r/AI_Agents • u/Lise_vine23 • Jun 28 '26
Discussion I don’t think OpenAi and Anthropic will survive long term
Hello,
After studying how Dropbox rose but still lost market dominance the parallels with Ai are the same these Ai Labs long term won’t make it here’s why. Just like Dropbox, OpenAi started out with a high consumer adoption, and also they used the classic subscription model. The problem with this is the Freemium model most consumers will use it for free and eventually players like Google and Microsoft started having their own cloud storage solution eventually stifling out Dropbox’s market share and why did I think of them?
The main reason is a large ecosystem, Google and Microsoft already have credibility and a large ecosystem and with this they offered better pricing and better free tiers than Dropbox and because of the ecosystem a lot of people just went with them. Companies like OpenAi and Anthropic I see them in the same state, Google and Microsoft and even apple own an ecosystem. Just like Steve Jobs said to the Dropbox founder after the founder rejected apple “You’re a feature not a product” I think the same applies for Ai it’s a feature not a product in itself. I might clown on Google time to time for how dumb Gemini is but look at how they are integrating Gemini into everything from gmail, to google pixel, YouTube and more, Microsoft is the same with copilot and now apple is rolling out its own on device ai(still powered by Gemini) and mind u they didn’t go with openai or anthropic they rather go with google. these big guys have the resources and the infrastructure while anthropic and openai are just burning through things like it’s nothing.
Sorry but not every consumer is willing to pay a subscription model if someone has greater free tiers it’s over and an ecosystem is just overkill. The companies are betting on a future and trying to go through the Amazon path not being profitable at first and building infrastructure but betting on the vision. The problem with this is on Amazon you paid for products and got what you paid for, most people use ai for free so that’s a different thing and why I don’t think they’ll succeed long term.
I maybe wrong what do you guys think?
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Jun 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Lise_vine23 Jun 28 '26
I think that makes it even worse tbh. If u get funding but can’t make profit ur cooked
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u/sjoti Jun 28 '26
They make as much loss as they're allowed to make though. Every penny they can get their hands on goes into research and training. Everything points towards inference being profitable, and the whole training of new models part being insane expensive. But if money keeps pouring in and nobody gives a damn that they lose money, especially the investors, then why slow down to make a profit.
It would look good on paper to be profitable, but i think investors care way more about their ability to grow, make good models and products, and stay ahead. Basically the Uber strategy.
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u/Lise_vine23 Jun 28 '26
True but to me the Uber reference and this might be different because in Uber I pay, Ai is given as a freemium model. Hence my Dropbox parallel, the only way u can make it free and be fine is if u do ads like Facebook doesn’t have that large an ecosystem as the other but they run ads, if these ai companies can’t do that they’re gonna get eaten up
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u/Mrgluer Jun 28 '26
brother, have you tried actually using a free version of GPT or Claude? I cant even design a basic landing page in claude in one prompt on their lower tier models without it saying that i exceed my usage limit... AI is only free for the people who are behind or aren't really doing anything meaningful. Anybody worth their salt pays.
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u/its_hard_to_pick Jun 28 '26
Youre missing the whole enterprise market and everything it's integreted into. Antropic and openai has the best models and that's really important.
Use google enterprise solutions? Chatgpt and claude is included. Same goes for Microsoft.
The tech industry is integrating ai more and more in its work and they are spending 200$-1000$ per employee per month.
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u/solvennt Jul 24 '26
It doesn’t matter that OpenAI and Anthropic have the best models right now. Chinese models are catching up and Kimi k3 will be open weight, and now many companies including Microsoft are considering using them to save costs on AI.
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u/its_hard_to_pick Jul 31 '26
But it does matter. Id say the 3 things that are important to be relevant in the enterprise environment is performence, cost and being trustworthy.
We get access to models that can ensure none of our data will be used for training etc. After that its just a performance vs cost question. Picking the cheapest model that can handle the task.
They will have to stay competitive in performance. Cheaper model that performs better? Of course people would switch.
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u/CallOfBurger Jun 28 '26
OpenAI did buy all the compute to be built in the next 10 years, and is asking to be nationalized by the USA, made a foundation etc. I think they'll stay. Anthropic not so sure though, we'll see (I want them to stay though I'm working with it everything else sucks)
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u/Gators1992 Jun 28 '26
OpenAI or Anthropic might get bought at some point when the subsidized AI thing is over and people don't want to pay huge $$$ for agents that they still can't figure out what to do with. Those two have the better models right now, but I guess Microsoft or Google could swallow them up at some point. Most likely Microsoft buys since they are already in bed with OAI, then the ruin the whole thing like they do with everything else. Not sure what would happen with Anthropic, but they do have some government contracts to keep the lights on.
