Your last two sentences remind me of the olden days of people building applications on top of FB and Twitter APIs (and later, Reddit), only to to have the rug pulled out from under them in one way or another

I believe the coding tool revenue is an important factor right now but not the endgame. The AI companies have to become consumer products to justify their gigantic valuations. We always talked about the “super apps” - one app that fulfills most consumer needs, like WeChat in China. OpenAI is the company most visibly making a huge bet on becoming a “consumer super device”, even designing their own hardware to stop being dependent on Apple and Android. The long term battle is not AI companies vs SaaS, but rather AI companies vs big consumer brands - Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon. Imagine having the ultimate digital assistant that you can throw any task at. Under the hood it creates its own code and interfaces on the fly to help you accomplish your task. By using LLMs as coding assistants we are all training them to become really good at it. If the newcomers succeed to deliver the ultimate digital assistant first, then even a monster like Apple could become obsolete.

Our current incarnation of capitalism is all about monopolistic behaviors. If these LLM companies do get to the point of being able to replace employees I fully expect them to stop selling shovels and start producing the gold directly, anyone else be damned. And, frankly, this has always been the case. If a product is built on top of another service it has a limited lifespan. Either the product will be purchased or it will be replaced by the service it depends on. How many "killer apps" has Apple silently absorbed into iOS over the years?

That's very true. I realized it myself when I worked on my first app, I made a resume tailor last summer back when GPT 5 just came out.

Then, by the time GPT 5.5 came out you could already generate a flawless PDF and Word doc resume with the same formatting as your base resume. It really is amazing.

Trying to compete with these labs is a bad idea, you might work hard on your thin wrapper and then they come out and have their chatbot or harness do it way better than you.

But I also think this is really cool. It's a new era in software. Build something worthwhile and you won't need to worry about a lab doing the same thing with their chatbot.

Disagree: The era of "<Tech Giant> will eat your startup by throwing capital/devs at it" are over. Anthropic, OpenAI et al are under too much competitive pressure to chase every quixotic product idea.

Then run your own fine tuned models for your AI startup.

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You are vastly underestimating how much more profitable a 10% annual return on GPUs is than basically anything else you would use an LLM for.

They think whatever you are doing is cute and would very much like to ensure their models can do it even better in the future, but competing? Not even worth the time to think about

This has been a story, age as old as time. How many times have startup founders been told "you're a feature" or "Google/Meta/etc can copy you so fast". Operators just need to stay vigilant of their value add, or they never really had a moat in the first place and were living on borrowed time anyway.

> I would suggest to people using LLMs: you should be cautious about giving these companies data or relying on them. If you're building an AI startup, there's a very good chance they could decide to directly compete with you if your idea has traction. You're also at their mercy for API pricing etc.

LLM generated code is not copyrightable, so even if they do "steal" it - I don't think there's legal grounds to do anything about it.

It can't be stolen. You don't really own it.

You can try to lock it in a safe and hope no one ever gets a hold of it. You can lie and say you didn't use an LLM, but Anthropic and OpenAI et al probably have logs to disprove that.

But, if push comes to shove, you don't own it...