Claude Code is extremely easy to set up and use. I suspect its saturation among software professionals is at the majority of the addressable market.
What if there are no other killer apps for Enterprise? Only CC will produce the level of token churn that could drive huge profits for model providers.
The Enterprise market is not as substantial as the rapid success of CC makes seem.
What about "cowork", aiming to be the claude code of excel files and pdfs and screenshotting your desktop to tell you what's wrong?
Like, that feels like it's also a huge amount of token churn ("sure, I can search every xls file on your machine to find the 2023 invoice from that company"), and very early in its adaption curve.
Most people are still using AI as a webpage chatbot to ask questions to and copy+paste between, but running an "openclaw" like assistant, which can access your files, email, and opens you up to wild security attacks, that seems like a really big killer app.
Cowork to me also seems like it'll take longer to reach the broader market since the models are less good at "use the mouse and keyboard to do this repetitive task" than "write code", but I see it as having killer-app potential with lots of token churn.
"Push buttons for me" in the most common ways I see it used ("add this ticket to Jira so I don't have to") is a nice timesaver for being lazy but it's not a 10x multiplier to justify the subscribe-forever cost.
I think it's more likely that the companies that employ large numbers of people to perform manual push-the-button-then-the-other-button workflows will replace the tools that need button-pushing with other sorts of automation.
And outside of work I wouldn't spend any money on something to save myself the ten minutes of logging in to pay my credit cards or check my bank statements once a month or so. I have no real need for an always-running assistant and even the things that it seems most useful for today (beating unassisted humans to the punch for limited-quantity things) are only something it could help with as long as only a very few people have access.
I think The Verge said it the best. Taking advantage of these tools to the maximum requires you to have "software brain" which the average person does not have. They struggle to set up a simple automation in their smart home platform of choice. There is little reason to believe they will take the leap to use such tools to simplify daily tasks because it requires people to think about which daily tasks can be simplified and automated.
I don't think 'software brain' is required for non-coding tasks. Rather, it requires 'manager brain', the ability to delegate, direct, and review the output. Manager brain is more prevalent than software brain and likely learnable by many knowledge workers who don't yet have it.
I think you still need software brain, because ultimately, this stuff still has limitations driven by software constraints, and having the AI try to explain it to them doesn't necessarily help.
I think we all have had experiences with people treating their computers as magic boxes and not understanding why certain requests simply are not possible to satisfy.
You have to recognize that it's a problem to delegate in the first place. One example I love to trot out is, do you have any toilet seats in your life that kinda slide around bit and don't seem securely attached? It's absolutely trivial to fix this, and it's really annoying when it happens, yet with shocking frequency I encounter people who've just been dealing with the annoyance because they didn't process it as something they could solve.
The whole point of click and point (gui) was that one barely had to engage the brain vs using a terminal.
The ideal experience is where one’s resources are able to be allocated such that one can achieve some goal with minimal effort. We are very far away from this ideal with llm’s and absurd amounts of money has already been spent.
> What about "cowork", aiming to be the claude code of excel files and pdfs and screenshotting your desktop to tell you what's wrong?
I’ve been using these types of functions for a while for some specific use cases, and it’s super useful for this. Eg go into my budgeting app and explain to me why a certain discrepancy between forecast and actual occurred, which would otherwise cost me a huge amount of time.
I’ve also been using Cowriter AI, which actively learns from what you’re doing by taking screenshots of your screen every few seconds.
These types of utilities are just starting, they’re underexplored, and will definitely burn lots of tokens (while creating value).
it's been pretty funny seeing people who did not predict Claude Code's success and previously said the whole sector was a nonsense dead end now saying, well okay there's one massively successful killer app, but what if that's the only one ever?
Claude Code is rare product that is both beneficial and economically addictive, where its use increases demand for itself, at least in the supply / demand range for code we are accustomed to. It makes making software so much easier that Claude coding custom software becomes a solution to all sorts of past annoyances. Maintaining the software is easy enough thanks to Claude code.
There's just so much incredible stuff being made by really brilliant people that never would have had the chance before. And these tools are literally brand spanking new. We're just getting started.
Missing the Claude Code market was the biggest swing and miss ever.
Too busy trying to make TikTok for preteens with $4/generation videos that lost their novelty the minute IP was off the table. Didn't even identify the professional market in video was the correct place to invest, like Kling and ByteDance did.
Chasing consumer killed their ascendency.
Sam is a ruthless leader and knows how to build an empire, but he's also a distracted leader who chases too many flights of fancy. Without a golden goose like Zuckerberg, every mistake is a knife wound.
