> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. And sadly everyone has the same ideas
Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before?
One obvious answer is we can make a lot more custom stuff. Like, why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks? We can make so many more one-off pieces of software.
The fact software has been so expensive to write over the last few decades has forced software developers to think a lot about how to collaborate. We reuse code as much as we can - in shared libraries, common operating systems & APIs, cloud services (eg AWS) and so on. And these solutions all come with downsides - like supply chain attacks, subscription fees and service outages. LLMs can let every project invent its own tree of dependencies. Which is equal parts great and terrifying.
There's that old line that businesses should "commoditise their compliment". If you're amazon, you want package delivery services to be cheap and competitive. If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that?
We said the same thing when 3D printing came out. Any sort of cool tech, we think everybody’s going to do it. Most people are not capable of doing it. in college everybody was going to be an engineer and then they drop out after the first intro to physics or calculus class. A bunch of my non tech friends were vibe coding some tools with replit and lovable and I looked at their stuff and yeah it was neat but it wasn't gonna go anywhere and if it did go somewhere, they would need to find somebody who actually knows what they're doing. To actually execute on these things takes a different kind of thinking. Unless we get to the stage where it's just like magic genie, lol. Maybe then everybody’s going to vibe their own software.
You can basically hand it a design, one that might take a FE engineer anywhere from a day to a week to complete and Codex/Claude will basically have it coded up in 30 seconds. It might need some tweaks, but it's 80% complete with that first try. Like I remember stumbling over graphing and charting libraries, it could take weeks to become familiar with all the different components and APIs, but seemingly you can now just tell Codex to use this data and use this charting library and it'll make it. All you have to do is look at the code. Things have certainly changed.
The number of non-technical people in my orbit that could successfully pull up Claude code and one shot a basic todo app is zero. They couldn’t do it before and won’t be able to now.
They wouldn’t even know where to begin!
> You can basically hand it a design
And, pray tell, how people are going to come up with such design?
> To actually execute on these things takes a different kind of thinking
Agreed. Honestly, and I hate to use the tired phrase, but some people are literally just built different. Those who'd be entrepreneurs would have been so in any time period with any technology.
Its not our current location, but our trajectory that is scary.
The walls and plateaus that have been consistently pulled out from "the comments of reassurance" have not materialized. If this pace holds for another year and a half, things are going to be very different. And the pipeline is absolutely overflowing with specialized compute coming online by the gigawatt for the foreseeable future.
So far the most accurate predictions in the AI space have been from the most optimistic forecasters.
Thank you for posting this.
Im really tired, and exhausted of reading simple takes.
Grok is a very capable LLM that can produce decent videos. Why are most garbage? Because NOT EVERYONE HAS THE SKILL NOR THE WILL TO DO IT WELL!
The answer is taste.
I don't know if they will ever get there, but LLMs are a long ways away from having decent creative taste.
Which means they are just another tool in the artist's toolbox, not a tool that will replace the artist. Same as every other tool before it: amazing in capable hands, boring in the hands of the average person.
100% correct. Taste is the correct term - I avoid using it as Im not sure many people here actually get what it truly means.
How can I proclaim what I said in the comment above? Because Ive spent the past week producing something very high quality with Grok. Has it been easy? Hell no. Could anyone just pick up and do what Ive done? Hell no. It requires things like patience, artistry, taste etc etc.
The current tech is soul-less in most people hands and it should remain used in a narrow range in this context. The last thing I want to see is low quality slop infesting the web. But hey that is not what the model producers want - they want to maximize tokens.
This goes well along with all my non-tech and even tech co-workers. Honestly the value generation leverage I have now is 10x or more then it was before compared to other people.
HN is a echo chamber of a very small sub group. The majority of people can’t utilize it and needs to have this further dumbed down and specialized.
That’s why marketing and conversion rate optimization works, its not all about the technical stuff, its about knowing what people need.
For funded VC companies often the game was not much different, it was just part of the expenses, sometimes a lot sometimes a smaller part. But eventually you could just buy the software you need, but that didn’t guarantee success. Their were dramatic failures and outstanding successes, and I wish it wouldn’t but most of the time the codebase was not the deciding factor. (Sometimes it was, airtable, twitch etc, bless the engineers, but I don’t believe AI would have solved these problems)
> The majority of people can’t utilize it
Tbh, depending on the field, even this crowd will need further dumbing down. Just look at the blog illustration slops - 99% of them are just terrible, even when the text is actually valuable. That's because people's judgement of value, outside their field of expertise, is typically really bad. A trained cook can look at some chatgpt recipe and go "this is stupid and it will taste horrible", whereas the average HN techbro/nerd (like yours truly) will think it's great -- until they actually taste it, that is.
Agreed. This place amazes in regards to how overly confident some people feel stepping outside of their domains.. the mistakes I see here in relation to talking about subject areas associated with corporate finance, valuation etc is hilarious. Truly hilarious.
> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that?
It would be cool if I can brew hardware at home by getting AI to design and 3D print circuit boards with bespoke software. Alas, we are constrained by physics. At the moment.
> Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before?
The model owner can just withhold access and build all the businesses themselves.
Financial capital used to need labor capital. It doesn't anymore.
We're entering into scary territory. I would feel much better if this were all open source, but of course it isn't.
Why would the model owner do that? You still need some human input to operate the business, so it would be terribly impractical to try to run all the businesses. Better to sell the model to everyone else, since everyone will need it.
The only existential threat to the model owner is everyone being a model owner, and I suspect that's the main reason why all the world's memory supply is sitting in a warehouse, unused.
I think this risk is much lower in a world where there are lots of different model owners competing with each other, which is how it appears to be playing out.
New fields are always competitive. Eventually, if left to its own devices, a capitalist market will inevitably consolidate into cartels and monopolies. Governments better pay attention and possibly act before it's too late.