mess at scale You are right about the incremental work. But most of the work is historically incremental imo, only few positions are R&D.
    • no-name-here 5mo ago
      ICL = In-Context Learning where LLMs learn to perform new tasks by reading examples directly within the prompt, rather than requiring permanent model retraining.
• dnnddidiej 5mo ago
  Is PMF enough. It is such a dynamic self-disrupting wave that it is like predicting physical chaos. These aren't early Googles in a blue ocean. Maybe a blue ocean full of pirates and dragons! This isn't me being a doomer I just don't know. Can we look at Q2 profits and draw hockey sticks yet? Remember people are boasting how much their expenses are. That is where we are in the bubble/new paradigm.
• vb-8448 5mo ago
  I'm a huge fan of agent coding but kinda dislike this "llm evangelism". There are still several open points (eg.: code churn, maintainability, subtle bugs human will never do) that everyone with a minimal programming knowledge that seriously used a LLM agent knows about but somehow none of these "big influencers" never mention (or just saying "it's your fault").
• vb-8448 5mo ago
  > That’s $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200—not bad at all! Just imagine how funny it will be if it comes out that big labs were doing some fancy maths to count the 2k$/month in their forecasts ...
• wewewedxfgdf 5mo ago
  Simon Willison just hit the "Publish to top of HN" button.
  • simonw 5mo ago
    Wish I'd hit that one the other day on this one, which I cared a lot more about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48228321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48228321
• Szpadel 5mo ago
  > but as far as I can tell those credit costs are an exact match for the API token costs listed for those models. it is only true for USD. for example if you pay in euro, this is actually more expensive. kind of makes no sense, because it translates to $1 = €1
• atleastoptimal 5mo ago
  I think this was obvious since the birth of ChatGPT Intelligence is a universal good, it can apply to anything, and no, "human intelligence" is not the only form that is useful nor special. There are limitations to AI but also huge advantages, and its obvious that the advantages are worth paying for, given their revenue.
• bambax 5mo ago
  > That’s $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200 So the author claims he's getting $2000 per month worth of frontier AI free of charge. Ok. If he's been doing that for 6 months that's $12k. What has this produced concretely? For $12k you can find a used car in decent condition. Heck for $1200 (his actual out-of-pocket spend) you get a brand new ebike! (on which you could put a pelican and make a photo of both if that's your fancy). But here it's unclear what has come of it.
  • simonw 5mo ago
    I've written a great deal of code - code that would have taken me years of work to produce without LLMs. (It's mostly open source, you're welcome to dig around in https://github.com/simonw https://github.com/simonw and https://github.com/datasette https://github.com/datasette if you like.) My time as an experienced software engineer is worth a lot of money - a whole lot more than $12,000 for the past six months.
    • ex-aws-dude 5mo ago
      And what was your return on investment?
      • simonw 5mo ago
        As I commented elsewhere, I'm still bad at making money from my open source work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296794#48298909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296794#48298909 (I have a feeling if I could say "and I closed $2m in sales with the software I wrote!" people would find a way to say that didn't mean anything anyway, because how can I prove I wouldn't have made those sales writing it by hand?)
        • brazukadev 5mo ago
          > "and I closed $2m in sales with the software I wrote!" Given the audience you are reaching, that is actually the expectation. Github stars is not a great metric.
• thisisaman408 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• epolanski 5mo ago
  Wait till people figure out they can swap Claude code for DS4 Pro and spend a fraction in API billing (actually, significantly less than $100) while barely noticing a difference.
• siteblob 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• vishalrad 5mo ago
  This is great analysis but my first reaction was - is this trolling? The fact that we have to think about whether a $1TN company has achieved product-market fit both articulates 1/just how high the valuations are 2/How hard it is to pin down EXACTLY what PMF is. As a pre-revenue startup, I am laser focused on PMF and frankly if this is the bar, no one will achieve it. But OTOH its heartwarming that people are willing to value you at $1TN before you reach that. Guess everything is in the eye of the beholder?
