[suriya-ganesh]

Will the big labs leave anything for external competition?

This probably killed a thousand startups in this space.

in the early internet you wouldn't see google creating their own news site or facebook building their own animal farm. what happened to platformication of everything?

[bcrosby95]

Building a startup on an LLM is like building a house on a foundation of quicksand. As the LLM gets better it naturally erodes your moat. It's a completely different dynamic compared to the internet. It's why I'm watching this from the sidelines.

[PyWoody]

I have a close friend who is trying to build a company entirely on top of Claude. He doesn't know how to program. He can't do basic arithmetic. Yet, the company he's building is a "Data Science AI for the Government" because, according to him, all of the data scientists at NOAA don't know what they're doing.

I have given up on trying to get through to him how bad of an idea this is. He's unemployed and has been working on this for over a year.

[blitzar]

Sounds like YC material.

Y Combinator is accepting applications for the Summer 2026 Batch funding cycle. Make sure they don't miss out!

[ecshafer]

Scientists are pretty solid overall for the Government. Lots of Phds that decide to take the steady reliable income and solid benefits over the risk of Academia for a few post docs hoping for a professor job.

[PyWoody]

Yeah, I've tried explaining to him so many times that these are passionate people working their dream jobs. They are not slouches. He never listens and just doubles-down that since they work for the government they do the bare minimum for a paycheck. I'm guessing either Joe Rogan or Elon made this argument at one point and he's taken it as gospel.

Very frustrating.

[edm0nd]

Yeah that's the scary part about these coding LLMs.

Before, some idiot would pitch their stupid idea to dozens of local webdev companies and banks and get told dozens of times their idea is straight up stupid and never going to work and they are stupid.

Now these LLMs allows them to bypass all of that advice and create what they want without any input or even knowing how the tech behind it works.

We are so fucked lol

[intrasight]

Building a business on top of any SaaS platform is building on quicksand. I know that from experience.

[gwerbin]

> Will the big labs leave anything for external competition?

No, why would they if they have the choice?

> what happened to platformication of everything?

Business happened. The web works differently from how it used to. The users are different. LLM inference and AI tools is a different core product from search and ads. That, and we have the benefit of hindsight now. Maybe a Google newsroom would've actually been a good idea in 2006 in hindsight, who knows.

Also realistically you could say the same thing about Google Maps and Street View. That probably also killed some startups. Google isn't running a charity for startups.

[anon373839]

This was their play all along with their unethical data collection practices: let others use the APIs to discover the applications, then use the data against them to offer integrated solutions in every vertical of interest. Cursor, once Anthropic’s biggest customer, was one of the early ones they screwed.

They are also fighting for their lives because these insane valuations simply aren’t justified by being dumb pipes. Fortunately, open weights models are widely available and have crossed a threshold of usefulness that cements their place as good substitutes.

[csoups14]

Amazon Basics for Knowledge Work™

[wongarsu]

I guess the argument is that a tool built by a company with actual insight into and focus for financial services, with Anthropic as inference provider, would lead to more adoption and more use of Anthropic models. Something Anthropic could achieve either by just leaving things alone and having the best models, or alternatively by starting some kind of incubator or something. AWS might be a good model

The issue with that is obviously that most of the generated value would be captured by that company in the middle, while Anthropic would stay in the cost-conscious inference market.

[noitpmeder]

Why would anthropic at all prefer this approach when that middle man can switch and cost-arbitrage between countless other model providers.

We're not talking about what is best for the consumer (ex more competition to force iterations and improvements), but what Anthropic thinks is best for Anthropic.

[wongarsu]

Make up the lower margins by larger volume because you get much better market penetration. But you are right that this only works if you know the middle-men don't go to other model providers. That's where some kind of incubation program that provides capital or credits or whatever in return for long-term commitments might work

But I doubt staying a pure model provider is a winning move. It's a market nobody will win long-term. Almost all of the value to be captured isn't in inference APIs but in how to use them to generate business value. Claude Code was already the right approach, they "just" need to show they can repeat this for other kinds of tasks

[khuey]

> Almost all of the value to be captured isn't in inference APIs but in how to use them to generate business value.

If the business value can be generated with a few thousand words in a SKILL.md on top of a commoditized model it doesn't sound like that's a market anyone can win long-term either, and the business value is ultimately going to accrue elsewhere (the customer, the inference hardware provider, etc)

[ctoth]

I'm confused because I remember using Google News in 2006?

[suriya-ganesh]

there has been a product called Google News since 2002. It was only aggregating information from news channels

[_pdp_]

> Will the big labs leave anything for external competition?

Is this a serious question?

Without the big labs with deep pockets investing to change the consumer mindset do you think a small company with no funding has any chance of even existing?

I remember when paying $1.99 for a mobile game on iOS was considered too expensive and now it seem most consumers are primed to spend more on in-app purchases every week. That mind-shift did not happen overnight.

It was not that long ago $200 for ChatGPT subscription was considered extravagant but now even wrappers can charge this price without hesitation - some of them do.

What Anthropic is doing is priming the market of which they will be potentially one of the main beneficiaries as long as they can continue existing. But I don't think anyone will go to Anthropic directly to source their financial services agent. They will go to financial service companies that use Anthropic to build the capabilities.

[BowBun]

I work in a space where one could imagine a Claude replacing our product.

