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Comment by xlbuttplug2 | Hacker News Reader

> They can and most likely will release something that vaporises the thin moat you have built around their product.

As they should if they're doing most of the heavy lifting.

And it's not just LLM adjacent startups at risk. LLMs have enabled any random person with a claude code subscription to pole vault over your drying up moat over the course of a weekend.

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LLMs by their very nature subsume software products (and services). LLM vendors are actually quite restrained - the models are close to being able to destroy the entire software industry (and I believe they will, eventually). However, at the moment, it's much more convenient to let the status quo continue, and just milk the entire industry via paid APIs and subscriptions, rather than compete with it across the board. Not to mention, there are laws that would kick in at this point.

Surely they've reserved the best models for themselves and have people looking into how to optimally harness untapped potential from LLMs?

Edit: I guess the competition between them keeps them honest and forces them to release their best models so they don't lose face.

I think the function of a company is to address limitations of a single human by distributing a task across different people and stabilized with some bureaucracy. However, if we can train models past human scales at corporation scale, there might be large efficiency gains when the entire corporation can function literally as a single organism instead of coordinating separate entities. I think the impact of this phase of AI will be really big.

> the models are close to being able to destroy the entire software industry

Are you saying this based on some insider knowledge of models being dramatically more capable internally, yet deliberately nerfed in their commercialized versions? Because I use the publicly available paid SOTA models every day and I certainly do not get the sense that their impact on the software industry is being restrained by deliberate choice but rather as a consequence of the limitations of the technology...

I don't mean the companies are hoarding more powerful models (competition prevents that) - just that the existing models already make it too easy for individuals and companies to build and maintain ad-hoc, problem-specific versions of many commercial software services they now pay for. This is the source of people asking, why haven't AI companies themselves done this to a good chunk of software world. One hypothesis is that they're all gathering data from everyone using LLMs to power their business, in order to do just that. My alternative hypothesis is that they already could start burning through the industry, competing with whole classes of existing products and services, but they purposefully don't, because charging rent from existing players is more profitable than outcompeting them.

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