  • simonw 5mo ago
    The title was indeed meant to throw subtle shade at the idea that supposedly $1tb companies were only just now starting to figure out product-market fit.
• Gravityloss 5mo ago
  I see two really good ideas for monetizing the free tier for consumers. Firstly, if the user is asking for things where AI can link to products or services to buy, there's a very good relevancy, much higher than in other types of ads. Secondly, since the AI often takes time to compute answers to user's questions, they could be shown ads while waiting. People could perhaps be less annoyed by this than some other commercials since they know the break has to be there anyway. (First idea is something I came up when asking Claude to compare some products, or ask for help in lawn care. Second idea was by a colleague.)
• cmiles8 5mo ago
  Article doesn’t mention on-prem and on device models. Almost guaranteed that there are a range of killer enhancements on these fronts waiting to drop until IPOs get closer to inflict maximum chaos on the valuation games. While the big guys will argue they’re worth trillions expect others to drop chaos booms showing their NPV may be effectively zero.
• Zizdefense 5mo ago
  My Costs without CC Max+Caching over past 2 months: $112K. Ran `ccusage` on my Claude Code logs. - Total tokens: 22.2B Without current Claude deals, my personal cost would have been *~$112,000*.
• sandeepkd 5mo ago
  If we take out the circular interests and investments here then there is no way that this is a feasible business in current state.
• vonneumannstan 5mo ago
  HN is the least agi-pilled place on the internet
  • reducesuffering 5mo ago
    HN has been on every wrong side of AGI predictions since the founding article on OpenAI...
    • marcosdumay 5mo ago
      You mean that HN has been predicting AGI will happen, or you mean the Singularity happened earlier today and I missed it that humanity is already all killed?
• overgard 5mo ago
  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/ 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 is already incredibly expensive, I really don't think most people are going to be willing to pay more like $1000 a month.
  • ralphael 5mo ago
    this - I'm wondering why this isn't getting picked up more in the analysis? Its an accounting trick, which is not sustainable. Time will tell.
  • bob1029 5mo ago
    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.
    • QGQBGdeZREunxLe 5mo ago
      How are you billing clients when using AI? Do you pass on costs or do you multiply time saved by your hourly rate and bill that?
      • TheSoftwareGuy 5mo ago
        Sounds like he pays for AI himself. He said he bills by the feature/bug. So he keeps all the productivity gains from using AI
      • bob1029 5mo ago
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• aagha 5mo ago
  Ed Zitron begs to differ
• noddingham 5mo ago
  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 remains enormous." Yes, it's just the yearning for AI failures. It couldn't possibly be runaway costs, record revenues, and massive layoffs. It couldn't possibly be that these tools are lighting dollars on fire by people already paid significantly well and not producing any increase in "value" for it (I recognize that output is 100x but outcomes are flat by all measures). [1] https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-productivity-what-the-evidence-really-says/ https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-pr... [2] https://futuretech.mit.edu/publication/crashing-waves-vs-rising-tides-preliminary-findings-on-ai-automation-from-thousands-of-worker-evaluations-of-labor-market-tasks https://futuretech.mit.edu/publication/crashing-waves-vs-ris...
  • simonw 5mo ago
    What's the psychosis?
    • yokoprime 5mo ago
      Sometimes it feels like theres this opposite AI psychosis, where anything AI is bad and boils the ocean, takes our jobs and makes RAM expensive. Its a component in the current economy, but things like tariffs, closing the strait of hormuz etc is equally bad for the economy. Anyway, just find it strange to be so militantly anti a certain tech.
      • dmix 5mo ago
        That’s the modern internet. What sells is the most overdramatic doom and gloom take possible.
        • Gigachad 5mo ago
• aenis 5mo ago
  The end game here is going back from a model where a bunch of product and tech management people sit in the U.S. or Europe, and try to manage thousands of mediocre talent sitting somewhere far away. The new model is you give those coding tools to good engineers colocated with your product people, and you ship good stuff much faster. If you can achieve such a setup, the token costs can be $50k per seat per month and you still run circles around the legacy IT models in terms of efficiency. Giving everyone the API keys and not changing the way products are managed is not going to work.
