Comment by dalemhurley
18 hours ago
Cursor (and Garry Tan’s X post) has shown us that the VC money is propping up these companies astounding growth, the only way for them to become profitable is to increase the cost per a request, which means they need to innovate like crazy.
The moat is paper thin.
GitHub has open sourced copilot.
The open source community is working hard on their own projects.
No doubt Cursor is moving fast to create amazing innovations, but if the competition only focuses on thin wrappers they are not worth the billion dollar valuations.
I love watching this space as it is moving extremely fast.
I seriously cannot keep up. I fell a bit behind and now I feel I need a primer to know who owns/acquired/developed all these additional things surrounding the ai space
There is no moat. If you’re a true believer that strong agents are around the corner, then all of these add on companies will be obsolete in a few years. The first company to strong agents can trivially rebuild Cursor or Windsurf.
If you believe AGI is around the corner, doesn’t it mean it’ll replace ALL products?
If AGI is around the corner, I don't believe one single company will "own" that tech. It will be like it is today, where you have multiple models competing.
And after that, AGI will be open source.
In the end, ownership of data and compute will be the things that define the victors.
That would be true if the product was the goal. In my experience,
Even with AGI in hand, there will still be competition between offerings based on externalities, inertia, or battle-testedness, or authority. Maybe super-intelligence would change the calculus of that, but you'd still probably find opportunities beyond just letting your pool of agents vibe code it.
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If you believe AGI is round the corner (I don't), then you face the dilemma of investing in a company that will be the one profitable survivor in a disintegrating world.
This would only be true if it was cheap to run and would return results quickly. If AGI only has compute to serve 1 customer per hour then their is an upper bound of market share it can take from other products.
So grifting for investor cash and revenue right now is the obvious play either way
It feels like we're watching a hype cycle in real time
Cursor just committed mass consumer fraud at worst, and at best pissed off all their best customers. I feel really sorry for those who invested at a 9bb valuation.
> I feel really sorry for those who invested at a 9bb valuation.
Because they didn't do their jobs properly?
>Cursor just committed mass consumer fraud at worst, and at best pissed off all their best customers.
What happened?
flip-flopping on pricing has led users to feel nickel-and-dimed
i like cursor fine, but check out the forum/subreddit to see people talking like addicts, pissed their fix is getting more expensive
i think this aggressive reaction is more pronounced for non-programmers who are making things for the first time. they tasted a new power and they don't want it taken away.
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What was Garry's post?
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1941553682736439307
The thesis is that once you’re paying $200 a month, you’re beholden and won’t pay and compare it with anything else.
Until something else comes around for similar price and is much better.
Good thing for consumers who use AI coding tools is that there is no lock-in like in Photoshop or similar software where you hone your skills for years to use particular tool. Switching from Cursor to any other platform would literally take 10 minutes.
I have same question
Gary gives off a grifter vibe to me. Such a shame seeing how YC has fallen
He blocked me (a relative nobody) on X for remarking on the number of people I know who’ve made it to YC on completely fraudulent credentials.
His reaction seems entirely appropriate. He could ignore you, but then you might keep replying to his posts and potentially spread incorrect but damaging information. He is losing close to zero by blocking you, but preventing a potential big loss. Why did you make that remark, if not to damage YC's reputation? This does not seem like the correct approach, if you wanted to improve their selection process.
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I think the recent Grok release and considering xAI was relatively late to the game shows that the only moat to training giant models is how many GPUs you can buy. ChatGPT was earth-shattering and it took less than two years for multiple credible competitors to match or exceed them. Making these models profitable is proving extremely difficult in the face of so much competition and such unsustainable expectations being set. Google seems to be most likely to sustain themselves through this melee. Them and the Chinese companies.