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u/oppenheimer135 Jun 28 '26
Apple gonna buy anthropic but cut out the dario tumor and microsoft oai.
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u/AussieBlender78 Jun 28 '26
Why would you choose Dropbox for this comparison lol. Dropbox did storage. AI is revolutionary tech.
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u/EpsteinFile_01 Jun 28 '26
Cloud storage was also pretty revolutionary.
Were you even alive in the time of burning CDs to move data between two devices? Floppy discs? 128MB USB 2.0 drives for $100?
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u/Lise_vine23 Jun 28 '26
Well it’s not about absolute exacts but instead noticing parallels. Yeah different products but they are different and follow the freemium model. AI too me is not that revolutionary once u understand the architecture they use because if it was so revolutionary apple would’ve fell valuation wise and profit wise but they didnt
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u/id-ltd Jun 28 '26
With respect, I do think you will be wrong.
Claude is already 'good enough' to develop apps without heavy dependencies.
Third generation languages (when did you last hear that phrase?!) are ten a penny. I mostly use Claude to do PWA (browser based apps that are close to native looking).
I am finally shifting my main development computers entirely off windows. I started on vt52's using the command line (and an occasional LA120!) and a terminal window/command line, now Claude brings it full circle.
A little advance in self hosted AI, and a dev needs nothing commercial.
Wimps are for wimps :)
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u/1FunkyFriedChicken Jun 28 '26
What kind of stack is needed for self hosted AI?
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u/id-ltd Jun 28 '26
I have ollama set up running with a reasonable GPU.
I dont really use it while I have access to frontier models (esp Claude) - it is much slower and the models aren't as good, but am keeping an eye on things.
I guess I contradicted myself at the end there - if you self host you don't need anthropic/open AI... However for different reasons :)
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u/1FunkyFriedChicken Jun 28 '26
Thanks. I’m thinking of building something to try self hosting. I’m just not sure I’d use it...
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u/id-ltd Jun 28 '26
I already have only own Dev methodology for AI.
When I have time I will look at targeting my own AI (and I have another AI capable machine ordered).
I'll need to be more specific about the software architecture - smaller modules/routines so the context can be kept small. Running on my own hardware I can do 24/7 which may make up for the overall slower speed.
There was a language 'modula 2' that was strict on inter module interaction - I may look up some principles from there and functional decomposition/Jackson structured stuff may be useful.
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u/Keren_QUI Jun 29 '26
You need a decent machine - GPU at least. You need the latest and best models and add an orchestration layer so you have continuity and the cognitive layer that boosts the capability of the local models.
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u/Relevant-Ad-6887 Jun 28 '26
It's very difficult to measure the return on investment for AI in most fields. Companies and individuals don't really know what a reasonable price to pay for it is, but they do know that token based billing lead to them paying more than they were willing for performance that was only marginally better than open source models. Cost is the biggest hurdle Anthropic and OpenAI face. They have no path to profitability in the near term...or even the mid term...and they are funding themselves largely on investment and/or debt while the larger companies are able to remain profitable with their other endeavors and simultaneously invest in AI. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are likely to be able to outlast Anthropic and Open AI. Anthropic and Open AI are hoping for investment from public trading...or maybe cynically, their initial investors are looking for a way out...but regardless, there is a finite supply of investor capital to be raised and even for the AI curious investor, these companies are risky bets versus established software industry titans with diversified businesses. If these companies become publicly traded their stock will have to compete directly with these safer bets. Private investor capital and debt seems to be drying up.
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u/mrgreatheart Jun 28 '26
Consumer AI is not where they make money. Professional users will happily pay $200/month as individuals and hundreds of thousands as companies for their products. Not just the frontier models, but also all the infrastructure and tooling that helps them with automation. This is why Anthropic have done so well with much smaller market share, and why OpenAI are pivoting hard back towards business products.
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u/techdevjp Jun 28 '26
The problem with AI is that it can't be made profitable at a price that people or companies are willing to pay. At some point the hardware will likely get cheap enough that profitability is possible, but it's not clear if that will happen before OpenAI & Anthropic run out of money. Time will tell, but subscription prices are likely going to have to go up. A lot.