I think someone stated it clearly - they can't take on these kinds of businesses until they build out the risk side and the personnel, all of which is a human problem not a tech one. A lot of processes still require physical steps and backstops because it's not possible to source all the data needed to act on it in the first place. Then you have audits and reconciliations, a bunch of strict workflow rules and atomicity to reach levels of software that bigger financial institutions would accept.

My gut reaction to stuff like this is a mix of "oh shit, they could take over my company" and "they're the next script kiddy that thinks software is anywhere near a majority of the work in some software spaces".

[bix6]

> they can't take on these kinds of businesses until they build out the risk side and the personnel, all of which is a human problem not a tech one.

Yes they can? They have infinite more cash to pay off any risk. What do you need personnel for besides sign off if the AI does it right?

[stubish]

The personnel also need to take the fall when the AI does it wrong. A judge isn't going to jail Claude, they are going to jail the sucker who unknowingly authorized the fraud.

Will Anthropic externalize the risk, selling access to agents? Or will internalize the risk and liability, selling financial services? Maybe both? I guess lots of companies want both, doing some things internally and keeping other things at arms length by outsourcing to 3rd party accountants.

[BowBun]

Managing risk is a negotiation across parties, not just ponying up the cash. Personnel completes steps that are still physical requirements, usually by law. I think those are two things Anthropic isn't going to want to get into anytime soon.

[ambicapter]

> in the early internet you wouldn't see google creating their own news site

Google News was definitely a thing (and actually still exists).

[suriya-ganesh]

it's been a things since 2002. but it's a news aggregator not directly competing with newyork times

[landian66]

just looked up, it is still a thing - learn something new everyday!

[colesantiago]

> Will the big labs leave anything for external competition?

Unfortunately no.

The TAM for Anthropic and OpenAI is anything that runs software or a screen.

Any software or technology business that has high margins that Anthropic and OpenAI are not doing will be a target.

After both their IPO's mandates Wall Street them to push for more growth by competing in other technology business areas or they will get punished in the markets.

It is ROI or bust.

[sokoloff]

I'm not sure if this was tongue-in-cheek or not, but Yahoo created its own news site in 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_News and FB had Zynga's Farmville as well.

[lordgrenville]

I think OP meant that Farmville was built by a different party (Zynga). FB was trying to encourage other businesses to build apps on its platform, not build them itself.

[_fizz_buzz_]

But Google did move into a lot of spaces: maps, mail, docs, etc.

[selicos]

Or "rent seeking" type tools/options that should be baked into products from a much earlier point.

There was an app for OSX that added window snapping, long before Apple added it to their desktop environment. $5 or something for a free feature that just makes sense to build into your product from the start. Apple is king at absorbing this sort of paid add on, eventually. AI makes that faster.

[mobattah]

This is premature caution/fear.

[owebmaster]

I don't think Claude Design killed menu competitors and I don't think this will too

[SoftTalker]

Why control part of the world when you can control it all?

Less cynically, you might say that "use AI to do <obvious thing>" is not really a viable startup pitch anymore. That's not necessarily bad.

[bombcar]

It's not wise to build a startup that is just a feature of the product that you're building on.

What's even sadder is it can work for way too long.

[robotswantdata]

History suggests otherwise. railroads, telecoms, search all consolidated. The natural equilibrium for transformative infrastructure is winner take all. AGI/ASI won’t be different but will be nearly every vertical and governments will legislate too little too late.

[agentultra]

Nothing natural about it. Such monopolies were propped up by the state using public funds and profits captured by the capital class. Many benefitted by the arrangement and so it became normalized. But it’s a choice people made to structure things that way.

The car industry, oil and gas… all could have played out differently if different players had gained wider adoption or if governments used a different economic model.

[colechristensen]

local models are going to win and therefore the hardware providers, Apple and nvidia.

There isn't going to be any moat for the hosted providers besides hardware scale. They can run your request on shared 1TB memory hardware, or whatever.

But local hardware is going to catch up, the hosted providers are going to become commoditized, and the costs are just going to be compute whether its your hardware or theirs.

And your laptop is going to be powerful enough to be good enough for most cases.

[robotswantdata]

Local hardware catching up doesn’t matter if the thing worth having never leaves the building. Enterprise services are hard, moat is in distribution and know how.

[colechristensen]

>if the thing worth having never leaves the building

Not sure what you're referring to, the models?

[debarshri]

I am not sure if people are using claude design, security review stuff and other tools they have built so far.

Building is the easy part. There are lot of service level stuff that I am sure anthropic will not be able to provide, therefore they are trying to partner with other orgs in that realm.

I am very skeptical about their stuff now.

If you are builder, I believe you should avoid anthropic, it can be default to monopolistic behavior, I am not saying they are doing it, but they could, where in they see what you are building, if you have traction, position a product in that realm. Just saying.

[tyre]

You’re advocating for less competition? AI startup valuations are out of control. People are raising $20m seed rounds.

If you can’t prove PMF and differentiation with $10m, I’m sorry but you’re not a serious enterprise.

And if what you’re building is “pitch deck AI”, I mean, come on.

[iewjj]

lol these agents are missing the point re. What people actually do in these jobs.

This is an attempt to inflate token generation to fool people into increasing anthropic’s valuation.

[vatsachak]

> tfw you've been huffing your own copium so much that you forgot you're selling shovels