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Posted by simonw 5/27/2026

I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit(simonwillison.net)
1094 points | 1245 commentspage 3
smokel 5/27/2026|
Does this analysis factor in potential caching of tokens on the server side? It seems that if they organize things well (as a model provider), they can save quite a lot on that. Looking at my Cursor statistics makes it clear that the token calculations are not at all trivial.
simonw 5/27/2026|
I believe the ccusage tool I used takes cached token pricing into account.
osigurdson 5/27/2026||
Realistically, OpenAI found product market fit with the OpenAI API playground in 2021. People were using that as ChatGPT at the time.
mesmertech 5/27/2026||
If nothing else this blog did give me the idea that I should split my $200 claude max plan into two $100 CC max and $100 codex plan, esp because Claude is now offering 1.5x weekly limits so its the 5x usage is now more like 7.5x usage.
Havoc 5/27/2026|
>I should split my $200 claude max plan into two $100 CC max and $100 codex plan

You may want to get one of them to check the math on that :p

firesteelrain 5/27/2026||
Anyone actually making money paying all of these monthly fees? Or just hobbyists? I have yet to see any real ROI posted anywhere.
rvz 5/27/2026||
This is the same question I said about people running OpenClaw. You don't hear about anymore.

Other than the hosting providers, I am also yet to see anyone directly making money from their OpenClaw agent.

brazukadev 5/28/2026|||
Ironically, we had more new interesting things launched daily 5 years ago before AI.
lugu 5/28/2026||
Ask yourself: what is the ROI I provide? It isn't trivial most of the time.
firesteelrain 5/28/2026||
We measure ROI of employees annually via ranking systems, who gets bonuses, promotions etc
dude250711 5/27/2026||
> Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter.

Is that quarter same as any other quarter in terms of infrastructure costs (e.g. are there any temporary discounts happening coincidentally)?

MadxX79 5/27/2026||
Didn't xAI basically donate the compute for that quarter so Anthropic could get to say they turned a profit?
simonw 5/27/2026||
The SpaceX S-1 says they're charging Anthropic $1.25b a month.
travelalberta 5/27/2026||
It also states that the first few months (this current quarter where Anthropic are reporting profit) are discounted.
travelalberta 5/27/2026|||
Hey man, that discounted rate on Colossus 1 inference is purely coincidental...
jnewton_dev 5/28/2026||
[dead]
wg0 5/28/2026||
This requires hard evidence which isn't available. Circumstantial evidence is all otherwise.

Bloggers are having AI psychosis too.

simonw 5/28/2026|
I thought the links I provided were pretty solid. A lot more solid then you'll see in most commentary about this stuff!

I agree with this person, let's use AI psychosis for when using an LLM gives someone psychosis, not for when we think, what, that a blogger made some poor assumptions?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296794#48303200

protocolture 5/27/2026||
I feel like we should just ignore all LLM news until after they IPO, lots of positive sentiment astroturfing bots.
asim 5/27/2026||
Love how everyone boasted about replacing all the software with ChatGPT and then we end up with coding agents meaning the software engineer are STILL important. The sell is the development tool. It's classic cloud. Where did all the ops people go, many got subsumed by the cloud companies YET every company still has DevOps people to manage cloud infrastructure. The layer of abstraction went up but we still need the people to write the glue code and understand the business. OK great there's a new cash printer in the room. There's a new tool. Let's just start to ground the tooling in its new found gravity, profitability and IPO market dynamics... Reality has set in. The hype cycle is about to explode... Do you remember ride hailing and just how much cash was burned on credits pre Uber IPO. Then remember the IPO itself? These companies are not the new Google. They are a layer on top. Google was still the most efficient cash printing machine in history beyond the the US government and might still be. Will be interesting to see what the trillion dollar IPOs turn into. I'm going to say we see those prices get cut to a third in less than 5 years and scale back up over the next 15-20 years.
thewebguyd 5/27/2026|
> The sell is the development tool.

I've been calling that out for a couple years now. LLMs best and most viable use case is still just as a dev tool. Even for non-programming tasks, I still get better results from the LLM if I instruct it to write code to do the task...look at Claude Cowork for example, it's everything I used to do with python myself. It's not really a novel capability, it's just using python & bash for automations that any sysadmin has been doing for decades. Yeah, that's valuable for a non-techincal audience but is it $1T valuable? I don't think so.

When has an IDE or other dev tool ever commanded a $1T valuation?

These things get lost in discussions because people conflate "overvalued" with "not useful." LLMs are useful, particularly as dev tool, but Anthropic & OpenAI are definitely way overvalued.

crakhamster01 5/28/2026||
> As further evidence that enterprise agents represent product-market fit for these companies, consider their open job listings.

PMF is one interpretation, but it could also be read as desperation.

In my opinion, we've been at PMF for quite a while now. The November inflection point that's often referenced definitely changed how we interface with models, but as far as coding goes, I feel like Cursor had proven itself useful for at least a year prior to that.

The demand has always been there, the outstanding question is still - how do you build a business on top of these products? None of the frontier models have emerged as uniquely capable, but open weight models are now catching up in capability as well. The explosion in go-to-market roles feels more like an attempt to lock customers into contracts so that they don't consider alternatives.

I assume the hope is that during this 12-month contract they will develop real integrations, something deeper than just a CLI harness. If you've ever worked in procurement or dev tooling at a reasonably sized company, you'll know that this is exactly what teams try to avoid.

It's anyone's guess what will happen this time, but I'm excited to see how the IPOs go.

mtrifonov 5/27/2026|
They certainly have, but it relies entirely on the assistant frame, which is a problem in and of itself for the trillion-dollar economics.

Anthropic and OpenAI have shown people want a tool for task offloading, driving predictable token consumption and justifying the math, so long as users stay in that dynamic.

However, knowledge workers using these tools daily are getting exhausted with them. Outputs come out polished but hollow. Talking to a frictionless, frame-completing model all day drains you.

If user behavior drifts away from assistant usage because of that, per-token math implodes. The valuations we're hearing about all the time rely on usage compounding daily. The fatigue is a timer running against that compound.

Anthropic's Constitution is the closest hedge out there, I think. Installing an identity structure into the model through training. But it's still assistant-first, so the fix there is only partial.

I've spent the last year running a product that flips the architecture so identity is primary and the assistant role is secondary. Same frontier models, completely different conversational quality. The fatigue property doesn't really show up.

Whichever labs figure out how to install real identity natively in the weights are going to be the ones with PMF in the next phase.

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