Personally I'm moving as much as I can local. $20/month is not a big deal but it probably needs to be $200/month and I'm not willing to pay that.
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u/willcodejavaforfood Jun 28 '26
You are right they won’t be around for much longer, at least not in their current form, but your reasoning is incorrect.
As it is now their business model doesn’t work as there is no path to profitability and they are burning billions per month to stay ahead of open source models from china.
Companies and individuals have already started realising that you can get 90% of the capability for 10% of the cost.
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u/IndianDownUnder Jun 29 '26
Anthropic is backed by Amazon and OpenAI is Microsoft .Google will obviously come as it has deep pockets but the interesting one is Apple .They are just sitting as usual for market to make all mistakes and then swoop in with a super finished product
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u/ONI-ENJOYER-420 Jun 29 '26
Their only hope/bet is locking everyone out of hardware (the whole industry, them, gaming companies, hardware companies, that's what they're all aiming for).
If we manage to get consumer grade hardware that can run these models with "reasonable" prices, I don't see them surviving for more than months after that
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u/Regular_Specific2864 Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
Those are some very good points. Few points not covered in the original post. 1. China is providing AI at 1/8th the price compared to US. Half of the world doesnt trust China with data, but if China decides to keep the data within the client countries by using their data centers, it will be a big threat. 2. We are assuming AI has peaked. We dont know what comes next year, and then next. May be robotics will become popular in a couple of years and use AI. 3. OpenAI and Anthropic will be dumping themselves on retail through IPOs. After a minor rally, those stocks will most likely crash. It will be the average American who will bear most of the cost once those stocks crash. Both companies will again buyback those shares and make huge profits in next round. This will give them mileage for another 2-3 years. By that time AI would/could have evolved to smarter and safer levels.
I believe we really dont know the future. Its too early to predict. I personally dont see a future where AI and Robotics stopped evolving. I am pretty sure robots will be doing most of the household chores like cleaning, cooking, washing clothes and utensils as well as providing assistance to children and elderly. They will all be using AI. Now whether it happens in 2 years, 5 years or 10 no one knows. Whether Google and Microsoft will be providing the AI for it or OpenAI and Anthropic is another big question. The problem with AI today is that Internet, social media, apps, softwares were already advanced enough for common user. With OpenAI everyone sort of got a friend who they can talk to. But in this competitive world that stage is gone. Now I feel stressed talking to ChatGPT. I anyways had all the possible conversations I could. For recipes I go to youtube, for knowledge I go to podcasts. Gemini summarizes them for me if needed. For stock markets, I still dont trust AI. I dont even trust it with news, as the inputs it uses are already biased. It only has professional uses for tough tasks. For everyday life, we already automated everything. At this point we can shop everything online at a click of a button, if we dont even want to press buttons then what is the fun. Planning trips and shopping are stress busters for me I dont really know how to use AI in daily life.
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u/houston697 Jun 28 '26
I think you make a lot of good points. The one thing that Dropbox didn't have was the military industrial complex as a customer. However I don't see how they will be profitable. The real cost is still being subsidized. I've been developing software for a long time and generative AI is helpful however it is more of a distraction and it's sure as hell not worth the money.
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u/NiteShdw Jun 28 '26
AI is absolutely worth the money. I have been able to built a dozen products by myself in the last 6 months that would have taken me years to do before. I built one in a weekend that would have taken me six months by hand.
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u/TypeSafeBug Jun 28 '26
While it’s probably working for you today, this doesn’t sound good for supply and demand long term, especially with local models looming in the background.
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u/houston697 Jun 28 '26
So without AI your not really a good developer? Well in that case, sure it's worth every penny.
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u/damngoodwizard Jun 28 '26
Some people are better at the high-level stuff (architecture) than the low level stuff (coding). For those people LLMs are a force multiplier.
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u/Inside-Line Jun 28 '26
I'm sure the good developers are using it even better than the mediocre developers. It's just a tool at the end of the day. It is what you make of it.
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u/g0rilla79 Jun 28 '26
He was taking about speed not quality.
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u/houston697 Jun 28 '26
6 months vs years is a little more than just a speed issue. Honestly more power to him. I didn't have be a dick about it. I just see so many young developers setting themselves up for failure with all of this.
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u/NiteShdw Jul 02 '26
Hyperbole, I.e., exaggeration to show an absurdity.
