> there is no way companies like OpenAI could ever justify their valuations

The value proposition isn't really "we'll help you write all the code for your company" it's a world where the average user's computer is a dumb terminal that opens up to a ChatGPT interface.

I didn't initially understand the value prop but have increasingly come to see it. The gamble is that LLMs will be your interface to everything the same way HTTP was for the last 20 years.

The mid-90s had a similar mix of deep skepticism and hype-driven madness (and if you read my comments you'll see I've historically been much closer to the skeptic side, despite a lot of experience in this space). But even in the 90s the hyped-up bubble riders didn't really see the idea that http would be how everything happens. We've literally hacked a document format and document serving protocol to build the entire global application infrastructure.

We saw a similar transformation with mobile devices where most of your world lives on a phone and the phone maker gets a nice piece of that revenue.

People thought Zuck was insane for his metaverse obsession, but what he was chasing was that next platform. He was wrong of course, but what his hope was was that VR would be the way people did everything.

Now this is what the LLM providers are really after. Claude/ChatGPT/Grok will be your world. You won't have to buy SaaS subscriptions for most things because you can just build it yourself. Why use Hubspot when you can just have AI do all your marketting, then you just need Hubspot for their message sending infrastructure. Why pay for a budgeting app when you can just build a custom one that lives on OpenAIs server (today your computer, but tomorrow theirs). Companies like banks will maintain interfaces to LLMs but you won't be doing your banking in their web app. Even social media will ultimately be replaced by an endless stream of bespoke images video and content made just for you (and of course it will be much easier to inject advertising into this space you don't even recognize as advertising).

The value prop is that these large, well funded, AI companies will just eat large chunks of industry.