alt Hacker NewsAddendum to counterpoint: why haven't those SotA gen-AI companies become the most productive software companies on earth, and release better and cheaper competitors to all currently popular software?
People always gripe about the poor quality of software staples like Microsoft Office or GitHub or Slack. Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat? It would be both a huge cash cow and the best possible advertising that AI-facilitated software development is truly the real deal 10x force multiplier they claim.
If someone invents a special shovel that can magically identify ore deposits 100% of the time, they aren't going to sell it with the rest of the shovelmongers. They're going to keep it to themselves and actually mine gold.
Replies
Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat?
My guess is two-fold. One, they are specialized in AI. Two, building another anthropic is a big moat and they like to keep it big vs what you could build with it.
Anthropic appears to have realized before OpenAI that code gen was an important enough market to specialize in.
For now though, building smarter models / general integration tooling is a better us of model companies' capital.
Once/if performance gains plateau, expect you'll see them pivot right quick to in-house software factories for easily cloneable, large TAM product spaces, then spin off those products if they're successful.
Generating code isn't the bottleneck for selling software.
Those apps aren't that bad, it's just internet people complaining about things like react.
Imo "higher quality" isn't a way to sell software
They're still training up using all of our extensive feedback to improve software architecture. Maybe later this year.
Because it’s not their business to sell a chat app? "Our company is the frontier lab for AI models, oh and btw we also offer SlackClone, sign up for enterprise please". Their job is selling shovels, really good, increasingly more expensive shovels that keep getting better, let others waste their time looking for gold.