Comment by overgard
1 day ago
I keep thinking about the Figma thing. If you're unaware, here's the google summary:
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The Board Departure: Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s CPO and a co-founder of Instagram, sat on Figma’s board of directors. He resigned on April 14, just days before news of Claude Design broke. This sparked speculation over conflict of interest and the use of proprietary product strategy information.
Betrayal of Partnership: The launch aggravated the tech industry because Figma relied on Anthropic's models to power its own AI features, and even announced a joint "Code to Canvas" integration. Reports indicate Figma was blindsided by the depth and scope of Claude Design.
Market Reaction: The "SaaSpocalypse" thesis—fears that major AI foundation models will rapidly build application layers and cannibalize their own SaaS partners—was realized when the news broke. Figma’s stock saw an immediate 7% drop upon the announcement.
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I would suggest to people using LLMs: you should be cautious about giving these companies data or relying on them. If you're building an AI startup, there's a very good chance they could decide to directly compete with you if your idea has traction. You're also at their mercy for API pricing etc.
Your last two sentences remind me of the olden days of people building applications on top of FB and Twitter APIs (and later, Reddit), only to to have the rug pulled out from under them in one way or another
Olden days being FB and Twitter APIs? Don't forget about Apple Sherlocking independent devs. This has been happening with almost any platform for a very long time.
Back in the day, a contract company I worked for had entire teams of people dedicated to building FB apps. When that collapsed, it came down fast and hard.
Still true today for AWS.
even before that, by some accounts I hear the reason VCs over invested in dot com was primarily because they saw something that could not easily usurped by Microsoft by releasing their own sh*tty copy. so they all piled in and then bubble dynamics took over.
story as old as internet itself!
don’t forget m$ as well.
I believe the coding tool revenue is an important factor right now but not the endgame. The AI companies have to become consumer products to justify their gigantic valuations. We always talked about the “super apps” - one app that fulfills most consumer needs, like WeChat in China. OpenAI is the company most visibly making a huge bet on becoming a “consumer super device”, even designing their own hardware to stop being dependent on Apple and Android. The long term battle is not AI companies vs SaaS, but rather AI companies vs big consumer brands - Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon. Imagine having the ultimate digital assistant that you can throw any task at. Under the hood it creates its own code and interfaces on the fly to help you accomplish your task. By using LLMs as coding assistants we are all training them to become really good at it. If the newcomers succeed to deliver the ultimate digital assistant first, then even a monster like Apple could become obsolete.
How long did Apple take to kill off all the iPhone competitors.
These companies haven't got the attention span to work on one thing for that long.
The driving constraint if you want to take a spot in B2C is the speed at which consumers replace tech, not the speed at which tech can be developed.
Delusion
Our current incarnation of capitalism is all about monopolistic behaviors. If these LLM companies do get to the point of being able to replace employees I fully expect them to stop selling shovels and start producing the gold directly, anyone else be damned. And, frankly, this has always been the case. If a product is built on top of another service it has a limited lifespan. Either the product will be purchased or it will be replaced by the service it depends on. How many "killer apps" has Apple silently absorbed into iOS over the years?
And who will buy the gold? At a certain point everyone will be too poor to buy anything.
> And who will buy the gold?
Wrong question. The real question is "Who and what will they buy with the gold?"
The golden rule is just the beginning, and no, there's nothing positive for the rest of us.
No one. I do not believe this to be a good idea. I think its pretty awful and this whole thing, if it goes as far as they keep saying it is going to go, will spin wildly out of control and do an immense amount of damage to people.
But the big money has been skipping Leg Day for ages, and that lack of a foundation will bite us all. Which sucks.
I mean Claude IS replacing people. Even in Australia - Claude + postgres mcp is replacing data/bi people in even small and medium businesses.
What did the bisexuals do to deserve that?
That's very true. I realized it myself when I worked on my first app, I made a resume tailor last summer back when GPT 5 just came out.
Then, by the time GPT 5.5 came out you could already generate a flawless PDF and Word doc resume with the same formatting as your base resume. It really is amazing.
