adventured

Those 60,000 people are being eliminated from tech jobs. That's a gigantic number. Microsoft is pruning. They'll do it the hard way if they have to with literal firings. They'd like to avoid that if they can, and they're in a position currently where they can afford to. Most companies are not going to be so gentle.

HN is in denial. Just watch what happens over the next ~36 months.

Uber isn't dealing with a shrinking market. They're becoming critical transportation infrastructure and their business keeps expanding year after year.

$32b -> $37b -> $44b -> $52b -> $57b

That's Uber's sales growth year by year. And now they're solidly profitable.

The sole threat to Uber is the Waymo / Tesla automation angle. A merger is most likely there.

Photoshop users could switch to GIMP tomorrow. They don't want to.

The many professionals are the ones that could most easily understand how to switch to GIMP, which is free to use. They could save enormous amounts of money. They prefer to spend money and stick with Photoshop instead. That has persisted for a very long time now.

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).

Microsoft is laying off 60,000 people. That's just the early pin prick of the layoff gusher that is incoming.

One million software developers will lose their jobs in the US over the next ten years.

The big firing waves will begin when valuations decline as the initial AI boom slows. That has started already, although it's early. Companies like CoreWeave will basically collapse. Investors will demand & reward the layoffs, efficiency push, the end of rah rah times will prompt the inflection on employment in tech. And it'll never be like it was ever again.

My income is not dependent on LLMs not taking all the software etc jobs from humans.

My suggestion to anybody staring this down is: do something for yourself while you can, while we're in the early going. Most people still have no understanding of AI, most tech employees are doing absolutely nothing interesting with it other than prompt prompt prompt prompt while at work and effectively doodling at home.

Go high value and go for the users. Do things that don't scale, that actually rings more true now than ever. Focus on areas of tech where it's really hard to get the users, where you have to practically hand acquire them to get started. Users are the moat.

It's not build the software and they will come. That's what nearly everybody has wrong about what is going on right now. The value is not in the software. Users, users, users, users - they should be your primary focus.

Also consider looking at software more as a layer related to something else you do, not as The Thing you do. Related to another service you offer, improving that service.

Let's say you started consolidating in the physical self-storage space ten years ago. You read that it was a very wide open field, where the market was not yet highly concentrated, 3/4 of the market was mom & pop operators. Over the next ten years you built up a lot of storage locations. LLMs can amplify your business, they can help you automate, layer better software on top of your physical business. You know what LLMs can't do? They can't build storage units, and humans love their storage space. That's just one example out of a zillion out there.

Build experiences that are user dependent. The value isn't in the software it's in the users. That's the ultimate moat. It's what isn't properly grasped about GPT's position, insofar as they don't mess up big: they have captured a zillion users, they're Kleenex. Ask GPT = Google it.

You don't want to be in the CD selling or radio business with the Internet & digital & streaming & smartphones & iPods bearing down on you. Go for concerts. Notice that humans are spending more than ever on live concerts. Disney World and Disneyland still command extraordinary pricing power, despite everybody hiding inside on their phones.

LLM clones of eg Photoshop will end up being worthless, like ideas generally. The software will be worthless for the same reason ideas are: they're too easy. Users are hard, software will be (relatively) easy.

Is the value in McDonalds in the food? Everybody knows it's not. McD captured consumers, their heft is extraordinarily difficult to displace. Ie habits, brand awareness, location, etc.

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.

It means in corporations across the globe, the majority of code is no longer being written by humans. That is over and it will only keep dwindling by the quarter.

Astra, Fable, Opus 5.5 are drastically beyond the capabilities of the median software developer. It's not remotely close.

The bottom 2/3 of the human market is entirely dead. Their jobs are gone (AI-shored) they just haven't all gotten the forced retirement or pink slips yet, while they click a few more prompts for a few more pay checks. The frontier pushing forward will knock out most of the remaining top 1/3 without breaking a sweat over the next few years. The really good developers will graduate into babysitting AI as managers.

It is legitimately sad, it's millions of high paying jobs just in the US alone. It's going to be brutal on the housing market. Automation came for another field.

Why have they needed to worry about profitability?

They have been chasing extreme growth with cheap money. That enabled them to hyper scale at a pace the world has rarely seen before. They have made the correct choice so far.

The absolute dumbest thing they could have done up to this point is slow down to try to turn a profit. They have not needed to. Market capture is the sole thing they should be focused on. Here's a hint: how many users does GPT have now versus three years ago?

There appears to be very widespread confusion about what purpose turning a profit serves and how business operations actually work.

Go back in time and tell Uber in ~2013-2015 that it needs to immediately become profitable and not focus on capturing the market.

GPT 3.5 is 2022. In the past ~18 months the majority of all human software development has been wiped out and the models keep getting better rapidly. AI has already radically overdelivered and the biggest returns are in the next 10, 20, 50 years.

It's 1987: The PC is underdelivering.

It's 2000: the Internet is underdelivering.

It's 2010: smartphones are underdelivering.

It certainly may place a very high value on archive.org over time thanks to their historical timestamping

Seems like an exceptionally silly premise that boils down to: affluence as a concept is relative.

Well of course it is.