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Comment by girvo | Hacker News Reader

The follow on question is if it's making us all so much more productive, where is the increased revenue? As far as I can tell, it's mostly the AI labs seeing that, not everyone using them (modulo small founders building new things and doing okay, I think)

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Personally I believe that this boost in productivity will not necessarily lead to greater revenue.

All the companies have the same access to AI, and AI is making them all better at doing what they were doing before (writing software). So some companies that use AI really well may be able to take market share from other companies that are slow. But I think this might just lead to a more intense competition for customers.

Kinda like what happened to music after digital recording became the thing - we have more music than before and the music is better, but being a musician became a much more intense competition to find an audience.

probably a naive question but then would we expect companies not using it to lose market share to competitors that are using it?

Well I don't really know what will happen in the future. My first thought is that what will happen depends on the company and industry. I can think of some non tech companies where AI might not matter for a while, like a car wash or a lumber mill. But long term likely yes for tech companies and companies where tech makes a difference.

People won't want to hear this, but for FAANG things are probably similar. I'm not very convinced that Meta, for example, is actually creating new revenue. It's just consolidating a lot of the existing global ad spend, it's just wrecked newspaper classifieds and the like.

If every software company saw a roughly equal improvement in productivity, they'd still be splitting the same customer base amongst each other - not clear whether revenue would actually go up for anyone.

Perhaps some new markets could be entered that weren't feasible before?

But there have been trillions invested in infra for AI. Surely those investors are going to need to see a return at some point?

apparently those trillions were necessary just to keep the boat staying afloat.

Isn’t cloudflare a pretty clear answer to these? They are launching more products than ever, some of them clearly vibe coded, and their revenue is exploding.

I think you could make that argument, yeah.

https://au.finance.yahoo.com/quote/NET/financials/

Interesting to look at, a decent example for sure.

Is that because more people are signing up to use Cloudflare as a MITM to block the increasing avalanche of AI-generated traffic though??

I don’t know exactly where the money comes from but they are clearly launching vibecoded products https://try.cloudflare.com/ and seem to be quite good at it. So they are shipping more for sure and it seems to help win them business/ expand their existing accounts.

It may not have to do with increased revenue, but it does have everything to do with reduced cost, especially developer's cost.

I bet every company is finding up how to level up their employees via AI, so that they can use less of them in the future.

So even without increased revenue, AI has its (mis)uses.

The increased revenue is in startups, like the recent couple YC batches.

Do you have a source for that? Are they raising more money or receiving more money for AI-oriented products or are they actually making more money on consumer/B2B end products?

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