  • overgard 5mo ago
    Good lord, what company would want to spend 600k per employee just to go maybe %20 faster (what the studies seem to show is a realistic estimate for productivity gains), I'm building a product right now with some AI coding (despite my negative sentiment about AI in general they are useful). I am both the product person and the engineer, and I'm pretty decent at using it, so according to the hype I should be seeing like a 10x speedup. I am not seeing that. It's definitely faster, but there are also days where I'm stuck cleaning up things after going too fast for too long, or periods where I need to put the software in front of people to get real feedback, or even periods where I just need to use it extensively myself to find the pain points and bugs. I just don't see this "running circles" once you get past an MVP and you actually need to build something secure and not embarassingly broken.
    • grttq 5mo ago
      To me the question is, can the frontier labs make the variance of output lower + make the output of higher quality to justify their prices? If not lower priced chinese offerings will be better as its cheaper per token - giving you more attempts to offset the variance. My feeling on the former is no... I believe they tried really hard but they've settled on pure marketing now to attempt to fight off the chinese with perceived superiority in quality.
• outageroom 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• jcmfernandes 5mo ago
  These folks have no lasting moat and they know it. We are still close to the November 2025 inflection point, so they had a clear advantage during these past few months. That will soon fade as open-weights models become really good, which is arguably already the case with DeepSeek V4.
• hottrends 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• protocolture 5mo ago
  I feel like we should just ignore all LLM news until after they IPO, lots of positive sentiment astroturfing bots.
• jwpapi 5mo ago
  I have to give them kudos. This whole thing is the greatest swindle of all time. AI has some use cases, but not at the price it’s currently priced at. I’ve been on AI since GPT-2 with a lot of heavy users. Every user has the same story, curiosity, surprise, hype, hate, realization. Enterprise is usually a bit behind and are right now at hype cycle, that’s where they sold all the deals and do the IPO. It’s really a VC masterclass. Don’t get me wrong there is are useful cases of AI, but not the way the want it to be. Quite similar to Blockchain. The idea of decentralized money has right to exist. 99% of other coins not. AI is a faster, but still less accurate search engine. AI is great in finding bugs, it’s great at ruber duck debugging. The reason I call it a swindle is, because along with the marketing it gives tons of people in the world the impression, they can now build their own startup, game, infra etc without the need to learn it themselves. This leads to millions of abandoned and low qualiy projects and products, because the vast majority has never built the mental modal necessary to solve the problem thoroughly. In the end they’ve wasted months and money (but burnt tokens). This is what I call a swindle. All early adaptors I know have not drastically winded down their usage, not because of money, but because there is no new case. If you want to explore a new project you can get onboarded quickly learn a lot and then switch to documentation and live testing. For me usage is the lowest it has been the last 2 years. I would not let AI touch my code. I have anxiety around it, because it will gripple back up. I will let it read my code and let me know what I did wrong so I’m sharpening myself. 100s of companies including open source solution can offer that for me. All my non-tech friends are now in hype cycle and share their hype and fore forseeable frustration with me. I have to say I’m in a way impressed in how AI has been rigorously vc-utilized (conciously or not-conciously) to generate these vast companies with the whole world watching.
  • aspenmartin 5mo ago
    Trying to parse the raw claims here maybe you can help me out - it’s a swindle because ROI of tokens for coding models is not positive? As in it doesn’t bring enough value to charge like the $100/mo? - enterprise customers are too dumb to see this - IPO to max out the CEO profits for what is ultimately blockchain vaporware Am I getting that right? Or am I putting words in your mouth? > it gives tons of people in the world the impression, they can now build their own startup, game, infra etc without the need to learn it themselves. I can’t speak for peoples beliefs and motivations, but this seems to be strawmanning, no? AI is a powerful tool to force multiply people. You can’t just prompt “build me an enterprise SaaS app worth $1B” or “build me GTA6 and don’t hallucinate” but is that your impression of what’s happening? Dario and Sam are saying “if you buy our coding agent subscription you can build a game with zero skill and one shot and then be rich”? If you don’t find value in AI agents I can see reasons why that could easily be true today. Also if it just gives you the heebie-jeebies. But to say it’s a swindle on par with the blockchain I think that contradicts an enormous amount of signals and also the actual dialogue (not just headline sound bytes) around what these systems are capable of today and what we expect them to do say at the end of the year.