Its pretty embarassing how they have blown the lead. Instead of finding a pathway toward selling tokens in volume (software production) they spread themselves thin and tried to hype up research, sora, web browser... blah blah.
It amazed me that no one picked up on Codex last summer when it was effectively unlimited. I must have burnt through £10k worth of inference whilst still paying £20 a month
HN is a bubble. I hear people from outside of Silicon Valley that only just started trying out Claude Code recently. There's still a ton of developers yet to jump on board.
I was convinced they were going to go the openclaw or something similar route..pivoting into cybersec/enterprise makes sense if they are trying to copy anthropic, but it doesn't really telegraph any sort of differentiator
This is the key. These frontier model companies are funneling all of their time and resources into scaling, how could they possibly be researching the next phase of AI? Once scaling hits the limit the money is gonna dry up.
As someone working in the enterprise space with OAI, this still feels like we're in the top of the first inning.
Many teams remain anchored on equating AI with chat experiences, while a growing share of enterprise value is emerging from leasing compute clusters to run agentic workloads in containerized environments.
OpenAI has built a cloud-first architecture that supports this model. The desktop experience and applications are sexy, but enterprise usage will likely skew heavily toward asynchronous, background processing.
I know that people keep saying "we're early on here", but I take it as a negative signal that people keep thinking we are in the early innings here. Compared to previous generations of technology change, a great deal of time has passed, it should be a bit disconcerting that no one seems to have found a way to make money out of this yet.
Look at previous killer apps- they came out quickly and were raking in money very quickly. The Apple II went on sale on June 10th, 1977. Visicalc went on sale October 17th, 1979- 860 days separate the two. Apple IPO'd in 1980 with a 21% operating margin! Netscape Navigator 1.0 released December 15th 1994, Amazon.com made its first sale July 16th 1995- 214 days later. AMZN IPO'd May 15th 1997, 883 days after Netscape 1.0 released to the public (they had raised <10 million dollars to that point, but chose not to have a profit because they kept re-investing all of their profit into expanding the business).
We are already 1232 days since ChatGPT 1.0. So we're about 50% farther along than either of those killer apps. No one has figured out as good a business model for Generative AI as either of those were.
To use the other great technology transformation of the past 50 years, cell phones, I have a bit of trouble figuring out the right comparison to ChatGPT 1.0. I can work backwards from today to ChatGPT 1.0 opening up to the public, that's about the difference from the iPhone 3G (the first one with an appstore, the real killer app) to the launch of the Motorola Razr, to give you an idea of how fast mobile technology moved.
Do note that both the Razr and the iPhone were hugely profitable for their companies, in a way that no one has demonstrated with Generative AI.
Is it actually profitable? That the presumed market leader, Anthropic, changed their business model just today to kill off their buffet monthly plans and switch to a la carte for Enterprise makes me doubt they are making money off of selling tokens to software developers.
I think that fact that IPOs have grown slower over the years is more about larger VC markets where they can fund valuations up to hundreds of billions rather than something to do with adoption.
As you note, Netscape and Amazon IPOed fairly quickly.
Google took 6 years (1998 to 2004)
Facebook took 8 years (2004 to 2012)
Alibaba Group took 15 years (1999 to 2014)
Claude Code is at $30B annual recurring revenue, and it launched in Feb 2025, and OpenAI at $25B (although they measure partner revenue differently). By comparison the iPhone make $630M revenue in the 12 months after it was launched.
just maths. if they're as a capable as each other then x product cannot be worth multiples above y unless there's a clear USP. Arguably OpenAi's is brand recognition but given Antrhopic's recent growth that's less certain than a quarter ago
There’s roughly 8b people in the world and somewhere between 2-3b have never used the internet. If OpenAI manages to capture the 6b internet users growing at 100% per year, they have 3 years of user growth left max. Then what?
what makes gpt 5.4 bad to chat ? To me it seems smart and does the job albeit it’s a bit slow. I’m using it only/mostly with the “pro” /xhigh reasoning
The way it converses is the least human like out of all models. It communicates like its writing markdown documents instead of just conversing normally like every other model does. You ask a question and it spits out a design doc instead of just answering the question like a normal human would.
Ah yes, the weekly "ChatGPT is definitely going to fail, for real!" post, with absolutely no substance whatsoever. Still, they know it will definitely be on the front page, regardless. Make sure you subscribe to their pub!
