Comment by mmasu
2 days ago
I think that these companies are understanding that as the barrier to entry to build a frontend gets lower and lower, APIs will become the real moat. If you move away from their UI they will lose ad revenue, viewer stats, in short the ability to optimize how to harness your full attention. It would be great to have some stats on hand and see if and how much active API user has increased decreased in the last two years, as I would not be surprised if it had increased at a much faster pace than in the past.
> the barrier to entry to build a frontend gets lower
My impression is the opposite: frontend/UI/UX is where the moat is growing because that's where users will (1) consume ads (2) orchestrate their agents.
I agree with you - we are saying the same thing, by restricting their API or making less developer friendly, they want you to be captive in their UI. This might not be true for Anthropic or OpenAI - another child commenter made a comment about ads in CLI, I would not be surprised if in a while we will have product placements in LLM responses exactly as we have it in movies - not a plain ad but just a slightly less subliminal suggestion.
I don't think we'll get ads in the enterprise version. There will be ads for individuals and usual business pricing for businesses.
I just think that OAI/Anthropic will try to keep both types of users locked into their walled garden via the UI.
The APIs may have a future, but at our own peril and zero guarantees. It's a tool to create traction and demonstrate capabilities to devs.
It’s objectively easier to build a frontend now and therefore that moat is disappearing. What you can argue is the moat is in incumbent advantage at the UI layer, not the UI itself.
What ad revenue? In their terminal cli?