3 ms·

I think part of the new equation may also become; "Why even pay for the SaaS in the first place if you can just forge the service exactly how you want it?" The

I think part of the new equation may also become; "Why even pay for the SaaS in the first place if you can just forge the service exactly how you want it?" The benefits of unlimited access to the tool you forge are still there, its just a lot easier to make whatever tool you want. Are there any examples of products containing ai inference that are successful? Products that are beyond just direct access to frontier LLM's, I mean.

coconido 2mo ago
[dead]
esafak 2mo ago
As if making all the decisions that go into that product, hosting it, and maintaining it are free! Now do that for all the SaaS you subscribe to. Would you even get any real work done?
- cwmoore 2mo ago
  So many pivot opportunities, we’ll live remotely from office.
- nostrademons 2mo ago
  There wouldn't be a product. Consumers would just use the underlying foundational models directly to solve their problem. ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini are the products, not your business. Products are only viable when you do a lot of work to solve a problem, which is then shared by many potential customers. It makes sense to amortize the high costs of solving the problem across all the different customers to reap economies of scale. Businesses then pay for product design, hosting, and maintenance because those costs can also be amortized, and they are cheaper than a bespoke solution for each customer. But if the bespoke solution becomes cheaper than that, because it's generated by an LLM that doesn't need to be paid a living wage, there's no reason to have the product in the first place. Just solve your damn problem and let other people solve theirs. This is an underrated factor in the market structure of the AI bubble going on now. Anecdotally, we're not seeing new AI-based products other than the foundational models and coding assistants gain traction. Why? Because AI makes it so easy to customize the solution to your particular needs that everybody is just solving their particular needs directly. It's the opposite of the Internet boom, where the network greatly expanded the potential market, reduced the cost of reaching them, and made it economical to spend large amounts of money building a software product that had a TAM of billions. The AI boom instead enables extremely cheap customization, which shrinks the market to a single customer who uses AI to directly solve their problem rather than building a product that's generally applicable.
  - esafak 2mo ago
    > Consumers would just use the underlying foundational models directly to solve their problem. ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini are the products, not your business. How am I going to use ChatGPT instead of, say, Figma or an office suite with my coworkers?? It's no use for it to spin up a clone for me if my coworkers can't collaborate. And if they can, what it will serve is a product. How can it be cheaper for every company to re-invent the wheel? > Products are only viable when you do a lot of work to solve a problem, which is then shared by many potential customers. Yes, that's what businesses pay services for.
    - DangitBobby 2mo ago
      > How can it be cheaper for every company to re-invent the wheel? Companies not matching their prices to current reality, mostly.
      - esafak 2mo ago
        There are already free, open source clones of numerous things but companies still pay for commercial versions. Do you think LLMs that you have to pay for are going to change that?
    - nostrademons 2mo ago
      Actual example: my wife wanted a logo for the facepainting business she's starting with our 5yo, so she asked Gemini "I want a logo with these objects in it, drawn in these colors, with this business name." And it spits back a perfectly passable logo in 5 seconds. Done. No designer needed. No Figma needed. It cut out the entire value chain. Is it as good as a professional could've done with Photoshop? No. But it's about 90-95% of the way there, which is good enough that neither her nor any customers would care. A great deal of business is precisely this, tasks that need to be done but where you only care about "good enough" solutions. After all, a key principle of business is you don't outsource your competitive advantages. You pay people for the table stakes, the things that everybody needs but that they only need to be "good enough". LLMs can generate "good enough" facsimiles of a wide variety of fields.
- samrus 2mo ago
  Hosting is cheap if its abstracted away. Same with the technical aspect of maintainance About design and the product side of maintainance, what i have felt is that, deep down inside, the user does know exactly what they need. If they can learn to communicate that in a way another person or agent can understand, then design and maintainance will be fine. Thats a big if, but if the economics align for people to benefit from developing that skill, maybe they do.
anal_reactor 2mo ago
If my manager prefers to pay for SaaS while I sit on my ass rather than have me develop an in-house solution, how do LLMs drastically change the equation?
tonyedgecombe 2mo ago
>"Why even pay for the SaaS in the first place if you can just forge the service exactly how you want it?" This is the part I'm least convinced by. Corporates used to develop their own tools and they moved away from it for many reasons. Cost of development was only one of those reasons.