Trying to compete with these labs is a bad idea, you might work hard on your thin wrapper and then they come out and have their chatbot or harness do it way better than you.
But I also think this is really cool. It's a new era in software. Build something worthwhile and you won't need to worry about a lab doing the same thing with their chatbot.
Disagree: The era of "<Tech Giant> will eat your startup by throwing capital/devs at it" are over. Anthropic, OpenAI et al are under too much competitive pressure to chase every quixotic product idea.
Then run your own fine tuned models for your AI startup.
Doesn't that mean you bet against the bitter lesson?
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You are vastly underestimating how much more profitable a 10% annual return on GPUs is than basically anything else you would use an LLM for.
They think whatever you are doing is cute and would very much like to ensure their models can do it even better in the future, but competing? Not even worth the time to think about
Is it only a 10% annual return? That's not a lot.
This has been a story, age as old as time. How many times have startup founders been told "you're a feature" or "Google/Meta/etc can copy you so fast". Operators just need to stay vigilant of their value add, or they never really had a moat in the first place and were living on borrowed time anyway.
> I would suggest to people using LLMs: you should be cautious about giving these companies data or relying on them. If you're building an AI startup, there's a very good chance they could decide to directly compete with you if your idea has traction. You're also at their mercy for API pricing etc.
LLM generated code is not copyrightable, so even if they do "steal" it - I don't think there's legal grounds to do anything about it.
It can't be stolen. You don't really own it.
You can try to lock it in a safe and hope no one ever gets a hold of it. You can lie and say you didn't use an LLM, but Anthropic and OpenAI et al probably have logs to disprove that.
But, if push comes to shove, you don't own it...
This is a popular misreading of the state of the law.
Someone tried, as a bit of a stunt, to register a work for copyright with generative AI as the sole creator/author. That registration was rejected. This is quite different from a person using generative AI as a tool to create a work.
People have copyright in photos and videos they create, even if they used a camera. Same with images and code, even if they used an LLM.
I'm not your lawyer, but to the extent you have copyright in works you create, the fact that you used a tool doesn't diminish the copyright.
This isn't quite true: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922
The clearest part from the page:
> Before the proliferation of generative AI, U.S. courts did not extend copyright protection to various nonhuman authors, holding that a monkey who took photos of himself lacked standing to sue under the Copyright Act; that human authorship was required to copyright a book purportedly inspired by celestial beings; and that a living garden could not be copyrighted. The U.S. Copyright Office has also long maintained that copyrighted works must be "created by a human being" and therefore refused to register works that are "produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author."
I think the long story short is if you're incorporting LLM generated content into your own work, then your own work is copyrighted but if it's purely AI created and you never put any of your own work into it, it's not (so: think the slop cannons people are pointing at social media for example -- probably not copyrighted (although I don't know why you'd want to put your name on it anyway)). Granted, I don't know how you'd ever prove that something was purely LLM generated so it's kind of a technicality for coding, but for image and music I think it applies pretty clearly.
As an aside, I think socially maintaining that copyrights are for humans only is extremely important. It might be the most important legal matter around this. I see nothing good of allowing AI labs that have strip-mined the internet to claim a copyright on the things they regurgitate, and I don't think spammers deserve copyright protection either. The human-only requirement is a very good one.
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So, code is not the only data they potentially have access to, and it might not even be the most interesting data. There's also whatever other things you plug the AI into: slack, email, internal documentation, etc.
Also, a lot of people using LLMs are using it on code bases that were written before LLMs were common for coding. So in that context, you really are allowing them to train on your code for free.
> LLM generated code is not copyrightable, so even if they do "steal" it - I don't think there's legal grounds to do anything about it.
> It can't be stolen. You don't really own it.
At least in the UK computer generated code has been copyright-able for decades [1]
> (3)In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.
And the ToS of the major/minor AI providers as far as i can tell have no opinion on what you do with the code in terms of ownership.
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/9
> LLM generated code is not copyrightable
[citation needed]
I've seen cases where it was determined that the LLM itself doesn't hold copyright. But where are you getting the idea that nobody holds copyright?