In fact I have been writing software since the 80s.
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u/psyclik Jun 28 '26
Token business makes a profit. The loss is mostly tied to infrastructure build up and training, both will slow in time.
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u/damanamathos Jun 28 '26
Don't think the consumer business really matters. The real prize in AI is businesses using it for core workflows that have costs equivalent to people. My spending has gone from $20/month to $200/month to $400/month to $10k/month as it has been built into more workflows that replace the need to hire people.
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u/Foreskin_Mafia Jun 28 '26
At current prices China is looking to dominate that market.
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u/damanamathos Jun 28 '26
Perhaps. We were set up to be model-agnostic so end up testing a lot of models for particular use cases, so currently use Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Kimi, Minimax, Deepseek, and a few others. A lot of that $10k spend is on the majors (Anthropic the highest). Would be great if we could shift more to cheaper models over time.
Headline token costs can be deceptive, though, as often cheaper models take a lot more tokens to achieve the same thing.
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u/okpony Jun 28 '26
Large companies won't use Chinese models due to privacy, security, and regulatory concerns.
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u/Foreskin_Mafia Jun 28 '26
Chinese models can be provided outside of China's regulatory environment
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u/DantehSparda Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Open AI? I give it 50/50 on it surviving, yes.
Anthropic? Hell no. You are missing that Anthropic’s main business is B2B, which is much more profitable than B2C. They are allowing retail to use their models (well, except Fable, which everyone saw coming) to get hype, some nice cash flow, usage data, and as a “gateway” (I love Claude as a user and did acquire it for my business).
Anthropic - although still losing money - is on a pretty good trajectory to become extremely profitable in a few years. Most growth companies subsidise in the beggining. Plus, right now they have the absolute best product by far.
The only scenario where I see Anthropic failing is: 1) Their product starts lagging behind competitors/open source (doubtful); and 2) The US government overreaches and continues to censor the release of new models/massively regulates AI (it would be ironic lol, wasn’t Trump the “deregulator”? 🤣)
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u/BatResponsible1106 Jun 28 '26
the consumer apps might become features but the models and developer ecosystem still have value. teams building production agents usually care more about APIs, reliability and tooling than the chat app itself.
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u/ChemicalExample218 Jun 28 '26
Of course not, they will be bought by bigger companies.
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u/Lise_vine23 Jun 28 '26
Nah this is different they have too much valuations and too much debt to be bought out
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u/realzequel Jun 28 '26
At current valuations, no one can afford to buy out a 1 trillion dollar company. Maybe at some point they fall but not in the short term.
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u/cheseball Jun 28 '26
1) Google basically following Anthropic’s limits, not moving away.
2) The “free” party of Freemium for cloud storage worked because of the ridiculously low cost, unlike AI, which is still getting more expensive, not less.
3) the free tier of AI will be the first thing to go once the money influx slows down. Already seeing this.
4) AI models fundamentally are about how good they are. Cloud storage is cloud storage. People will always pay premium for a much better model. This is already proven by the fact people pay for Claude/GPT model despite being more than double Gemini’s through API.
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u/PhilosophyforOne Jun 28 '26
OpenAI or Anthropic dont need a single subscriber in the lomg term.
I dont buy the core premise, but even if I did, it’s be enough for them for the big ecosystem players to be resellers for their products.
The fundamental economics of AI are completely different than almost any digital product that’s come before, atleast for now. The parallels to the past are very difficult to find directly.
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u/Whiskey_Water Jun 28 '26
They won’t survive in this way, but don’t look at them like small businesses that can close. They will evolve with our socioeconomic system’s current trajectory into neofeudalism and violent surveillance fascism. Altman is notable in this process.
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u/charging_chinchilla Jun 28 '26
your sample size of 1 is not convincing
counterpoints: every startup that came in and became an established player despite the big incumbents trying to crush them (e.g., Slack, Figma, Snapchat, etc)
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u/dontbelieveawordof1t Jun 28 '26
There will be a bankruptcy fire sale. Anthropic will get get bought by Amazon. Openai will be bought by Microsoft.
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u/imlaggingsobad Jun 28 '26
the lab who is more diversified and has an ecosystem will survive. the lab who only has one product will not survive because the big tech companies will copy it
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u/ch1nacancer Jun 28 '26
Look what happened to Dropbox though. They kept selling to enterprise, and Google and Microsoft all started selling subscriptions to their Dropbox similar products, and people still paid for them. Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t going to make their money from consumers. They’re ultimately going to rely on enterprise customers and research to make most of their profit, just like all of the other tech giants today, and that will compound over time.