coconido 2mo ago

[dead]

esafak 2mo ago

As if making all the decisions that go into that product, hosting it, and maintaining it are free! Now do that for all the SaaS you subscribe to. Would you even get any real work done?

cwmoore 2mo ago
So many pivot opportunities, we’ll live remotely from office.
nostrademons 2mo ago
There wouldn't be a product. Consumers would just use the underlying foundational models directly to solve their problem. ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini are the products, not your business. Products are only viable when you do a lot of work to solve a problem, which is then shared by many potential customers. It makes sense to amortize the high costs of solving the problem across all the different customers to reap economies of scale. Businesses then pay for product design, hosting, and maintenance because those costs can also be amortized, and they are cheaper than a bespoke solution for each customer. But if the bespoke solution becomes cheaper than that, because it's generated by an LLM that doesn't need to be paid a living wage, there's no reason to have the product in the first place. Just solve your damn problem and let other people solve theirs. This is an underrated factor in the market structure of the AI bubble going on now. Anecdotally, we're not seeing new AI-based products other than the foundational models and coding assistants gain traction. Why? Because AI makes it so easy to customize the solution to your particular needs that everybody is just solving their particular needs directly. It's the opposite of the Internet boom, where the network greatly expanded the potential market, reduced the cost of reaching them, and made it economical to spend large amounts of money building a software product that had a TAM of billions. The AI boom instead enables extremely cheap customization, which shrinks the market to a single customer who uses AI to directly solve their problem rather than building a product that's generally applicable.
- esafak 2mo ago
  > Consumers would just use the underlying foundational models directly to solve their problem. ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini are the products, not your business. How am I going to use ChatGPT instead of, say, Figma or an office suite with my coworkers?? It's no use for it to spin up a clone for me if my coworkers can't collaborate. And if they can, what it will serve is a product. How can it be cheaper for every company to re-invent the wheel? > Products are only viable when you do a lot of work to solve a problem, which is then shared by many potential customers. Yes, that's what businesses pay services for.
  - DangitBobby 2mo ago
    > How can it be cheaper for every company to re-invent the wheel? Companies not matching their prices to current reality, mostly.
    - esafak 2mo ago
      There are already free, open source clones of numerous things but companies still pay for commercial versions. Do you think LLMs that you have to pay for are going to change that?
  - nostrademons 2mo ago
    Actual example: my wife wanted a logo for the facepainting business she's starting with our 5yo, so she asked Gemini "I want a logo with these objects in it, drawn in these colors, with this business name." And it spits back a perfectly passable logo in 5 seconds. Done. No designer needed. No Figma needed. It cut out the entire value chain. Is it as good as a professional could've done with Photoshop? No. But it's about 90-95% of the way there, which is good enough that neither her nor any customers would care. A great deal of business is precisely this, tasks that need to be done but where you only care about "good enough" solutions. After all, a key principle of business is you don't outsource your competitive advantages. You pay people for the table stakes, the things that everybody needs but that they only need to be "good enough". LLMs can generate "good enough" facsimiles of a wide variety of fields.
samrus 2mo ago
Hosting is cheap if its abstracted away. Same with the technical aspect of maintainance About design and the product side of maintainance, what i have felt is that, deep down inside, the user does know exactly what they need. If they can learn to communicate that in a way another person or agent can understand, then design and maintainance will be fine. Thats a big if, but if the economics align for people to benefit from developing that skill, maybe they do.

anal_reactor 2mo ago

If my manager prefers to pay for SaaS while I sit on my ass rather than have me develop an in-house solution, how do LLMs drastically change the equation?

tonyedgecombe 2mo ago

>"Why even pay for the SaaS in the first place if you can just forge the service exactly how you want it?" This is the part I'm least convinced by. Corporates used to develop their own tools and they moved away from it for many reasons. Cost of development was only one of those reasons.