alt Hacker NewsWhat if all the people currently using these "AI" services are the entire market for those services? I'm pretty sure everyone that wants to use LLMs is already doing so and already paying for the service.
That would mean the only way to increase growth would be to charge more per token and to get the existing people to use more tokens. Both of which seem to be only what mature companies do when trying to squeeze the cash cow for all it's worth.
It also explains why they're trying to stuff AI into everything, to keep the numbers up, and to get everyone to try and pay them money.
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Think about all the "people" AI services can displace in due time. There's a fuckload of pencil pushers / knowledge workers with 100k student loans whose lifetime contribution can probably be measured in a few hundred dollars in tokens. And TBH normalizing AI crutch for kids is going to make large % of future cohorts even more replaceable. Skill atrophy among youth is declining hard, but AI is basically crippling future workforce quality to make their displacement even easier. There's even less reason to hire entry level in 4 years not just because models get better but human capita is going to be so much worse.
Give it a year or two, and apple or any other hardware will have unified memory OR AMD will have a good offering to run all that stuff locally. It won't be as good as Claude, but it'll do for 90% of the things. It will be expensive as first, just like the first mainframes, then give it another 5 years or so, and it'll be affordable.
I think there is a massive market in waiting for something that uses a way better UI/UX. I’d say chat is only great for developers/technical people.
> only way to increase growth would be to charge more per token
Or spend less per token (ie. increase profit margin without raising prices).
The market hasn’t been built out yet. There’s that post from a couple days ago where someone frontloaded the entire UX of an operating system onto an LLM, so you just tell the hardware what you want to do and it does it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47557165
The growth is there but it’s going to be a marathon, not a sprint. I don’t know why everyone’s in such a goddamn hurry all the time
When I show people personal projects I’ve vibe-coded with Claude Code, they often seem impressed and envious. They come up with ideas for things that they would like to do, too. But they have full-time jobs outside of IT, and when I mention they might need to use the terminal to do what I’m doing now their eyes glaze over.
A couple of such people, after they learned about Claude Cowork, signed up for Anthropic subscriptions and are now using it in their jobs. But overall my impression is that there is still huge potential demand from regular people who use computers for agentic systems with less barrier to entry, and that many will be willing to pay for such systems when more mature and user-friendly ones arrive.