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Comment by richardbarosky | Hacker News Reader

To be sure, security is an amazing AI/LLM use case. A huge swath of the work is pattern matching known security issues against stuff that's very precise to analyze -- programming language text.

Something that stands out is that for the strongest use cases, AI companies will prefer to sell the technique as a service rather than its raw output. For use cases where the output is less valuable, tokens are sold. If AI tokens were so magical in creating new value in developing software applications generally, they wouldn't be selling tokens directly. They'd hoard the tokens are use them to dominate SaaS software in any industry they want.

The same way as someone selling an expensive course in the stock market is signaling that they have more to gain by selling the course rather than taking their knowledge and making money in the stock market directly.

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> The same way as someone selling an expensive course in the stock market is signaling that they have more to gain by selling the course rather than

Or they want to diversify

> If AI tokens were so magical in creating new value in developing software applications generally, they wouldn't be selling tokens directly.

That requires to build and sell a whole product they have little experience with, competing with their own customers. Not a great place for an AI vendor still trying to establish itself. It’s a lot of distraction, when you already have a lot to deal with the existing business. And strategically not too valuable

What market is hotter than AI models? Do you think their energy would be better making games or image editing software?

No, I’m saying the opposite

> They'd hoard the tokens are use them to dominate SaaS software in any industry they want.

I don't understand this argument. I've ran and sold a semi-successful SaaS. The exhausting and frustrating parts are all the things an LLM cannot help you with. Coding the product is not the bottleneck or what grants you success.

Good point but I do think LLM helps with those frustrating parts while not being able to outright solve them.

> Coding the product is not the bottleneck or what grants you success.

Agree, and I think that's the core of my point.

Not that it's irrational or doesn't make sense to sell tokens for purposes of software dev, but that if tokens were a true game changer for success in software dev, they wouldn't be leading with token sales, the same way they're not leading with token sales for security stuff -- it's more like "Contact Sales".

> If AI tokens were so magical in creating new value in developing software applications generally, they wouldn't be selling tokens directly. They'd hoard the tokens are use them to dominate SaaS software in any industry they want.

This doesn't follow at all. Anthropic's revenue is growing 10x year over year selling tokens. Their tokens can be super magical, let them enter established industries and displace incumbents, and get 100% annual growth in those industries, and they would still be better off prioritizing selling tokens, because it's a great business.

What your argument shows is that there are limits. Their tokens are not quite powerful enough to make infinite money instantly in every area of software. Admittedly, that does seem true.

kind of funny tokens don't prompt and steer themselves. it almost as if the value still lies with the human holding the tool.

They kinda do though, that's sort of how agents work. At least that's how it's always felt to me.

what is doing the steering is the weights of the words that came before in context. there is no agent or agency. if your problems need median effort and are well represented in shape in the corpus then agents may work well. true inovation is impossible without careful prompting, wherein the agent becomes an associative engine (kind of a smart search engine) and you the human become the manager of the process.

Maybe, but an alternative argument that building an ecosystem is more valuable in the long run.

We started out with many companies forbidding their employees to use remote LLMs on their source code because of security concerns. Now many companies are starting to believe that they must analyze their all their source code with remote LLMs because of security concerns. When trusting Anthropic becomes normalized, that means they can sell more services that require access to the source code.

Surprised we havent gotten an integrated "MetaSploit" AI update where it calls and messages a ton of people in a company and once it starts to find someone possibly vulnerable lets a human red teamer take over or guide it more by hand.

Isn’t this analogous to saying if farming equipment is so productive why doesn’t John Deer hoard all the tractors and do the farming themselves?

> If AI tokens were so magical in creating new value in developing software applications generally, they wouldn't be selling tokens directly.

If hardware were so magical in creating new value generally, TSMC would be designing the chips instead of selling fabrication as a service.

That is what US chip companies used to do, by the way (back when there was silicon in Silicon Valley, before they got their lunch eaten by Taiwan). If TSMC had to design all of the chips they fabricate now, they would be doing a lot less business. Conversely, if any other company that wanted to design a chip had to build their own cutting-edge fab first, NVIDIA would not exist.

They can only do that if they're a monopoly, which they're not

> They can only do that if they're a monopoly, which they're not

Why do you say that? I reckon lots and lots of companies sell software that aren’t monopolies. Having competition, even stiff competition, isn’t anathema to running a business.

You said "They wouldn't be selling tokens directly ... They'd hoard them"

But they can't do that because they aren't monopolies.

> You said

Just to clarify, I’m not the person you initially replied to.

> "They wouldn't be selling tokens directly ... They'd hoard them" But they can't do that because they aren't monopolies.

Hoarding them— not selling any of them, but instead using them internally and selling the products created by them — doesn’t at all seem like it would require a monopoly.

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