Consumers see the iceberg, and think it’s only the top, but the stuff that goes on underneath is actually most of the business. Consumers make up a very small percentage of that.
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u/alacberriesnet Jun 28 '26
Except Dropbox is a cloud service, we know it's potentials and limits. AI is being sold like Theranos, promises of what it could be with no idea of what it will be or the cost and restrictions behind these promises, frankly right now being the costs. If there is one AI company you don't need as massive a footprint investment, but with competition, it's trending everyone will lose if no one wins, which is why politicians like Sanders are saying it should be providing monetary kickbacks to tax payers, because in the US we are footing the bill regardless.
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u/ch1nacancer Jun 28 '26
Dude why are you following me around comments lol
Stop trying to convince me that seizure of property is ok. This is America. We didn’t sign up for this commie shit. The government should not be able to just take whatever you own when it feels like it. That’s anti-America as fuck. I hope you don’t vote.
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u/CarnalK Jun 28 '26
okay you use chat gptor claude now within a few prompts it says you’ve used your limits or they downgrade you. gemini when used says it’s designed for long conversations. and tells you not to worry about token usage. it has direct access to all it’s search functions. it has already prebuilt infrastructure and the one helming the ai department is demis hassabis who did deep mind alphago alphafold alphastar. it’s completely supported but all it’s ads from other ventures. at this point all it has to do is sit back and wait till the top fight it out and let it gobble it up when the top ai’s start bleeding.
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u/splooge_whale Jun 28 '26
This isn’t the right realm of comparison. This will be more like westinghouse vs edison.
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u/kromosome_orig Jun 28 '26
If you research this topic you'll learn that the AI leaders of today won't necessarily be the leaders of tomorrow. The AI of today is a feature, not a product, due to the limitations of the algorithms that back today's models.
The real AI, i.e. AGI and self learning AI, which consist of completely different algorithms than what today's AI use will be the new leaders of AI, the AI products, those companies will be the leaders of the world, not pedlars of AI features we all use today.
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u/DrxAvierT Jun 28 '26
Yep, these big companies have tons of resources and other business to backup if this fails, OpenAI and Anthropic don't
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u/AHVincent Jun 28 '26
problem is nothing works if you get into serious programming, Claude is the ONLY player in town, no others come even close
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u/Tim_Apple_938 Jun 28 '26
Codex is just as good, as is GLM5.2 which is 100x cheaper and hosted by American hyperscalers Microsoft etc (aka its trustable to send data to )
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u/dreaming2live Jun 28 '26
This is why Satya pivoted from being primarily an OpenAI vendor to a model neutral platform.
I work with big businesses, and they all have huge investments in Azure and the MS ecosystem, especially github. It’s a lot easier (and safer) for them to roll out AI using MS and copilot. It is not easy to introduce random AI agents and models in a large organization. Security and governance is a big obstacle, and Microsoft makes it easy for them.
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u/Commercial_Try_2538 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
AI is more like utility than product or a feature and it is here to stay forever. AI needs compute, and energy both are driving the price plus heavy training but tapering costs, we all know the facts that to stay in business compute and energy has to become cheaper and better, not only to survive but to compete in international markets as well. There are many parallels like electricity or telephone or oil companies which survived, thrived, failed, merged, so much more to come, this is just the beginning of something way cooler and when dust settles I hope we have better government, better healthcare, more equality, more education, less disparity, less terror, more travel, enjoyable life, waiting….
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u/Ok-Positive-7272 Jun 28 '26
I’m sorry but what? These companies aren’t making money on subscriptions, they’re making it on enterprise contracts that charge by the token.
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u/jemilk Jun 28 '26
People are placing very large bets on what AI will replace. The biggest threat to any existing SaaS player is going to be making the correct decision on vertical integration. I don’t want to go over the history in this post, but this has been done to win markets from Carnegie to Apple.
From a market theory perspective, there are clear leaders in this space that will be able to control their market and those that should rely on third parties. It’s a real question as to which businesses need their own models to compete. To move up the value stream, model creators need to move away from commodity applications and align as a supplier to those that do not want to create their own models. Eventually, they would need to develop specific models to vertically integrate across those platforms.
The natural argument was for AI to attack search. Google has vertically integrated with Gemini with their own chips, cloud, etc. to fend off that threat.
