I mean, is there any phone left with a 3.5mm jack, SD card support, and decent specs?
Just those 2 alone disqualify a lot of the market. I'd like to have both, but I'm currently typing this on a pixel 9 with neither simply because the market isn't there for them.
From 2025 onwards? Only Sony Xperia 1 VII/VIII or... the Ulefone Armor 28/29 Ultra. None of them have a stylus, none of them support GOS.
And Lenovo (Motorola)? For me, so far, nothing. Unless this or next year's successor to the Moto G Stylus 2025 model comes with a much better USB-C port (i. e. not just that cheap 2.0 garbage), runs on GOS, keeps the audio jack as well as the dedicated uSD slot, and improves the not-so-hot stylus.
Do you pay for NYT Cooking? B/c I did, and part of the reason was that the recipes were actually tested and I had confidence in them.
I don't want an AI to give it's best guess at what a recipe should be, if that was the case I'd just do a Google search and find one of the heavily polluted blogspam recipes for my query. The point of paying for NYTCooking was that the recipes were tested and normally trustworthy. It introduced me to new cuisines and recipes I hadn't tried before, and part of my willingness to experiment with a new dish was that I could trust the recipe. That's why I was paying for it,it was similar to the cookbook subscription my mom had years ago.
I mean, if anything summarizes where we have gotten to as an industry this quote is sure it. From Uber using VC funds to subsidize growth to where the AI players are at...
So how is this startup going to be a value add long term? If they can cut all the devs, what moat is there? What's stopping their customers from just prompting their own model?
Seriously asking, why would this look like a good business model to be in? If they don't need anyone besides a technical non-developer to create the product, why would this look like a good business? If it's B2B, then most of their customers will have that type of IT person on staff.
A dry cleaner and a car wash can be a good business. Outsource things that are not your core competency. A moat means you can defend it better, but in this case your business can capture the value of them not having the IT person on staff and not having to spend the tokens. It’s a good old fashioned business.
Wait... Are anthropic and openai just commodity suppliers? Because dry cleaners and car washes both need soap, but I've never heard of a trillion dollar soap company.
AWS, Azure and GCP supply a commodity -- compute -- yet each one of them could be a trillion dollar company in its own right. Even when on-prem is nominally much, much cheaper than cloud services.
Turns out there are ways to monetize commodities, to the tune of double-digit billions in revenue per quarter.
If it were true that what OpenAI and Anthropic offer were commodities, that there is no moat, Microsoft could trivially eat their lunch. There would be no OpenAI. Google with its nation-state money, extreme AI talent, chips, datacenters, could eat their lunch.
So mighty Google can't manage it. But it's a commodity that's easily copied.
Somehow HN can't reconcile the contradiction even though it's laughably obvious.
Hey anybody could go MVP a ride hailing app over the weekend. It's a commodity app. Should be super easy with LLMs.
Oh shit, wait, you mean I'd have to take a billion users away from GPT and getting those users is now 50x harder than it was four years ago? You mean it's drastically harder to peel users away from existing services than if you get to start fresh? Ohhhh.
They have gigantic moats and so long as they don't do anything too stupid, those moats will just get stronger with time.
No VC is giving you money to try to run down OpenAI and Anthropic. Nobody is writing that $100 billion check. It's already over, HN is just in its standard denial phase.
OpenAI's moat is the userbase and service layer, which is gigantic. It is extremely difficult to pull users away from giant services.
The Chinese models have no great branding with the masses, they have no service layer that any average user understands. Where does Joe go to use the Chinese model that he doesn't even know the name of? Joe has no clue what the difference between DeepSeek and Kimi is, and Joe will never know that.
They all know ChatGPT, they have all been trained on how to use it and what it is. The inertia is enormous and HNers endlessly undercount how that works because deep tech users all want to think the masses view tools like they do and approach tech like they do (which is entirely false).
OpenAI's future is as an ad platform in terms of its business. That's at least 2x-4x larger as a business opportunity than anything they have going on now. Which is to say $80-$160 billion minimum. That requires they maintain the giant userbase, we'll see how that goes. Losing it requires someone take it from them. Joe isn't just going to wake up tomorrow and go seek out how to use Kimi.
The LLM space is worth a minimum of half a trillion dollars per year in ad revenue. It will subsume all of search. Search becomes merely a service of an LLM, which will perform the function on your behalf. Google is on top of that shift, so OpenAI has its work cut out for it competing with Google there.
Of the US big three, Anthropic is by far the one most threatened by the persistence of the Chinese models. Anthropic will probably never stop being chased by them and will have to endlessly race to try to stay ahead. Anthropic has to figure out how to build out the LLM+ equivalent of AWS before China figures out how to beat them, ie build a very deep service / tool moat around Claude that the userbase gets stuck to. In short dramatically increase the difficulty in peeling away users, it has to become a big chore to switch (which eventually this is exactly what someone will figure out in that area of LLM competition).
a regular business is not a startup though. A startup implies a much higher ceiling on growth and profit. Worth investing in on a high risk, high multiple of return manner. An SME sized business is not that.
The question is "what business value is AI driving?" and the answer was "a solo founder cut all the devs and still delivered a product".
