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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

It is very difficult for me to see any amount of money being thrown at Anthropic as a bad idea.

The amount of new revenue that I am personally able to create for my clients, using Claude models for dev, and Claude models inside the insanely agile products delivered, is astounding.

If I was not currently experiencing this myself, and someone told me that this was possible, I would be calling them names.

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You could say the same about Codex (and other tooling). Opus as a model is market leading (trading blows with the greatest that OpenAI is peddling), but there will be a reckoning when open weight models are good enough - and I'd argue we are almost there with some of the latest releases. If you hook up the latest OpenAI models to something like OpenCode, its a taste of what an open harness with a powerful model (outside of a providers ecosystem) will be able to offer developers in the future.

I know there are multiple paths at this, thank the computing gods.

If we get to an end-state of monopoly/duopoly at this game, then we are truly screwed.

I was just stating my current use and revenue path. Anthropic has insane velocity, in April of 2026.

> when open weight models are good enough

I think Deepseek is already there.

> there will be a reckoning when open weight models are good enough

Will you have the hardware to run them? Perhaps. Will enough of Anthropic's/OpenAI's large enterprise customers have the hardware to run them and the money/desire to have their own internal teams set up and maintain them?

You’re paying the subsidized cost. Those margins will shrink once the real bill comes due. I really think everyone will look back at this time as the golden area of cheap AI. We are already seeing the costs (and restrictions/limits) creep up with the Western models.

I think the opposite. AI will get cheaper as models become more efficient and we solve the datacenter/energy problem. I bet 10 years from now AI, that is way better than what we have today, will be close to free.

Just like how cloud costs got cheaper and we solved the datacenter/energy problem over the past 10 years.

For the most part, we did, actually. We had plenty of energy and computer until AI came along.

Energy will get fully solved eventually. To think otherwise is to bet against humanities ability to innovate, which I don't think is ever a wise bet.

ZIRP and Moore have helped the cloud build up with a promise of profits and ever increasing performance. The future is likely different.

"Power will be cheap" is hope you can hang any hat on. We've been increasing compute per watt but again that's on Moore. I don't think it makes sense to bank on a new energy surplus.

You can practically host a website that serves millions of users a day for nearly free using Cloudflare. Imagine doing that in the year 2000.

Cloud did get cheaper. What are you saying?

I just ran a quick gpt check - EC2 Prices have gone down by more than 80% after accounting for performance and inflation over last 20 years.

> You’re paying the subsidized cost.

100% agree. I have been trying to tell everyone to build their ideas, and exploit this environment where 100B of VC money into OpenAI/Anthropic = some percentage of money invested into your idea. This is the golden era of building! The music is gonna stop soon. Build now ffs!

Compute has been getting exponentially cheaper nonstop for decades. Much more likely that current capabilities are effectively free within 5-10 years

It amazes me how productive it's possible to be using AI, but I also has this nagging feeling that we are being reeled into being so reliant on this that when the price starts going up, we will simply eat the cost.

The math is pretty simple, and it's easy to justify still paying the price even if it goes up 10 fold, when compared to hirering more resources its still cheap.

So I guess having multiple players and competition in the market is the key?

Going forward, models will start specializing. Anthropic will build a BioMed model for large drug companies. A math/compsci model for frontier theoretical research. A physics modelf or nuclear research. They can communicate each other for synergy effects e.g. for areas where math meets biomed etc. This will be cost reducing as well. We plebs don't need advanced models for our plumbing software work. Following example applied to AI capabilies will make it clear.

Does everyone need a graphing calculator? Does everyone need a scientific calculator? Does everyone need a normal calculator? Does everyone need GeoGebra or Desmos ?

I don’t see why this would happen when the modern models already use MoE, which gives them most of the benefits of having specialized models.

as long as the chinese exist and offer alternatives I think were going to be okay in terms of price, as long as you dont lock in in any american model

> I really think everyone will look back at this time as the golden area of cheap AI.

Chinese models like Deepseek v4 are as good and 10 times cheaper. You can even run Deepseek locally. So no, cheap AI wont be over. Just the US investors won't be able to profit off of the artificial bubble that is there now but wont be in the future.

The open models of similar scales (ex. the new 1T deepseek model) are a fraction of the cost per token, so I don’t see how that can be the case. Inference is profitable, it’s the training that makes it unprofitable.

