points by mritchie712 3 days ago | 0 comments
that's a real stretch. WeWork was in a business that had already been commoditized (e.g. Regus) for decades.
Anthropic is in a business that didn't exist 3 years ago.
[–] bjacobel 3 days ago
Selling subscription productivity tools is a business that has existed for decades if not centuries. Just because their product is new does not mean their business is.
[–] stusmall 3 days ago
Oh come on. That's like saying "This isn't novel. People have exchanged money for goods and services for thousands of years"
[–] postexitus 3 days ago
If that was the business, yes. The first rule of understanding the business is understanding the business model. Not the product. If the business model is a subscription, then you look at the moat. If the moat is not there - you are not that much different from Microsoft Office (which arguably has a larger moat).
[–] kevinsundar 3 days ago
Its already commoditized. Thats why things like OpenRouter are useful and successful because it lets you route inference at the click of a button between different providers after balancing cost and availability. Exactly how commodities behave.
[–] creativeSlumber 3 days ago
> Anthropic is in a business that didn't exist 3 years ago.
but it's already commoditized.
[–] dgellow 3 days ago
And is already commoditizing. If not already commoditized
[–] cmiles8 3 days ago
[–] 827a 3 days ago
[–] atomicnumber3 3 days ago
Which ones? I'm looking at the list of companies with > $1T market cap and none of them have commoditized markets. Instead, they all have huge network effects (Apple), enormous legacy lockin (Broadcom), a religious monarchy (...), or are some of the only people on the planet who can do what they do (nvidia, tsmc).
Mind you, there's lots of _billion_ dollar businesses in commoditized or partially commoditized markets. But Anthropic as a billion dollar business is sunk.
[–] dzonga 3 days ago
[–] nozzlegear 3 days ago
But they might spend them on American inference providers running DeepSeek v7 Pro with ZDR routed through OpenRouter. Or hell, they might just run it themselves like we're already seeing some enterprises do right now.
[–] 827a 2 days ago
To be clear, I don't like this trend, and I strongly believe most companies are better off owning as much of their technology stack as possible, working with partners to help maintain it rather than making themselves lesser by working with AWS/GCP/Azure; but it is the trend.
Something like Azure Foundry w/ ZDR is more likely. And yeah, its possible that Ant will find competition from those kinds of providers. But Ant will also find revenue from those providers, and its hard to say where things will land in the end.
[–] SkiFire13 3 days ago
And they likely won't be spending them on something without ZDR like Fable 5.
[–] Lalabadie 3 days ago
IMO, US AI providers are not leaders in efficiency anyway, they're still running the original ~2010 playbook that led to LLMs ("What if we took ML researchers' work, but funded it at 50M/yr instead of 250k/yr?").
They're currently arguing for the continuation of that approach: Scale funding first, and the rest will follow. It is high-risk and WeWork-like, by nature.
[–] gtirloni 3 days ago
Meanwhile, everyone else is working on making these models more useful through a ton of ecosystem around them.
I don't see how the frontier labs will have any control over that to deliver on what investors expect. As mentioned in another post here, if they could, they would already be spawning hundreds of companies to diversify their reach but they aren't, because this era of AI is awesome but still doesn't allow a few individuals to replace millions of others that easily (or efficiently).