alt Hacker NewsI am confused about the whole situation let me explain.
It seems like all software will get replaced it by local versions. Suppose I am an individual or a business that was using a SaaS product (such as JIRA).
Let's be generous and imagine that the monthly payout was $20/month for that software (usually for businesses, it is much higher) and one fine morning I login and point a multi modal AI agent to it and clone the whole thing for my local use in let's say 3 months worth of $20/month AI subscription.
Now what? Gradually, that software company would go out of business but that user won't be subscribing forever either to AI inference service and the only constant customer of AI inference would have been the software company which went out of business so... No software company, no AI inference business either?
If I understand your question correctly, it reduces the value of software to almost zero. Meaning all of the SaaS companies are going to have to work very hard to diversify their revenue streams into value added services. That's going to be very difficult or impossible for most to navigate. Hence the term in the industry "SaaSpocalypse."
Some companies will retain a moat. For example, YouTube holds incredible IP, and until AI can replicate that wealth of content at scale for cheap, it will remain profitable. Facebook has the user critical mass. Increasingly, hardware for inference is going to be a moat. So is electricity.
Which loops back to my comment above: this breaks a lot of the market dynamics required for a functioning economy. Accelerationists are convinced that we'll invent new jobs to replace the old jobs, but I don't think that's going to happen. Certainly not at the pace of change we're seeing.