But are there any viable AI products? That's, I think, the root of his claim that it won't ever be good for anything. So far I have yet to hear of a really good, successful AI product. Coding tools arguably kind of work, but that's a pretty small addressable market, and it's still quite unclear whether any of them are viable long-term commercial bets. If you can get good results with Qwen 3.6-27B and Opencode what good is an Anthropic? There are a lot of big, unanswered, foundational questions like that in this space. That's pretty alarming given the huge amounts of capital being tossed around. Commercially, I think the jury is still out on whether LLM driven AI will ever be good for anything, and it's not necessarily an unreasonable position to take given the fundamental weaknesses of the underlying technology.

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mike_hearn a day ago | parent [-]

What are you defining as good and successful?? ChatGPT has 800M+ WAU, that seems pretty good and successful to me (not financially but they have time).

AI companies aren't selling coding tools. Claude Code is not a coding tool! It's a tool that does coding, which is subtly different. The total addressable market for a coding tool is all developers, which is maybe 25-30M people worldwide, the total addressable market for people who need code written is potentially around a few billion or so, maybe more.

	▲	jcgrillo a day ago \| parent [-]
		I'd like to see one of the major AI players demonstrate a successful exit. I don't think Coreweave counts here, because their long-term success is so tightly tied to the AI bubble continuing forever, which it probably won't. I want to see a strong company emerge from the bubble and start delivering real, sustainable value to its customers and investors. That would convince me it's possible to build a decent product and a real business on LLM AI technology.