Love how everyone boasted about replacing all the software with ChatGPT and then we end up with coding agents meaning the software engineer are STILL important. The sell is the development tool. It's classic cloud. Where did all the ops people go, many got subsumed by the cloud companies YET every company still has DevOps people to manage cloud infrastructure. The layer of abstraction went up but we still need the people to write the glue code and understand the business. OK great there's a new cash printer in the room. There's a new tool. Let's just start to ground the tooling in its new found gravity, profitability and IPO market dynamics... Reality has set in. The hype cycle is about to explode... Do you remember ride hailing and just how much cash was burned on credits pre Uber IPO. Then remember the IPO itself? These companies are not the new Google. They are a layer on top. Google was still the most efficient cash printing machine in history beyond the the US government and might still be. Will be interesting to see what the trillion dollar IPOs turn into. I'm going to say we see those prices get cut to a third in less than 5 years and scale back up over the next 15-20 years.
I've been calling that out for a couple years now. LLMs best and most viable use case is still just as a dev tool. Even for non-programming tasks, I still get better results from the LLM if I instruct it to write code to do the task...look at Claude Cowork for example, it's everything I used to do with python myself. It's not really a novel capability, it's just using python & bash for automations that any sysadmin has been doing for decades. Yeah, that's valuable for a non-techincal audience but is it $1T valuable? I don't think so.
When has an IDE or other dev tool ever commanded a $1T valuation?
These things get lost in discussions because people conflate "overvalued" with "not useful." LLMs are useful, particularly as dev tool, but Anthropic & OpenAI are definitely way overvalued.
Every so often there is a trend and a hype cycle. It eventually dissipates. There's value in what gets built but it also becomes the silver bullet or the hammer used for everything. In 2-3 years it's going to die off, it becomes the norm technology trend but it's also part of a larger suite of foundational tooling, meaning so much of it is going to fade into the background and we're going to get back to good old problem solving. Doesn't mean we shouldn't learn and understand but yes we're all going to get burned out on AI chatter.
Good for them. We built similar tooling at that time, but backed by our own APIs. It's something that has a lot of value, that standardisation needs to exist, but it also makes a lot of sense to fold the team into a company like Anthropic that is so developer centric. Good luck to the team there.
The same thing for 10 years and every couple years it gets reimagined while trying to get to the original goal of building a replacement for Google. It's called Micro.
Ah man the VC death trap. It's ok. I don't mean it like that but this is classic. It's unavoidable. They gotta make money. They took money, they gotta make money. It's not easy. Everyone has principles, developers more than anyone. They are developers, they are people like you and me. They didn't even start as ollama. They started as a kubernetes infra project in YC and pivoted. Listen don't be hard on these guys. It's hard enough. Trust me I did it. And not as well them.
This is the game. We shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking there are alternative ways to become profitable around open source, there aren't. You effectively end up in this trap and there's no escape and then you have to compromise on everything to build the company, return the money, make a profit. You took people's money, now you have to make good, there's no choice. And anyone who thinks differently is deluded. Open source only goes one way. To the enterprise. Everything else is burning money and wasting time. Look at Docker. Textbook example of the enormous struggle to capture the value of a project that had so much potential, defined an industry and ultimately failed. Even the reboot failed. Sorry. It did.
This stuff is messy. Give them some credit. They give you an epic open source project. Be grateful for that. And now if you want to move on, move on. They don't need a hard time. They're already having a hard time. These guys are probably sweating bullets trying to make it work while their investors breathe down their necks waiting for the payoff. Let them breathe.
> This stuff is messy. Give them some credit. They give you an epic open source project.
It seems to me the epic open source project was given to us by Georgi Gerganov. These people just tried to milk it for some money, and made everything a little worse in the process.
Especially when the solid core now ships with a web ui and API compatibility with OpenAI and Antropic. In my test of ai clients, Ollama was the only one I deleted.
I don't know why in 2026 I'm still surprised CLIs are taking off. But here's the difference today. It's for real world end user platforms like WhatsApp and Claude. That's the difference. Previously it was only Dev and infrastructure focused. Today we're saying you know what, I need programmatic access to this real world thing. It's fascinating because I rarely open my laptop now or try not to.
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.
Index funds won't get in at ipo prices. They wait a year or so before including new stocks, so the price is guaranteed to have settled by then. OpenAI also isn't profitable yet so that's another point against them in terms of being included in index funds.
Sure they have ... I don't know how many users but it's not like a social network. Instagram was valued $10B with 10 very VERY fast not because of it's tech or employees but mostly IMHO because of the number of locked in users ... because of OTHER users.
Here if one wants to move from OpenAI to Anthropic, they can and they do. You might have difficulty exporting history, context, etc but you make it.
Even basic email has more lock-in than any of the model provider. They did have some moat few years ago, arguably, but now no differentiator that would justify such a valuation.
They are no Meta/Google/Microsoft/Oracle not because of their size or technology but only because their customers can swap providers.
> Even basic email has more lock-in than any of the model provider.
History has proven the average person has very little ability to discern which products have lock-in.
Everyone was confidently predicting Uber would dominate over all the regional ride sharing apps because ride sharing is a commodity and subsidies were enough to shift user behavior.
The thesis from AI providers about lockin have always been coherent: increased personalization and learning of workflows over time would increasingly make using a new AI much worse than an AI that already knows you. If you look at the human virtual assistant world, stickiness is incredibly high once are happy with your onboarded assistant because onboarding a new person unavoidably sucks.
Is this thesis correct? We don’t know, it took Uber billions of burnt cash to discover their thesis was incorrect.
I wish this is the point at which we could create a true alternative to the app stores. This is the moment we could escape the walled gardens. Yes a lot of those who are happy in their ecosystems will stay, but for the ones making the apps, I think there are better alternatives, especially now with PWAs. I think now more than ever is an opportunity to invest in a PWA based mini app platform.
Kudos to Sid for trying it and hopefully it benefits others in the long run. Not everyone has the money, will or commitment to do this. My own father died with a battle of myeloma, a blood and bone marrow cancer, after 2 years, it wasn't the disease specifically that got him, it was the secondary conditions that caused irregular heart rhythm and eventually one day it stopped and no one was there to help. 2 stem cell transplants, rounds of chemo, almost full failure of kidneys. The cancer did its job. Ultimately what I'm saying, the medicine gives us time, but no one beats death. Maybe the treatment gives us time to come to terms with that, hopefully my dad did. I was in total denial. Anyway good luck to you Sid.
All the best to all the cancer survivors out there, and to the loved ones who lost them.
reply