[MontyCarloHall]

Addendum 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.

[tayo42]

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

[hxugufjfjf]

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.

[dangus]

But Google sells the productivity apps and also does the exact same things OpenAI does.

If their work on Gemini is this leading world-class stuff, why aren’t Google’s software products not suddenly becoming better?

Was the most recent release of Android demonstrative of a significant uptick in product iteration? Shouldn’t we suddenly be seeing Android pulling far ahead of iOS in an unusually rapid fashion because Apple doesn’t have access to the same quality of shovels?

What about Microsoft Windows 11? Isn’t Microsoft a major OpenAI investor with full access to their latest and greatest?

Why aren’t we seeing release schedules accelerate or feature lists growing at a faster rate?

Supposedly we are selling a lot of shovels here but I don’t see a lot of holes being dug.

[adithyassekhar]

Android is a poor example here especially with how more and more features are moved from the OS to Play services. Google is shipping so many features without even an OS update that's how Android has always been. Even for their OS, Pixel feature drops happen every quarter. AOSP is only a base for others to build anyway, have you seen how fast samsung and others are pushing updates and uncountable number of features. It's not comparable to iOS at all.

[dangus]

Okay, I agree with your premise, but can you point to some tangible acceleration in innovation.

Are these Google Play features coming out faster than they used to in a way that coincides with AI adoption?

[adithyassekhar]

Not really no. It's pretty much the same pace as before. I wanted to point out Android is not playing catch up to iOS in anyway in features or quality, it's the opposite. Your comment asked why Google isn't catching up to Apple with AI's help. iOS meanwhile has been regressing since 18 and is a mess now on 26.

[dangus]

Yes, to clarify, I’m not making any claim on Android versus Apple and which one is better, who is catching up to whom. Which operating system is ahead or better is essentially irrelevant to the point I’m making.

My main claim revolves around your second sentence: Google is a major primary source of AI research and has access to frontier models before all their customers, especially competitors like Apple who are clearly behind in the AI race and/or not participating in the same way.

In theory, if AI is transformational to developer velocity, Android and all other products under Google’s umbrella should be moving faster than competitors that don’t have early access and preferential wholesale cost AI infrastructure, and they should be clearly iterating faster and better than they did prior to ~2022-2024.

To me, the biggest argument for an AI bubble burst is that companies like Meta and Google won’t actually be able to show their prospective customers that their own workflows have benefitted. Google can’t say “we now ship major [Google Product] features n% faster/better” because there’s no evidence of it. They might make the claim but nobody will believe them.

Major corporations will try the products, start spending $20-200 per engineer per month extra, they’ll see productivity gains of <5% and maybe even see code quality drop, then they’ll decide that the experiment was a bust.

Essentially, this experience will be the most common one: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1r6olcv/an...

[camdenreslink]

But they are marketing their AI as replacing all software engineers. Their CEO can’t stop saying it. According to them the cost of producing software is now just the cost of tokens to generate it.

They have special knowledge to leverage AI to clone (and even improve) huge revenue businesses with high margin. If their claims about the abilities of LLMs are accurate it would be foolish to just leave that on the table.

It would also prove the power of their LLM product as truly disruptive. It would be amazing marketing!

[hattmall]

They care about money, they are making tons of investor money doing what they are doing, there's no incentive to pivot if it would just turn investor money into consumer money.

[chickenimprint]

Their business is making money. If they can build money printing machines, they're not going to refuse to use them because that's "not their business".

Do you really think they would be out donating trillions of dollars to other companies out of the goodness of their hearts, instead of just bankrupting everyone in the software industry if they could?

[signatoremo]

Huh? What kind of question is that? Who waste the opportunity to win the AI race to become another Jira vendor? Everything has the opportunity cost. Didn’t you already learn that?

[rkuodys]

Isnt that point kind of the counterpoint to the AI-first narrative. With standard, human driven operations its true about opportunity costs. What we are told is that AI will replace human, essentially saying that opportunity cost becomes cash only. Then the question of why doesnt AI lab start SaaS fully managed by AI becomes ever more interesting. Maybe because it's not that simple. Hence, it's not that easy in other companies as well to just replace devs, engineers and so on with AI

[skydhash]

They could always help with some OSS software’s list of bugs and issues.

[lpnam0201]

Waste ? They can become both an AI race winner AND a disruptive Jira vendor. Yet they don't. Why ? To be a successful Jira vendor will prove their point that software engineers are obsolete now. Why don't they do that already ?

[mdavid626]

Then why are they letting their models write browsers and compilers?

[Keyframe]

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.

[Aerroon]

Why aren't we in the year of the Linux desktop? It's free and arguably close enough, better, or as good as Windows.

I think in the modern world people would absolutely sell the special shovel, because even if you have a better product that doesn't mean people are going to be using it. You need to have a much better product for a long time for that to happen. And being much better than the competition is hard.

[ethbr1]

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.

[MontyCarloHall]

100% agreed. When/if that pivot happens will be the sign that gen-AI is truly disrupting the software market in a profound way. "You're using the model wrong/you're not using the latest model" is an oft-repeated argument against AI skeptics. Nobody knows how to use the latest models better than their developers.

[pydry]

For the time being though, theyre going to build their in house software with electron because building native apps is hard.

[plagiarist]

They're still training up using all of our extensive feedback to improve software architecture. Maybe later this year.