[TeMPOraL]

Yup. That doesn't really take a full-blown AGI on the path to ASI on the path to godhood - it'll take a bit better and more reliable LLM with a decent harness.

That's why I've been saying that the entire software industry is now living on borrowed time. It'll continue at the mercy of SOTA LLM operators, for as long as they prefer to extract rent from everyone for access to "cognition as a service". In the meantime, as the models (and harnesses) get better, the number of fields SOTA model owners could dominate overnight, continues to grow.

(One possible trigger would be the open models. As long as the gap between SOTA and open is constant or decreasing, there will be a point where SOTA operators might be forced to cannibalize the software industry by a third party with an open model and access to infra pulling the trigger first.)

[fc417fc802]

Don't open models and competition between frontier providers both serve as barriers here? If a frontier provider pivoted as you describe it would certainly change the landscape but they wouldn't be unassailable without developing some sort of secret sauce that gave them an extremely large advantage over everyone else. They'd need a sufficient advantage to pull out far ahead of everyone else before others had a chance to react in a meaningful way. Otherwise the competitors that absorbed all your subscriptions would stack that much more hardware and continue to challenge you.

I think meaningful change to the current equilibrium would require at absolute minimum the proprietary equivalent of the development of the transformer architecture.

[TeMPOraL]

> If a frontier provider pivoted as you describe it would certainly change the landscape but they wouldn't be unassailable without developing some sort of secret sauce that gave them an extremely large advantage over everyone else.

Integration, and mindset. AI, by its general-purpose nature, subsumes software products. Most products today try to integrate AI inside, put it in a box and use to supercharge the product - whereas it's becoming obvious even for non-technical users, that AI is better on the outside, using the product for you. This gives the SOTA AI companies an advantage over everyone else - they're on the outside, and can assimilate products into their AI ecosystem - like the Borg collective, adding their distinctiveness to their own - and reaping outsized and compounding benefits from deep interoperability between the new capability and everything else the AI could already do.

Once one SOTA AI company starts this process, the way I see it, it's the end-game for the industry. The only players that can compete with it are the other SOTA AI companies - but this will just be another race, with nearly-equivalent offerings trading spots in benchmarks/userbase every other month - and that race starts with rapidly cannibalizing the entire software industry, as each provider wants to add new capabilities first, for a momentary advantage.

Once this process starts, I see no way for it to be stopped. Software products will stop being a thing.

Open models can't compete, because they're always lagging proprietary. What they do, however, is ensure the above happens - because if, for some reason SOTA AI companies stick to only supplying "digital smarts a service" for everyone, someone with access to sufficient compute infra is bound to eventually try the end-game strategy with an open model, hoping to get a big payday before SOTA companies respond in kind.

Either way, the way I see it, software industry as we know it is already living on borrowed time.

[fc417fc802]

I don't understand where the unbeatable edge is supposed to come from here. Don't we already have this in the form of agents using tools? Right now it's CLI but it's not difficult to imagine extending that to a GUI coupled with OCR and image recognition in a way that generalizes.

So suppose ACo attempts to subsume Spotify or Photoshop or whatever. So they ... build their own competing platform internally? That's a lot of work. And now they what, attempt to drive users to it by virtue of it being a first party offering? Okay sure that's just your basic anticompetitive abuse of monopoly I guess. MS got in trouble for that but whatever let's assume that happens.

So now lots of ACo users are using a Photoshop competitor behind the scenes. I guess they purchased a subscription addon for that? And I guess ACo has the home team advantage here (anticompetitive and illegal ofc) but other than that why can't Photoshop compete? It just seems like business as usual to me. What am I missing?

If ACo sells widgets and I also sell widgets, assuming I can get attention from consumers and offer a compelling set of features for a competitive price why can't I get customers exactly? ACo's AI will be able to make use of either widget solution just fine assuming ACo doesn't intentionally sabotage me.

I think the more likely issue is that at some point the cost of building software falls far enough that it ceases to be a viable product category. You just ask an agent for a one off solution and it hands it to you.

Projecting out even farther, eventually the agents get good enough that you don't need to ask for software tools in the first place. You request X, the agent realizes that it needs a tool for that, builds the one off tool, uses it, returns X to you, and the ephemeral purpose built tool gets disposed of as part of the the session history. All of this without the end user ever realizing that a tool to do X was authored to begin with.

So I guess I agree with your end outcome but disagree about the mechanics and consequences of it.

> Open models can't compete

They can though. There's a gap, sure, but this isn't black and white. Plenty of open models are quite useful for a particular task right now.

[twoodfin]

One of the most valuable software products in the world is Instagram. Tens of billions of revenue annually.

Any of Meta’s competitors could reproduce Instagram “the software” in every meaningful detail for (let’s say) $100M.

They still don’t have Instagram the product. Reducing that outlay to a few billion tokens doesn’t change that.

I guess I’ll believe this theory when Anthropic or OpenAI rolls out a search engine with an integrated ad platform that can meaningfully compete with Google. How hard can that be?

[TeMPOraL]

Instagram isn't a software product, though, except in the trivial sense. It's a portal to the actual service people care about, which is the social network. AI can't do anything about it now, because access to the Instagram social network is legally protected. As long as Meta has a right to control how Instagram is accessed, Instagram the app (or whatever else they decide) will remain at the edge. But beyond that, expect AI. It's happening already, plenty of companies and individuals use third-party software, business automation, and increasingly also AI to create, post, and monitor content. Expect all that to be eaten.

Same with any other social media, DRMed media streaming, and other non-software services, where actual client software does nothing useful and serves primarily as a toll gate.