• ath3nd 5mo ago
  [dead]
• try-working 5mo ago
  Product market fit for the models, sure. But their cost structure is going to kill them as token costs drop this year, following DeepSeek and Xiaomi and soon more providers.
• cli-market 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• MaxPock 5mo ago
  The writer is on to something. Musk saw the writing on the wall and bought cursor. AI money is in coding plans
• hmaddipatla 5mo ago
  [dead]
• raincole 5mo ago
  The article is at least one year too late. Claude Code has been the product-market fit. It's so obvious retrospectively that questioning it at this point would be very silly. The problem is not whether they have PMF (they do) but how they're going to compete against on-prem and Chinese providers. Having PMF != printing money forever. The author claim: > That’s $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200 No matter what it means, rebuild the same thing you built with these $2,000 tokens with DeepSeek Pro V4 and let's see if Claude has a chance to survive.
• zuogl 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• claysmithr 5mo ago
  I’m happy with spending zero dollars on ai lol..
• Zafira 5mo ago
  The amount of caveats and vibes that this article is powered by could run New York City for a decade.
• cedws 5mo ago
  My employer went from the Max plans to Enterprise this month which was utterly stupid. We went from paying $200 per head to like $500 for some people, even more for others. For the same product. Oh well, guess we’re doing our part to prop up this bubble.
• zane_shu 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• wg0 5mo ago
  This requires hard evidence which isn't available. Circumstantial evidence is all otherwise. Bloggers are having AI psychosis too.
  • simonw 5mo ago
    I thought the links I provided were pretty solid. A lot more solid then you'll see in most commentary about this stuff! I agree with this person, let's use AI psychosis for when using an LLM gives someone psychosis, not for when we think, what, that a blogger made some poor assumptions? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296794#48303200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296794#48303200
• chipsrafferty 5mo ago
  I think my company is going to cancel our subscription once it realizes we're spending more money in a week that a developer gets paid in a month.
• jvaqueiro 5mo ago
  I'm surprised by how good coding agents are. I think PMF was reached last year or the year before (at least for coding). With current limits my 100/mo codex subscription is more than enough for the work I do. However, I do worry about when does current subsidies are going to end? I can see myself paying up to 300/mo, but more than that will be prohibitive. What's the long term plan here? Are OpenAI's and Anthropic's costs expected to increase/decrease?
• signalbright 5mo ago
  That might be an understatement
• showurwerk 5mo ago
  Not sure I can agree with this. Sure, we have enterprise paying, but are we actually getting anything new and interesting made from LLMs compared to if we just didn't have them at all? Maybe acceleration in smaller teams. We still seem in the era of the early internet where what questions LLMs change hasn't exactly emerged.
• jwpapi 5mo ago
  Unfortunately Simon drank from the AI Cool Aid. I know everything you’ve done for the tech community, but I please you to take some time off and reflect on this article. It’s not on par with ur usual level, but the tendency has been visible from the last couple of articles.
  • simonw 5mo ago
    Genuine question: what's wrong with it? I thought this was one of my best pieces of writing this year. (In case you missed it, the title was meant as a subtle burn on those two companies - it's pretty absurd for them to only just be finding product-market fit when they're already valued at over a trillion dollars.)