Would you mind sharing what you can and want about how the sausage is made? I would love to hear concrete cases where actual leverage is measurable. I‘m asking in good faith, not to attack your standpoint.

I would happily do so on a 1:1, private level. See bio for contact.

Sounds like you're about to give the OP a hard sell on a course or some other BS.

Wouldn't it be more efficient on a 1:n level here in the comments? Or are you happy to do a 1:1 with all of us?

You‘ve got mail.

Same with Codex and very soon with open source & local models. Training great models (for coding and similar tasks) seems to be a question of scale and not much more.

It is likely that 99% of the value created by Anthropic / OpenAI / friends will go the end user. Which is great news.

I agree. It's not trendy to have much appreciation for capitalism these days, but it's hard to ignore that the fierce competition in this space seems like it's going to result in commoditized productivity gains for the masses rather than monopolistic/oligopolistic extraction. At least for the near future.

Curious, what do you do btw?

Why do AI boosters like yourself all have the same writing style? Was the comment AI generated?

It's like insane hype marketing speak. "insanely agile products delivered" like huh?

> Why do AI boosters like yourself...

I believe that I am more of an AI realist. The agentic dev tools are really helping me out, but if I could wave a magic wand to make AI go away for a hundred years, I would do it.

I really hope that we can all laugh at how wrong I was.

However, I believe that the horrors will likely outweigh the benefits. Our global society/political systems are not ready for Stasi as a Service, mass unemployment, or any of this impending crap storm.

Getting in on the astounding action before the world turns to shit.

Who could call me a starry-eyed idealist? I have invested in bunkers.

lol. I have been a starry-eyed idealist all of my life. I would like to think that I still am.

I hate money.

You know what I hate even more? Being the supposed "smart one," and having to borrow money from my entire family to get through my health issues.

I will never do that again, hopefully.

I'll trust someone who has an account since 2018 vs 71 days ago. Especially when your name already indicates you're biased.

I've had an account for a while too, and I do think that that GP comment has a style typical of "AI boosters" -- breathless, big on hyperbole, and low on detail.

To the GP: I'd like some details of these "insanely agile products". Is this insane agility reflected by your customers saying that they have a better, faster, more reliable product? How are you measuring this?

Wym "trust"? What is there to "trust" with my comment? Huh?

It's like insane hype marketing speak because that is genuinely the difference from what it was like to develop software 6 months ago. You see many people using the same language, often in comments that are otherwise stylistically quite different, because many people are experiencing the same thing.

I get that it's tedious to sit on tech forums listening to an endless stream of people insisting that suchandsuch technology is world-changing. Many people and probably most people who say that are wrong. But sometimes the world really does change.

It's "world changing" yet the world seems mostly the same other than the increasing enshittification of everything...

> I get that it's tedious to sit on tech forums listening to an endless stream of people insisting that suchandsuch technology is world-changing.

It's tedious because the insistence doesn't seem to be matched by much observable change.

There's substantial observable change pointing towards a universal software development speedup in the neighborhood of 2x. Much of it is internal company metrics, simply because it's meaningless in most enterprise contexts to count how much software is released. Things you can count, like the number of phone apps published, show the same pattern: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/18/the-app-store-is-booming-a...

I'll grant that there's evidence of more low-level activity, but I'm not sure that equates to meaningful change particularly. "Released an app" is a neutral signal on its own, in much the same way that the Unity asset store led to an increase in game releases, but 'more asset flips' isn't really a major change to the gaming industry.

If software development speed has doubled, then we should be seeing not just an increase in apps being released, but an increase in product output from the big players too.

We should be, but I just don't know how you'd measure that in the short term. It's very hard to put a number to "how much software did Google release this month". You'd expect to see a substantial increase in revenue, but most kinds of software generate revenue only months down the line after adoption picks up, and few companies have even released Q1 results yet.

We've had LLMs for far longer than a quarter now; even if you think that only the recent ones have led to any improvement, you'd still expect to see something.

I’m skeptical that LLMs were capable of producing good software at all until Opus 4.5 in November, and they weren’t good enough to be in my personal workflow until 4.6 in February. I really do think the effects would have started only this quarter.

To me it is more like software consultant speak than AI booster speak. And it is not exactly surprising that the people in a particular subculture all talk similarly.

Well, I hear it from people who are regular devs and not consultants, although it's more common with people who aren't really working in the trenches anymore.

Like ex-developer turned PM who is now vibe coding everything they can and thinks it's the greatest thing ever.

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