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.
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.
The point of AI is that it's supposed to be intelligent. Why silo it in an app? Instead of telling it what to automate, shouldn't it sit at the OS level, watch everything you do, and figure out what to automate by itself?
"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.
An AI that consumes every document on the system in response to a simple search request is going to be fired just as quickly as a human who does the same thing not long after replacements able to use conventional search tools to efficiently accomplish the same task are widely available.
Similarly, customers who rely on AI cowork tools will come to favor systems and applications that expose AI-friendly interfaces, which shouldn't be difficult to implement in most cases under the assumption that the models in question are already good at consuming API documentation and writing code (and, for that matter, writing API documentation, refactoring, and generating relatively straightforward wrapper code).
I have less faith in the market's ability to effectively respond to security threats in a timely fashion, alas.
> 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).
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.
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.
> Only CC will produce the level of token churn that could drive huge profits for model providers.
Are they actually driving any profit? I mean actual profit, not "tokens" or users or profit but ignoring inference costs, same ignoring training, R&D, etc. I'm not arguing against how useful it is, nor how popular, just the basic total spent - total earned.
Us devs have shiny object syndrome. We will use whatever we perceive to be be best at the moment and move on. People are already souring on Opus 4.6 due to what appears to be opaque changes to it by Anthropic. For any of these companies to be successful they need to get to a point where their models stop growing and compute gets multiples cheaper.
What is incredibly disgusting for me, is the idea that there can be only one winner in the stock market, which spits in he face of free market competition.
This is not an AI thing, this is a stocks thing, which Ive been complaining about incessantly.
If a given domain, like AI, has competition, that means you have to sell things at cost + margin, and rush ahead or be crushed by competitors. Will definitely make you good money, but wont make you a king.
This is not the kind of money people involved with these kinds of companies are looking for.
AI right now looks like a competiton, with many horses in the race, which are more or less building the same product.
It will hard to squeeze and enshittify this considering people can just jump to another vendor, thus if the current market structure were to prevail, investors would go.
Thus competition has to go.
Altman knows this, and tried to position OpenAI as the obvious winner in this competition, but I guess in the process he managed to alienate people, so now he's not doing so well.
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.
Nothing is worth $852B in that space of time unless they are printing more than half of that in cash which to be clear they are not. They are burning it at that rate. Let's be clear. It's a valuable company, a valuable product, a valuable technology. It set the trend for the next phase of computer usage. But it's not worth $852B in that span of time and when it goes public that reality will bear down on them quickly.
It's a falling knife. Don't try catch it on the way down. That valuation might be justified in another 10 years.
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.
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 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
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?
> "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.
There does seem to be like a 1% chance (maybe 0.5%) that this turns into a WeWork situation. It's a product that users love, but the company leadership is so used to lying and deceiving and being loose with numbers that the IPO filing could be a pretty big shock. Either they'll have to tell the truth, which will be much less rosy than the lies, or they'll lie and turn everyone off.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
135 comments
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.
Tools like Claude are best at answering things when the user understands the question.
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.
Similarly, customers who rely on AI cowork tools will come to favor systems and applications that expose AI-friendly interfaces, which shouldn't be difficult to implement in most cases under the assumption that the models in question are already good at consuming API documentation and writing code (and, for that matter, writing API documentation, refactoring, and generating relatively straightforward wrapper code).
I have less faith in the market's ability to effectively respond to security threats in a timely fashion, alas.
> 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).
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.
> Only CC will produce the level of token churn that could drive huge profits for model providers.
Are they actually driving any profit? I mean actual profit, not "tokens" or users or profit but ignoring inference costs, same ignoring training, R&D, etc. I'm not arguing against how useful it is, nor how popular, just the basic total spent - total earned.
This is not an AI thing, this is a stocks thing, which Ive been complaining about incessantly.
If a given domain, like AI, has competition, that means you have to sell things at cost + margin, and rush ahead or be crushed by competitors. Will definitely make you good money, but wont make you a king.
This is not the kind of money people involved with these kinds of companies are looking for.
AI right now looks like a competiton, with many horses in the race, which are more or less building the same product.
It will hard to squeeze and enshittify this considering people can just jump to another vendor, thus if the current market structure were to prevail, investors would go.
Thus competition has to go.
Altman knows this, and tried to position OpenAI as the obvious winner in this competition, but I guess in the process he managed to alienate people, so now he's not doing so well.
But who knows what the future will bring?
It's a falling knife. Don't try catch it on the way down. That valuation might be justified in another 10 years.
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.
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.
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.
If people want to meme OpenAI into a trillion dollar market cap, I guess let them?
> "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.
Probably won't happen. But not definitely.
Maybe they think OpenAI is doing something right?
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?
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.