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The unit economics might be just fine. We'll know more after IPO. The drug dealer analogy has a darker side to it, however. Once your dependent, they can driv
by fny 4mo ago
The unit economics might be just fine. We'll know more after IPO.
The drug dealer analogy has a darker side to it, however.
Once your dependent, they can drive up the price just because. It doesn't need to be for existential reasons.
- airstrike 4mo agoIt's a really different market, though. New entrants can easily undercut them if they price too high
- okr 4mo agoAI is a worker for me. That i pay for. Basically i am in the same game now to reduce the prizes i have to pay for my workers. Just like the employers are, that seek to reduce costs for employees, as we are simply too expensive. We need more competition among the workers. Let's introduce more chinese workforce! ;)
- nemomarx 4mo agoIf you had a choice of maybe 3-4 contracting firms to hire workers from and you weren't large enough to negotiate on price I think you'd be in a pet bad spot as a business?
- okr 4mo agoI would say so, yep. I just find it funny, that suddenly i am in the position to find for the cheapest option for my lovely AI workers. While usually me is the one who complains to be underpaid. I am in the same shoe as my employers now.
- dofm 4mo agoAll of the silent, hidden model routing OpenAI does strongly suggests that the unit economics are not just fine, at least not yet. If apparently the only way you can make money with your product this early is to dilute and adulterate it behind the scenes, it strongly suggests you want the customer to continue to believe they are getting value that you can't afford to supply. More prosaically: if either of these firms could prove that they were even really close to profitable on inference, they would have bloomin' said so while they were trying to raise more money.
- chrismarlow9 4mo agoI'm finding it challenging to believe they wouldn't just cannibalize anything dependent on them in that way or at minimum launch a directly competing product.
- onion2k 4mo agoOnce your dependent, they can drive up the price just because. It doesn't need to be for existential reasons. This is the crisis point for vibe-coders. A developer can go back to writing code by hand, as horrible as that might sound. Someone who hasn't learned to code but builds with AI can't go back. They either pay or they stop. That will be an painful choice whichever way you fall.
- jcgrillo 4mo agoThere's a secret third option: learn. At one point, all of us were "nontechnical", but we learned. The trick is to never stop.
- akazantsev 4mo agoIs it? Learning is one thing. But owning a large codebase, you see for the first time, is a completely different level.
- jcgrillo 4mo agoYeah giving up is totally a viable choice, but it isn't the only option.
- VorpalWay 4mo agoWhen I started working on a large legacy C++ code base in the early 2010s, I learnt. It took probably close to a year until I was proficient enough that I didn't regularly need to ask where to fins things. This is a skill we used to have (and some of us still have). Though if your code base is all a vibe coded mess and you don't have a senior human colleague to ask... Good luck?
- jcfrei 4mo agoThere are already open weight models out there that are capable and cheap enough for a lot of coding tasks. Not as good as Claude but not far from it. There's no going back to pre-AI coding.
- JimsonYang 4mo agoThe dependent idea is questionable- when your boss tells you to not use the most expesive models-you just dont I would assume when price hikes happen either 1) less non technical people would vibecode as it doesnt impact the work that much 2) people use the cheaper chinese models 3)we're jamming ai into everything because were exploring. We will just niche down into use cases that provide high roi