For some reason the latest Claude Desktop release from Anthropic threw off its Claude branding and charm to chase after bland Codex Desktop app look and feels.
> "You have ChatGPT, a 1 billion-user business growing 50-100% a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code?" an early backer of OpenAI told FT. "It's a deeply unfocused company."
This is exactly the dynamic I've been worried about.
If you go to OpenAI's site to learn what they're all about, they're pretty clear about it: "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity", "Join us in shaping the future of technology". They think and I agree that ChatGPT is great, but the future of humanity does not depend on precisely how successful this one consumer chatbot is, and so it is not the company's focus. Anyone who understands OpenAI at even a basic level would recognize this, it's neither new nor subtle.
I'm not sure how to avoid the conclusion that OpenAI investors do not understand OpenAI and are just revenue growth junkies.
I don't believe that either Anthropic or OpenAI are going to survive the AI valuation crunch. Google, Meta and Microsoft will because they're not AI-only companies. There are four reasons why I believe this:
1. I honestly don't think that AI is all that useful for anything other than suppressing labor costs and I don't expect that to change in the short to medium term;
2. I really don't think Anthropic or OpenAI can ever satisfy their stratospheric valuations. I foreesee no cash flow possible that will arrive quick enough to make that happen;
3. Hardware costs will devalue the trillions invested in AI data centers. By 2030 the GPUs will probably be at least 3x as good. Bear in mind, it's just over 4 years between the 3090 and 5090 and that's 3x TFLOPS; and
4. China or other actors will make sure that proprietary LLMs won't be dominant. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow. China in particularly won't want a US tech company to dominate this space. The increasing RAM in local, relatively cheap computers will make this more and more viable.
Bonus prediction: I think China will be making their own homegrown NVidia equivalent GPUs on homegrown EUV by 2030.
What happens if OpenAI collapses at this point? Is it just too big to fail given defense contracts and Microsoft?
The Sora sunsetting marked a big shift towards enterprise focus and meeting Anthropic on the enterprise battlefield, but almost all engineers I work with or know are using Claude at this point exclusively.
There have been a stream of HN posts (I'm noticed this mainly in the past few weeks) implying some people prefer ChatGPT/Codex to Claude.
Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting, often stopping in the middle of a query. ChatGPT/Codex doesn't have this problem.
What the hell kind of queries are you running? I use Claude Pro all the time for asking questions, doing data analysis, writing side projects, and I very rarely get rate limited.
I use Claude Max 20x at work and I rarely hit 10% session utilization, which implies even using Claude to write code all day only uses 2x the Pro token limit.
Are you just telling it to try again when you get a response you don't like?
Claude Code definitely has a head start, but there have been a few HN posts about a perceived nerfing of the intelligence and settings in the past month or so. Codex could capitalize on that weakness. They just introduced a $100 monthly 5x plan so they are at parity with the Claude Code plans. If Anthropic fiddles too much more with the settings then people will start to switch to Codex.
If DoD systems are running on OpenAI infrastructure, you can't just pause them for 6 months during an acquisition. This gets far more complex than just "liquidation of assets".
Because their assets would have been vastly overvalued. The bailout is when the government buys those assets at as close to that fictional valuation as they can, and likely then sells them back at their actual worth.
> Absolutely no reason for a bail out.
There's never been any reason for a bailout. It's just handing tax money to wealthy people who have made bad decisions.
At some point you reach a size when too many politicians and the people who own them have invested so much money that they're willing to take any size political hit in order to save themselves from personal losses when you fail.
It’s an absolutely hilarious/absurd valuation for a company that has absolutely no path to do anything other than lighting money on fire, forever. I’d call it nonsense, but Tesla’s valuation proves the market runs on shenanigans, at this point, so whatever.
If people want to meme OpenAI into a trillion dollar market cap, I guess let them?
So now they are realizing that they are indeed in a bubble and OpenAI was extremely overvalued?
Anthropic is also overvalued. Their revenue is not even recurring. It’s now “Annualised Revenue” due to token spend.
These two companies are just vehicles of a pump and dump scheme. OpenAI is already off loading shares with “acquisitions” that do not make any sense because investors already think they are about to IPO and not worth the price.
What if there are no other killer apps for Enterprise? Only CC will produce the level of token churn that could drive huge profits for model providers.
The Enterprise market is not as substantial as the rapid success of CC makes seem.
Like, that feels like it's also a huge amount of token churn ("sure, I can search every xls file on your machine to find the 2023 invoice from that company"), and very early in its adaption curve.
