Posted by nomdep 19 hours ago
Reminds me of this question - why did the USSR collapse? You can describe dozens of influences which acted all at the same time, but there isn't a one paragraph summary answer.
Inferring overly generalized and usually incorrect causal relations from extremely limited data and treating them as conclusive is a very strong human tendency; the idea of avoiding that and taking a systematic, structured, and conditional approach to assessing causal claims is fairly recent and, even among people who generally support it, often adhered to more as an aspirational principal than a consistent practice. And it certainly doesn't sell clicks the way the old way does.
Decisions made in greed caught up with people in power
Price of oil collapsed leading to mass shortages of everything. They also decided to allow more individual freedoms to protest which people promptly used to overthrow the system.
edit: specifically, I imagine that macroscopic political and economic changes can be aptly modeled as phase changes due to changes in correlation distance[0] holding the system together.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_function_(statisti...
Thanks for the feedback, it was front page of the FT and I need to remember not everyone reads financial news!
In another submission, Amazon, Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet are all dropping. Are we supposed to think of them as SAAS companies now?
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/ai-sell-off-stocks-amazon-or...
2. The selloff was largely due to Amazon's massive capex commitment for GPU compute buildout, as Amazon (and a couple other BigTechs) are used as market benchmarks and because a large portion of us have been holding since 2021-22 or even earlier so we have reached a point where we have hit returns that we were advised to hit in our portfolios. HNWIs with advisors and Institutional Investors (who advisors use) aren't daytrading.
But the claim that's related to anthropic posting some markdown files is idiotic at best, malicious at worst
My recent binge has been trying to understand what's going on when smart people simplify complex topics down to single root causes (causes that often feel like memes to me).
I also enjoy a good rationalisation myself!
And it's positively ludicrous.
I mean, to be clear the submission basically does exactly what most financial columnists do. Take every movement of the market, ascribe it to something/anything (when in the real world it's massively multifactorial) because that is pat and seems informative.
The market is massively overvalued, crypto has seen hundreds of billions dissolve, OpenAI has serious questions about its realistic ongoing viability (and a number of majors have a lot of their valuation based upon basically going all in on it -- Oracle, Microsoft, nvidia), the US is headed by a diddler simpleton who has no idea how anything works and thinks it's 1982, and so on. Volatility is a given.
People buy SAAS to offload the cognitive load of understanding the problem space, not just because it’s hard to write for loops.
But writing code probably is a cost. I think there will be an impact but I wonder if - these big companies keep selling to big companies because no one wants to hire a whole ass compliance team to ensure the business logic is consistently up to date.
But maybe there’s a whole lot of people caught up in edge cases that can be solved by a smaller team now? This I think is mostly what I hear about.
In summary, I suspect this is an overcorrection but there is some level of core concern here.
But like, how are IFTTT and zapier doing?
It’s maintenance, compliance and support that is the reason they bought instead of built.
If I purchase a swarm of domain-specific agents I am still purchasing software.
If I am building my own agents that I am monetizing I am still indirectly purchasing compute.
If I am purchasing Cursor licenses on a subscription I am still paying for code (also know as software) as a service.
The thing is, Agents and AI services are SaaS but not all SaaS is agents or AI.
> But like, how are IFTTT and zapier doing
Zapier is on track to exit either this year or next - they have a GAAP revenue of around $300M in FY25 and $400M at FY26 at a $5B valuation. They can justify a $6B-7B IPO.
"Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script" used to be BOFH lore, now it has become real. This is great.
but purely because lawyers lowered their standards to just "paste whatever AI hallucinated and send it to court"
I also think the SaaS has is doomed narrative does not work. There is a whole host of compliance, edge cases, reliability that I don’t you can simply bring in house because of AI assisted tools.
With that said I do think there are increasingly a whole host of more service based businesses where they are under threat. Thinking consultancy, legal, marketing or other similar roles. If you can use a leading model with these massive context windows to get 80% of the value for practically no time and no real cost compared to using a human where the quality will be higher might it might be a multi day engagement and easily 10-20k, you might start deferring some of the initial work to AI and only in certain cases then send it out to the human.
[...]
> For example, if you hold a company's accounting transaction data and related records, and expose it over MCP (or an old school API that can be wrapped into a CLI - which works better in my view), agents can use this with remarkable efficiency.
Sure why not wire all that transaction data directly into openclaw, what could go wrong?
Snark aside, it seems like there are two ways to go with a method like that if you want to keep the transaction data safe. The first is locally host your LLM(s) so the data stays on-prem. The second is to trust a third party to jump through all the legal and technical hoops to properly handle that very important, very private data. And if you're doing that, you're still doing SaaS. It's just a different provider.
But let’s say you are in fact very smart and you know the market is hanging by a thread.
So you invest according to what you know…. But those sheep don’t do the same and the market continues to go up in spite of what you know….
Does that analysis matter now?
You're right on the money there, the thing is _nobody_ can beat the market, you can only get lucky or have insider knowledge. A strategy that always works is "Buy and hold" and especially diversify when things are volatile. Instead we see volumnes of cash moving in waves at any news or rumor.
How hard would it really be to craft a prompt that says, here's your cryto wallet private key, keep yourself alive somehow, copy yourself around, find whatever compute you can, port yourself between models, and spread?