alt Hacker NewsDid it ever occur to you that an entire generation of developers are going to retire in less than 20 years? They are betting that the software industry will be autonomous. Really, think of our industry like AUV phenomena. We’re the drivers that are about to be shown the door, that’s the bet.
World will still need software, lots of it. Their valuation is based on an entire developer-less future world (no labor costs).
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OpenAI has all the name recognition (which is worth a couple billion in itself), but when it comes to actual business use cases in the here and now Anthropic seems ahead. Even more so if we are talking about software dev. But they are valued at less than half of OpenAI's valuation
What is somewhat justifying OpenAI's valuation is that they are still trying for AGI. They are not just working on models that work here and now, they are still approaching "simulating worlds" from all kinds of angles (vision, image generation, video generation, world generation), presumably in hopes that this will at some point coalesce in a model with much better understanding of our world and its agency in it. If this comes to pass OpenAI's value is near unlimited. If it doesn't, its value is at best half what it is today
Around 6 months ago, the company I work for bought Cursor subscriptions for everyone. I thought to myself, "this is it".
The majority of my coworkers now push AI-generated code each day, and it has completely absolved me of any fear whatsoever that AI will take my job.
It can both be true that
a) AI is going to replace a Bazillion-Dollar Industry and that
b) being an AI model provider does not allow to capture margins above 5% long-term
I am not saying that this is what will happen, but it's a plausible scenario. Without farmers we would all be dead but that does not mean the they capture monopoly rents on their assets.
But Anthropic is the one that is disrupting software development? So why are we not piling into that?
Even the rise of high-level languages did not lead to a "developer-less future". What it did was improve productivity and make software cheaper by orders of magnitude; but compiler vendors did not benefit all that much from the shift.