Most people are still using AI as a webpage chatbot to ask questions to and copy+paste between, but running an "openclaw" like assistant, which can access your files, email, and opens you up to wild security attacks, that seems like a really big killer app.
Cowork to me also seems like it'll take longer to reach the broader market since the models are less good at "use the mouse and keyboard to do this repetitive task" than "write code", but I see it as having killer-app potential with lots of token churn.
I think it's more likely that the companies that employ large numbers of people to perform manual push-the-button-then-the-other-button workflows will replace the tools that need button-pushing with other sorts of automation.
And outside of work I wouldn't spend any money on something to save myself the ten minutes of logging in to pay my credit cards or check my bank statements once a month or so. I have no real need for an always-running assistant and even the things that it seems most useful for today (beating unassisted humans to the punch for limited-quantity things) are only something it could help with as long as only a very few people have access.
I think we all have had experiences with people treating their computers as magic boxes and not understanding why certain requests simply are not possible to satisfy.
This is the same issue many managers of people have for the same reason.
The ideal experience is where one’s resources are able to be allocated such that one can achieve some goal with minimal effort. We are very far away from this ideal with llm’s and absurd amounts of money has already been spent.
Basic forms can be a challenge. Even things like selecting a dropdown menu or pushing a button can be surprisingly hard.
I’m sure many here live in delulu land wondering why everyone doesn’t find the open claw stuff as fascinating as they do.
I’ve been using these types of functions for a while for some specific use cases, and it’s super useful for this. Eg go into my budgeting app and explain to me why a certain discrepancy between forecast and actual occurred, which would otherwise cost me a huge amount of time.
I’ve also been using Cowriter AI, which actively learns from what you’re doing by taking screenshots of your screen every few seconds.
These types of utilities are just starting, they’re underexplored, and will definitely burn lots of tokens (while creating value).
Tools like Claude are best at answering things when the user understands the question.
It’s telling how scarce vision is.
I'm in the film and engineering spaces, and I can honestly say the same about image and video models.
There is so much fun in all of these tools, and the productivity gains are insane.
I shoot film, but I never would have been able to do anything like this before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDdsKJl92H4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U
Today, I saw AI OR DIE with this banger:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNbmoVdirxw
Gossip Goblin is doing incredible work as usual. Dude is a savant and would have killed it in Hollywood if he'd had a chance before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rzl7nUdEs4
Corridor Crew is leaning in and building new tools:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3Dfw969itU
There's just so much incredible stuff being made by really brilliant people that never would have had the chance before. And these tools are literally brand spanking new. We're just getting started.
Too busy trying to make TikTok for preteens with $4/generation videos that lost their novelty the minute IP was off the table. Didn't even identify the professional market in video was the correct place to invest, like Kling and ByteDance did.
Chasing consumer killed their ascendency.
Sam is a ruthless leader and knows how to build an empire, but he's also a distracted leader who chases too many flights of fancy. Without a golden goose like Zuckerberg, every mistake is a knife wound.
Its pretty embarassing how they have blown the lead. Instead of finding a pathway toward selling tokens in volume (software production) they spread themselves thin and tried to hype up research, sora, web browser... blah blah.
Again - they get what they deserve.
AGI is not gonna come from these companies
Many teams remain anchored on equating AI with chat experiences, while a growing share of enterprise value is emerging from leasing compute clusters to run agentic workloads in containerized environments.
OpenAI has built a cloud-first architecture that supports this model. The desktop experience and applications are sexy, but enterprise usage will likely skew heavily toward asynchronous, background processing.
Look at previous killer apps- they came out quickly and were raking in money very quickly. The Apple II went on sale on June 10th, 1977. Visicalc went on sale October 17th, 1979- 860 days separate the two. Apple IPO'd in 1980 with a 21% operating margin! Netscape Navigator 1.0 released December 15th 1994, Amazon.com made its first sale July 16th 1995- 214 days later. AMZN IPO'd May 15th 1997, 883 days after Netscape 1.0 released to the public (they had raised <10 million dollars to that point, but chose not to have a profit because they kept re-investing all of their profit into expanding the business).
We are already 1232 days since ChatGPT 1.0. So we're about 50% farther along than either of those killer apps. No one has figured out as good a business model for Generative AI as either of those were.
To use the other great technology transformation of the past 50 years, cell phones, I have a bit of trouble figuring out the right comparison to ChatGPT 1.0. I can work backwards from today to ChatGPT 1.0 opening up to the public, that's about the difference from the iPhone 3G (the first one with an appstore, the real killer app) to the launch of the Motorola Razr, to give you an idea of how fast mobile technology moved.
