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Comment by smalltorch

10 hours ago

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.

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smalltorch

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esafak  2 hours 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?

  • nostrademons  11 minutes 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.