Comment by nostrademons
1 day 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.
> Consumers would just use the underlying foundational models directly to solve their problem
Whether this could happen is a critical question.
What ive found currently is that its not possible because the non-determinism of the model means you cant trust it, and these tasks are such that people expect determinism. Even if they dont then they dont tolerate the kind of stupid mistakes these models make
What could happen is that the model becomes good enough to be near deterministic, or as deterministic as humans. I dont know if the current next token prediction foundation is sufficient for that. But who knows, maybe it is
If you want determinism, you ask Claude Code to write you a computer program to the desired specs, and then run that program over and over again, instead of renting the software from a SaaS vendor. I've done that a bunch - I'll show Claude the inputs, I'll tell it what output format I want, tell it the tech stack, and then have it write the program. Then I'll ask for a systemd service or crontab entry to run it repeatedly.
For a lot of tasks, classical deterministic computer programming is better than an LLM. It's just that LLMs are very good at classical deterministic computer programming now.
> 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.
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.
Your wife would never have used Figma for that before LLMs anyway. What is she using to manage the accounts; the bread and butter of her business? Did she conjure up her own accounting and CRM software? If she vibe coded it what did she do to ensure there are no bugs? And in any case, she works alone, I presume? I'm talking about normal companies where people work together; the typical case.
> How can it be cheaper for every company to re-invent the wheel?
Companies not matching their prices to current reality, mostly.
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?