    • jwpapi 5mo ago
      I see you trying really hard to make things right and are everywhere in the comment. I feel a bit bad in formulating my comments a bit polemical. Also my highest respect for responding so calmly without lowering your debating level to mine. I try to best to explain what I think is wrong. To start I didn’t interpret the article as a burn. I think it’s interesting to explain what’s wrong with it, because it seems similar to what‘s wrong with AI. The issues are subtle. - Anthropic doesn’t have a profitable quarter, it’s financial engineering (https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle...) - The first argument about your subscription price, doesn’t has anything to do with the overall claim of the article. It would if at all be a weak argument to support the opposite. Subsidizing prices signals a lack of PMF. - That you hire sales people after you had a billions of funding is nothing surprising and doesn’t indicate PMF or not. - AI Implementations are fresh and of course AI Failures are thin, but so are AI successes. I haven’t seen any companies creating billions of shareholder value because they’ve massively invested in AI and their competitiors didn’t You really can look at these things in 5 to 10 years and it is multi-faceted including cultural acceptance. - That they need to buy more compute to satisfy the requests is probably the strongest argument in the artical, but don’t conclusive. The product is been sold heavily subsidized and in hype cycle. And again both OPENAI and Anthropic have to show growth in order to justify the IPO. - Regarding the part about revenue I refer to the linkedm article above, as it does explain it very well. The conclusion is reasonable given the arguments, but not the title. However it is missing all the real discussion points that are actually in observation at the moment. Local models as alternatives, IPO finanical engineering, how AI implementation actually will perform over years... Let’s all not forget crypto. It’s been full of "use cases" just a bunch of years ago. I like the idea of crypto(btc,eth) and I’m still invested, but 99.99% of coins have died on promies. So this is not a piece of critical thinking, but this reads like a twitter thread to sell me a course :/
• toksum 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• mark_l_watson 5mo ago
  Well, good for them that they are charging enterprises API rates. Why in the world not do something similar for consumers? Use for free a few times a day, have a $5 dollar plan for light use, and perhaps $10 to $15 for heavier use. If 90% of consumers pay nothing then ‘drop them’ except for letting them have an account and a few queries a day. It is easy for me to change providers. Right now I use the open source Claud Code harness with two paid API venders for DeepSeek v4 (flash and Pro). I like seeing how much each session costs.
• JRGC1 5mo ago
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• RevEng 5mo ago
  I usually agree with Simon but I think he is overlooking an important factor. There is a lot of AI usage happening not because it shows benefits, but because the business has mandated its ubiquitous use. Companies having dashboards for token usage and rewarding people for using more tokens is a real thing. I just spoke with someone today who works at Microsoft and they are required to use AI for all of their work - they have to make a special request with justification if they decide not to use AI for even a single PR. This kind of demand isn't driven by value from either the company itself or from its workers; it is the kind of artificial demand you get from make-work projects to keep people employed during hard times. We have to wait for the hype to settle down and people start making business decisions based on results before we can really value these AI products.
  • ggttk 5mo ago
    Correct the question is one of real vs fake demand curves.
  • no-name-here 5mo ago
    I think token leaderboards are idiotic, however… many companies are requiring AI use, with by far the most likely reason being that they truly believe AI-assisted development gets (or will after the time needed to get employees acclimated) better returns.
    • andrewflnr 5mo ago
      That mere belief by companies is not enough on its own to substantiate durable market fit. Companies believe all kinds of silly things. We're looking for long-term trends, and the returns have to be real for AI development to be more than a dream companies will eventually wake up from.
• asfkasdfasdadf 5mo ago
  [dead]
• willsmith72 5mo ago
  can we stop throwing around the term "profitable"? didn't they say "operating profit"? so so different to actually making a profit
• jsemrau 5mo ago
  Anthropic for sure. It's a useful professional product that I find many use-cases for in my professional and private life. OpenAI not so much.
• DeathArrow 5mo ago
  I think we are overly fixating on Anthropic and OpenAI. Since there are lots of models that are competitive and have a much better pricing, both OpenAI and Anthropic seem inefficient. I don't get why someone would want to buy shares after IPO apart from fomo and artificially built enthusiasm. Anthropic and OpenAI may well be the Altavista and the Yahoo of the AI age.
