Comment by esafak
1 day ago
> 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?