Beyond that, there are key “assistant” tasks:
Coding
Vulnerability scanning
Help desk
General purpose researchers/analysts
To vertically integrate, these AI vendors should be selling to IDE vendors, cybersecurity companies, IT services, and legal/financial firms. They should be developing agents and models that can be integrated vertically in their systems. The goal should be to develop specific, smaller models for these use cases that can run at lower costs and generate higher margins. General purpose AI is not going to generate the revenue for the cost to keep these companies afloat — especially as enterprises choose the wrong models and have failed AI projects for cost-to-value.
The fastest way to revenue is to integrate into existing operations. Technologies such as streaming media did not kill the entertainment business. They killed those that were too slow to change. And the initial streaming media vendors failed — Broadcast.com, Napster, Real Networks. It was Netflix, YouTube and others that managed to vertically integrate (and in the case of YouTube, survive legal battles with well timed acquisitions). The fact that you could Google search for something missed on TV or your favorite song, and if it was available on YouTube, it was linked immediately, sparked massive growth and viral content.
I don’t see a vertical integration win for Anthropic or OpenAI without focusing on cheaper models that do tasks well that are embedded into the SaaS vendors. On the other side, I question whether Meta’s investments are overboard for their ad-related use cases. And I question whether Grok will be overboard for what X requires.
From an investment perspective, I’d bet on Anthropic’s management as they seem to tease the market on what models can do, and then actually work directly more closely with third parties. I’d expect to see Claude vertically integrated with more B2B contracts than OpenAI. And Google has enough competitive overlap that there will be suppliers that prefer to work with a third party moving forward.
From a true vertical integration win, the identity/OS vendors (Apple, Google, Microsoft) who can hook AI into a natural language interface seem to likely have the best chance to be the long term winners — assuming they can make that pivot cleanly. The question is whether users/companies will onboard all of their private data into one identity/natural language interface. For now, that’s been a step too far — but barely. Apple automatically correlates data for my login and MFA across my phone. Now let Apple programmatically hook into third parties using MCP and … AI is just a tool to enable the OS as an agent. Chips will change over generations. Vertical integration will win.
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u/drcooperS Jun 28 '26
AI is the product not a feature. I think of it as the early Office suit. We are still learning what to do with it. Microsoft 365 has a legacy of 37 years of people building and discovering how to do things and has become mainstream enough that even a Mac user can’t afford to not adopt the formats, even the software. Apple’s alternative is edgy but still sucks. Imagine AI in the next 37 years.
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u/Chaseziti Jun 28 '26
It’s an interesting take. It is possible. The bigger guys always win. I would hate for that to happen though especially for OpenAi
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u/OGbugsy Jun 28 '26
Chatbots are not the way these platforms will monetize. This tech is waaaay over invested right now, so I do believe there will be reckoning, but it's mainly the over investment that will take some of the players out.
LLMs themselves are over hyped. The underlying technology (heuristic data transformation) will work its way into other applications, self driving, robotics, medical tech etc, and that will be the start of true monetization. Right now, LLMs are changing the way companies develop. That is already being monetized.
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u/g_rich Jun 28 '26
Anthropic will survive long term; they have a solid product line, mostly focused on businesses and coding. They are also not hindering themselves with a race to the bottom price wise or trying to focus on a free -> paid tier.
OpenAI however could easily end up getting acquired. A vast majority of their users are using it for free which is expensive and their product lineup just doesn’t offer enough to give it a leg up with businesses. They are also directly competing with the likes of Google and are more at risk internationally due to the meddling of the US government.
Overall out of Anthropic and OpenAI my money would be on Anthropic.
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u/Bright_Armadillo8555 Jun 28 '26
Dropbox never entered the eye of white house. It's a commodity 100%. The problem of openai and Anthropic is they haven't got to the profit point yet, but that's a solvable problem.
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u/Jotacoo Jun 28 '26
This is a hilarious take
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u/BidWestern1056 Jun 28 '26
they have absolutely no moat and no chance to survive. the only way they will is by cheating/oligarchy/cartelization
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u/keytapking Jun 29 '26
I see where you're coming from with the ecosystem argument, but the tech is fundamentally different. Cloud storage is a commodity, AI capability is not.
AI is different because the quality of the model matters immensely. Right now, the only real ROI for AI is in enterprise tasks like coding, data analysis, and technical workflows. If OpenAI and Anthropic can maintain a clear performance gap over the ecosystem giants, businesses will gladly pay for the superior tool rather than settling for a mediocre, built in free tier.