• Maojer 5mo ago
  Man what a disaster article
• pslab 5mo ago
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• iancmceachern 5mo ago
  It reminds me of this Steve Jobs Clip: https://youtu.be/0lvMgMrNDlg?si=QkkOnngYTjaSPlIy https://youtu.be/0lvMgMrNDlg?si=QkkOnngYTjaSPlIy He said, so many years ago, that there will become a time where computing power is so prevalent that we will stop using the person to make the computers job easier and start using the computer to make the humans job of interfacing with it easier. But in this context, it would mean the other side of increase productivity is decreased time to do the same work. These are the same thing.
• kkarpkkarp 5mo ago
  > I currently subscribe to the $100/month Max plan from Anthropic and the $100/month Pro plan from OpenAI. If you are a heavy user of coding agents these plans are a fantastic deal. Guys, what - in your opinion - does "heavy user" mean? I thought I am heavy user (I am using AI to code every day 8hr a day + side projects) but 20 USD/month Cursor plan is always enough. What should I be doing to extend my license to higher level?
  • jeswin 5mo ago
    I'm out of credits codex pro credits (200 plan) in 4-5 days, and then I switch to claude (another large plan) mostly or just go out more and get Vitamin D. :) I spend most of my time designing and tweaking tests suites, and improving test performance. These commits are almost entirely Codex: https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsonic/commits/main/ https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsonic/commits/main/ - but it's possible only because there's a very large test suite attached to it. All of that is very token intensive. If OpenAI gave me 3x my limits, I'd find ways to eat it up in a week. What do these tokens give me? Well, I think in a week or two, I hope to port the TypeScript-Go compiler back into TypeScript, but compiled to native code. It's probably not particularly useful for most ppl, but it's a hobby project that I've spent the last 7 months on.
  • mock-possum 5mo ago
    How many sessions are you running simultaneously, how careful are you being about token consumption and context window management, and what level of reasoning are you using (with which models?) 8hrs a day doesn’t really mean anything without a lot additional qualifiers. fwiw lately I’ve been straddling 2 or 3 claude codes and one Claude cowork, primarily on 4.7 with high effort - the company’s paying for it, so I’m doing my best to burn as many tokens as I have the mental capacity to manage. At that rate, the 100 account is completely necessary, I was blowing through my 4-hour limits consistently before requisitioning an upgrade.
    • kkarpkkarp 5mo ago
      at most I run 2-3, but usually one. About token consumption and models: that's the thing. I hear this question often, but my answer is always the same. As I am Cursor user, I run it always in Auto mode (so Cursor decides which model to use, I don't even know which is in use). Sometimes I switch from Auto to defined model but I found it quickly triggers "you are out of tokens" notices so nope: I stick to Auto :) 20 usd / month and that's it
• jimnotgym 5mo ago
  They have the whole software industry addicted to AI. They will be pushing the price continually up, and like addicts they will find a way to pay
• vfalbor2 5mo ago
  He is talking about tokenization of different llm and comparing, and this is inacurate because you cannot compare if you dont how it tokenice the words, some tokenicer could be cheap with more tokens than other because of their features. Not agree with Simón speech.
• CAX 5mo ago
  $50/month tops is like 60B
• attentive 5mo ago
  > and both companies now have measures to lock their enterprise customers (who tend to sign year-long deals) at those API prices why would enterprises do that if they can just use bedrock or vertex?
• harrouet 5mo ago
  Product-market fit, but what about customer retention? It is quite trivial to switch from using one model or another. Likewise, in a few years we'll have affordable laptops to run today's frontier models. What's their plan to let us keep subscribing?
  • simonw 5mo ago
    Right now the main plan for that appears to be having those enterprise accounts commit for a year at a time.
    • harrouet 5mo ago
      One-year commitment won save their churn rate without vendor lock-in. How about letting you maintain a vibe-coded repo only with access to the context that led to it ?
• crakhamster01 5mo ago
  > 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.