Separate question: "now that AI is here and development isn't a moat any more, how does a business defend itself from competition?"
That second question is a direct result of AI. Five years ago the amount of cost and effort spent on software development was a moat. Now it's not. So that answers the first question completely, I think.
As for the second question - market sector knowledge, customer contacts and industry reputation, all the usual non-technical things that make a moat. Also, we may now be living in a world where software companies cannot expect to be monopolies in their markets any more. This company will have to compete with many similar competitors for market share, like in most other markets. I think this is a good thing. Less enshittification will ensue.
No extra value was generated in the example. If anything, AI in this example reduces the price of the product AND employment.
Value was destroyed.
The hope is that all these unemployed engineers can somehow generate value? Even if they do they need to generate enough value that would employ 4 engineers.
If a business can create software cheaper, then it can charge its customers less for that software (or, conversely, if a business can use an AI to create bespoke software for cheaper than it would cost to buy that software) then the customer business saves money. It, in turn, can use that money to improve its offering to its customers. They, in turn, and so on.
Having cheaper things means everyone gets more things. The value created is created further down the supply chain.
I understand what you are saying, it just seems that this technology in contrast to any other productivity related technology is deflationary, because there is no alternative avenue to employ the idle labor. Not now, not in the future.
Where will people work on if both blue and white collar jobs go away? In brothels?
Good question, and the question of our age, for sure.
I loved the article that was on HN a while back (original article here [0] be warned it's a quite a long read). It compared the current revolution we're undergoing to the Mercantilist revolution when we stopped being farm workers and started doing other things instead, driven by technological change in agriculture.
The answer they came up with: we don't know yet. Much like the move from subsistence farmers who started working in a factory had to rely on other people to feed them, we have to answer this question ourselves and it'll probably involve doing something very different. And wonderful - subsistence farming is a shit life (despite all the influencers saying how amazing being in touch with the land is) and we would all prefer to be working in an nice clean office than trudging knee-deep in muck in the rain trying to keep our crops alive and pest-free. The same will probably be true once the dust settles on this revolution and we'll all be profoundly glad that AI came along.
The big problem we have to face as a society is that we cannot allow all the value from this technology to be captured and retained by the wealthy few. Our ancestors had to fight the same conflict with factory owners during the Industrial Revolution, and they didn't manage to win that war completely despite all the blood shed and battles won.
What are some businesses where software was really a moat but the software lacks sufficient complexity that AI can reproduce it?
I can't think of any, I'm sure there are some, but I would really like to know. I just don't think for most business the software is so much of a moat unless it's very complex.
Having known some cops, they tend to be really bad about thinking they are legal experts. Attorneys tend to know enough about how things are ruled to avoid falling for these types of 'legal' loopholes. Cops think they are more expert in legal matters than they actually are, and can fall for a hare brained scheme like this.
Ironically programmers are also just as bad for this type of thinking for a different reason. They will read a legal statute and interpret it like it is code. I was very much guilty of this, and from comments I see here that's not an uncommon assumption. My friend who's a public defender spend some time pointing out that legal rulings aren't strict in that way, there's a reason judges have leeway when making decisions.
But he had liquid 214k to spend on improvements. So how is that different than being able to afford to save up 214k for a down payment?
The only thing I can think of is he is using extremely suspect math and a lot of that 214k comes from "sweat equity" billed at a ridiculous rate. Otherwise he'd easily be able to afford a mortgage in that area with 214k down.
I mean, squarespace and similar services exist. Sure, there's a fee associated, but compared to even the costs of running a small coffee bar it's negligible. I could understand this argument in the 2000s and early 2010s; setting up a website meant engaging with a web consultant or similar IT agency, and there were yearly maintenance costs. It wasn't out of reach for most businesses, but it was expensive enough that a Facebook page was a genuine cost savings.
Anymore, putting up a basic template page for your business is maybe 2-3 hours if you're really non-technical. Sure, it will be just the basic template, but there's very little need for more customization than that. That hypothetical coffee bar really just needs a place to post hours, their menu, and maybe update with specials if they're ambitious. That's about all you get with a Facebook page anyway, there's zero customization.
It is a more complicated for non tech people. Web site would need to be designed for simple interaction for the person managing and owning. Simple text entry to post messages and remove them. RSS feeds or some other means would need to be used for notification to those that wish to stay actively informed. There is also the cost of hosting versus free hosting that facebook provides.
Example; I have been at a local restaurant were the WIFI was not working properly so they could not do check out at the table. You and I would know how to fix this with placement and picking equipment. The whole restaurant staff did not. Number of the staff were younger and grew up with the technology.
I my experience, it's often that Excel is an absolute necessity. Try telling people who work in finance or accounting that they will have to use Google Sheets or another alternative and you'll have a picket line out front of the office within a week.
I've never met anyone who was a die-hard for Word, I'm sure they exist but they can't be a large contingent of users.
Excel is a lot like Photoshop. Everyone hates the parent companies, but there just aren't good alternatives for either one.
For kitchen stuff, look for a local restaurant supply place. Check first that they aren't wholesale only, but enough restaurants are small that many of them do retail sales as well.
Prices are much better than the consumer-focused brands and normally everything is higher quality as well.
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