Do note that both the Razr and the iPhone were hugely profitable for their companies, in a way that no one has demonstrated with Generative AI.
All the other stuff is nice… but you will continue to be money losing and eventually die.
Now you can’t come out and say this because there’s a whole bunch of investments that depend on hype - think about the robotics nonsense.
And I’m referring to selling tokens to enterprises that produce software.
As you note, Netscape and Amazon IPOed fairly quickly.
Google took 6 years (1998 to 2004)
Facebook took 8 years (2004 to 2012)
Alibaba Group took 15 years (1999 to 2014)
Claude Code is at $30B annual recurring revenue, and it launched in Feb 2025, and OpenAI at $25B (although they measure partner revenue differently). By comparison the iPhone make $630M revenue in the 12 months after it was launched.
The ironic part about this is GPT models are by far the worst models to chat too.
I think I rather talk to a wall than GPT-5.4. It so unpleasant. I feel bad for anyone who only experience with AI is ChatGPT.
* generate a lot of text
* answer at least a few of what it thinks might be follow up questions
* restate its original answer a few times
* suggest a follow up “if you want, I can turn that into…”
It feels very tedious and noisy.
Especially the “If you want” at the end of every single reply.
Maybe they think OpenAI is doing something right?
This is exactly the dynamic I've been worried about.
If you go to OpenAI's site to learn what they're all about, they're pretty clear about it: "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity", "Join us in shaping the future of technology". They think and I agree that ChatGPT is great, but the future of humanity does not depend on precisely how successful this one consumer chatbot is, and so it is not the company's focus. Anyone who understands OpenAI at even a basic level would recognize this, it's neither new nor subtle.
I'm not sure how to avoid the conclusion that OpenAI investors do not understand OpenAI and are just revenue growth junkies.
Whats comical is Steve Jobs preached the notion of focus decades ago.
Why can't people follow simple advice from someone who already acquired the scar tissue? Its literally madness.
Sam shouldve been fired and stayed fired. He's great at raising money, but running the firm? Absolute basket case of a CEO in that regard.
1. I honestly don't think that AI is all that useful for anything other than suppressing labor costs and I don't expect that to change in the short to medium term;
2. I really don't think Anthropic or OpenAI can ever satisfy their stratospheric valuations. I foreesee no cash flow possible that will arrive quick enough to make that happen;
3. Hardware costs will devalue the trillions invested in AI data centers. By 2030 the GPUs will probably be at least 3x as good. Bear in mind, it's just over 4 years between the 3090 and 5090 and that's 3x TFLOPS; and
4. China or other actors will make sure that proprietary LLMs won't be dominant. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow. China in particularly won't want a US tech company to dominate this space. The increasing RAM in local, relatively cheap computers will make this more and more viable.
Bonus prediction: I think China will be making their own homegrown NVidia equivalent GPUs on homegrown EUV by 2030.
The Sora sunsetting marked a big shift towards enterprise focus and meeting Anthropic on the enterprise battlefield, but almost all engineers I work with or know are using Claude at this point exclusively.
Anyone seeing differently?
There have been a stream of HN posts (I'm noticed this mainly in the past few weeks) implying some people prefer ChatGPT/Codex to Claude.
Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting, often stopping in the middle of a query. ChatGPT/Codex doesn't have this problem.
I use Claude Max 20x at work and I rarely hit 10% session utilization, which implies even using Claude to write code all day only uses 2x the Pro token limit.
Are you just telling it to try again when you get a response you don't like?
We have Claude Teams at work and I don't think I've had issues there.
I've also noted that 90% of technical users I encounter are on claude or mostly-claude via cursor (switching models here-and-there).
It was a pretty straightforward transition going from mostly using claude code, to now exclusively codex
genuine question, what do you think these words mean?
Absolutely no reason for a bail out.
It may hurt the ego of Altman and Brockman - but that's their problem.
> Absolutely no reason for a bail out.
There's never been any reason for a bailout. It's just handing tax money to wealthy people who have made bad decisions.
If people want to meme OpenAI into a trillion dollar market cap, I guess let them?
Anthropic is also overvalued. Their revenue is not even recurring. It’s now “Annualised Revenue” due to token spend.
These two companies are just vehicles of a pump and dump scheme. OpenAI is already off loading shares with “acquisitions” that do not make any sense because investors already think they are about to IPO and not worth the price.
Also, one more thing… and it is called Deepseek.