• tornikeo 5mo ago
  And I think that's amazing. I'd like to keep using the subsidized coding tools, especially Codex, since I've given up on Claude. Hopefully the PMF allows the subsidy to continue. Would hate to have to move to the next coding harness again.
• mchusma 5mo ago
  If we define product market fit as profitable with a trillion dollar valuation, I think the term has lost its helpfulness. I do agree with the author that these companies seem much stronger financially recently though.
• zenai666 5mo ago
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• dep_b 5mo ago
  It’s funny how a US$30 ReSharper license that would give me a 20% performance boost in programming was out of the question, while me burning US$3000 per month on tokens for a 40% boost in performance never was questioned
  • mrpopo 5mo ago
    I feel this so much. What was all that fuss about needing 3 levels of approval for any software license? Or having to provide a compare chart against open-source alternatives? The money would be so much better spent that way as well, supporting individual programmers.
• 3vo-ai 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• emsign 5mo ago
  They've finally forced the system to fake profits. Attacking personal computing, sucking the rest of the industry dry, yeah eventually you can make people pay for your shit. I still pray these vultures will implode without too-big-to-fail safety nets. And big daddy Trump can't help them anymore by fixing the system for them, no matter how much billions they are paying into his personal pockets. The future are small models, nobody really needs big compute in the long run, that's why big tech is going for our personal hardware. So we won't become their competitor in their rent only economy. True competition is eliminated, natural evolution is being fixated by the government. This is not going to end well for the USA.
• einpoklum 5mo ago
  Sounds like mostly-baseless praise for the LLM behemoths / capital investment black holes. > I currently subscribe to the $100/month Max plan from Anthropic and the $100/month Pro plan from OpenAI ... which already indicates a bias. > If you are a heavy user of coding agents these plans are a fantastic deal... that’s $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200—not bad at all! Thank you for the sales pitch. Perhaps go buy a car and tell us how [insert your manufacturer] has "found product-market fit"? > Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter. First, the strong rumor is a claim by Anthropic itself. But even assuming that's true - it's an "operating profit", i.e. disregarding the massive capital expenses for years, and may also disregards ongoing capital expenses, if those happen not to be taken this particular quarter. > 1 Trillion .. companies spending $200+/month/user will get you there a whole lot faster First note the use of the first person plural to talk about Anthropic and OpenAI. But that aside - most companies aren't paying $200 USD/user-month. But even if they were - if we take the 30 Million SW developers mentioned in trjordan's comment as subscribers, that's 2400/user-year * 30 Million = 72 Billion USD / year. And this is already rather optimistic, but - want to double that number of subscribers? Fine, make it 150 Billion / year. Still not there with a rosy outlook and assuming the hype and enthusiasm continue for many years. And those rosy estimates are more likely than not unrealistic. I am reminded of this review of some empirical research regarding the benefit of LLM/AI use: https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-productivity-what-the-evidence-really-says/ https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-pr...
• rldjbpin 5mo ago
  money talks, and being a broky from outside the valley/west coast, the "product-market fit" here are the neighbours of the service providers. the economics simply don't work unless you make six figures, at least to just give it a go blindly. the providers are also still figuring out what they can get away by charging, and they are getting a similar treatment from those under the stack. the caps and limits are not very transparent, and it is quite difficult to know what is "enough". the current rate does not stay the same and the contract is changed way too often to dedicate for the long term. regardless, the subsidized rates should not be sustainable forever. make hay while the sun shines i suppose.
• dev_l1x_be 5mo ago
  I think the third company (likely Google) is going to make LLMs financially feasible with: - dedicated hardware (https://cloud.google.com/tpu https://cloud.google.com/tpu) - optimized models (https://research.google/blog/turboquant-redefining-ai-efficiency-with-extreme-compression/ https://research.google/blog/turboquant-redefining-ai-effici...)
• gcr 5mo ago
  For an alternate albeit somewhat contrarian view, also see Ed Zitron’s piece that add context to Anthropic’s profitability: https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle... TL;DR Ed argues that the deal between Anthropic and xAI could have been negotiated in such a way as to make Anthropic only appear profitable during its “ramp-up” period in June, which incidentally is also the month that Anthropic is making tons of other pricing changes.
• throwatdem12311 5mo ago
  If they’ve spent all this cash, and all we have to show for all this AI baloney are crappy coding agents that constantly make the same mistakes no matter how much you try to guide them. All the slop content, all the bots, all the misinformation and fake AI images and videos. All of the social and economic disruption from datacenter buildouts. The massive nosedive in reliability on the world’s software infrastructure. After all of that and all we get is a code bot so a few incompetent loser devs can bloviate about not writing their own code and brag about never reading it. Burn it all to the gd ground. Destroy this new Tower of Babel.
• diogogberger 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• jreynar 5mo ago
  I may be biased because I work on an AI powered enterprise productivity product, but while I agree they have PMF right now, I wonder whether people's use will evolve in ways that undercut the current PMF. Chatting with an assistant is great if there's no product with tailored UI available that also has the AI capabilities. But once there is, I suspect people may switch, or more importantly enterprises may switch because they'll get the benefits of AI without the clunkiness of a chat only interface. We may see another DOS -> GUI-like shift. More specialized products will consume tokens but their builders will be incented to optimize token use and switch models as costs and capabilities change. And if search engines become more AI capable, and Google is clearly striving for this, then they may have pressure from two sides that could squeeze the number of use cases for AI chat. AI coding isn't going anywhere and nor is the need for AI in general but I wonder if the products will have to evolve significantly to maintain the current levels of PMF. And then there's the question of profitability...
  • oxedom 5mo ago
    MCP-Apps could be the solution for tailored UI.
• frevib 5mo ago
  “the reality of AI right now is that it only works for coding.” Kind of…
• rhubarbtree 5mo ago
  PMF is such a bullshit term. There’s no precise definition. It’s bs. The fact is that investment is at a scale so large that current trajectories are nowhere near going to provide ROI. The model companies are trying to milk every drop of ARR they can before IPOing. That is entirely the current narrative. You can hurt ARR before it churns if your goals are short term. Anthropic being profitable is laughable. Sure, by some accounting measure that no one seriously uses. But looking at revenue and what they’re raising you can see the true story. The truth is we need a revolutionary step up in capability to justify capex spend. It’s possible that might come - Opus 4.5 brought one - but failing that we’ll see the bubble pop once the IPO pumping is done.
• eddysir 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• ludwigvan 5mo ago
  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?
• Ayush_Khati1 5mo ago
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• m3kw9 5mo ago
  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.
• motbus3 5mo ago
  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.
• pandoro 5mo ago
  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.
• Bolin-Weng_666 5mo ago
  [dead]
• kamazaki 5mo ago
  The product-market fit question feels premature when most usage is still developers building on top of the APIs, not end users paying directly.
• pseudopolous 5mo ago
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• k_plankenhorn 5mo ago
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• maxothex 5mo ago
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• _r6ox 5mo ago
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• trash_cat 5mo ago
  Discovering that Enterprise customers tolerate higher prices compared to retails consumers is discovering demand elasticities not PMF. Am I missig something?
• tabs_or_spaces 5mo ago
  Product market fit and profitability are two different things. Arguably product market fit was fond last November already. I don't think agents were the turning point that caused this. Profitability, not yet. For me, it depends on whether companies are seeing a positive ROI from their ai investments. This website is skewed more towards big tech companies, but everyone that's not big tech needs to see positive ROI with using ai tools. Short term might see a profit, but medium to long term we still need to wait a bit.
• nektro 5mo ago
  anthropic rumored to be having a profitable quarter is a ruse to ready them up for IPO or otherwise. they could've had a profitable quarter at any point in their history but they only do so if they stop making models; this has been established. they make a model, they sell inference and make a ton of money, they train the next model at 10x the cost, they sell inference and make a ton of money, they train the next model at 10x the cost, repeat
• sspoisk 5mo ago
  [flagged]