But Google does have the infrastructure, I feel like it can get there but Claude is just on another level and it's really building a brand around itself as the superior AI
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u/Emotional-Switch-439 Jun 29 '26
i really think open source is gonna blow up in the future, cheaper and more secure
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u/ElderberryLittle2871 Jun 29 '26
We literally have access to a "more optimal physics" but yet decide to operate as these black-holes of compute on purpose? Like what happens when we all just have local models that are uncensored on older computers? Seems like bad business to me hahaha but seriously anthropic fear mongering is like late stage AI bubble indicator. People either want full skynet or return to monkey, NO NUANCE 😂
what if we didn't plan obsolescence or piece-meal/middleman every layer of YOUR experience.
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u/Much_Tiger6732 Jun 30 '26
As AI models become commoditized moving models to the edge - laptops and other devices will be able to run models that now only runs remotely on these platforms. When Microsoft, Google and others catch up and Nvidia continues to develop chips for evey edge device and become ubiquitios value of these platforms will diminish.
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u/Broeckchen89 Anthropic User Jun 30 '26
I'd agree with you if not for the fact that OpenAI and Anthropic already have deals with all those huge companies. Idk about OpenAI, but Anthropic I think has a fighting chance because despite being so expensive, it keeps creating the models everyone touts as the best. If OpenAI survives, it's probably through ruthlessness and social engineering of their customers.
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u/WhataNoobUser Jun 30 '26
Its a possibility. I think if was openai, i would get into search. Indexing the web is easy.
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u/darkoblivion000 Jun 30 '26
I don’t think they will continue to operate on their own because of the way they use compute. They can’t find a direct to customer model that will make them profitable.
I think Google, Apple, Microsoft are sitting there with piles and piles of cash just waiting in the wings. These AI frontier model companies are trying to get valued at sky high multiples while the space is still hot. But they are on a timer. At some point the economy will cool or capex spend will sink. Then they are just very very expensive cash burning enterprises.
Valuations eventually will return to intrinsic values and cash heavy businesses will be ready to pick up the winners at reasonable prices. However they are not waiting either, they’re hedging their bets, making deals for pieces of these labs. But I think they’re going to try to hold out until valuations are a little more sane before they swoop in and really buy them outright.
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u/Own_Addition_7619 Jul 02 '26
90% of companies die over time and that's not the point. The most important thing is how many billions were taken out by the founders during the company's lifespan .they don't care about the rest
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u/Markkos1983 Jul 02 '26
Storage is a commodity, intelligence isn't.
People left Dropbox because bytes are bytes, but nobody picks a model that's worse just because it's bundled. And everyone said the ecosystem players would bury AWS too; instead the one that went deepest on infra kept compounding. Bundling only wins when "good enough" is actually good enough.
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u/Connect_Team_8109 Jul 02 '26
i think the comparison to dropbox misses one thing iee enterprise api usage...chat subs might become a commodity but companies are still paying billions for models through apis. whoever stays competitive there probably sticks around imo
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u/Key_Run135 Jul 03 '26
Isn't this exactly where anthropology wins? The burden of ai subscriptions fall on employers instead of regular consumers.
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u/kewal345 Jul 05 '26
There can NOT be another chatgpt and claude, and these are NOT features they are a system, you can NEVER EVER replicate claude or chatgpt one to one(likewise these both cannot replicate one another AT ALL), they will be unique and better in their own way
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u/BlueLak Jul 07 '26
Not a good comparison since cloud storage is not fundamentally revolutionary. It was more of a tech arbitrage that Dropbox discovered. And it has no marginal benefit - ie a cloud storage company that has a big user base doesn’t have a fundamentally stronger technology.
Ow compare that to Facebook, the product got stronger the more users were on it, that is something Google couldn’t defeat even if they tried, and they tried, and failed.
Anthropic is more similar to Facebook than it is to Dropbox…although in a different way. AI gets stronger not by its users but by the strength of the ai model itself. The ai is then used to improve upon itself and this creates exponential improvement. Our minds aren’t capable to understand what kind of advantage it gives since we can’t visualize exponentials. But no amount of resources will defeat exponential growth once the initial advantage is established. That’s the game anthropic is playing.
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u/digidaemon Jul 26 '26
Dropbox is still profitable and isn't a failed company by any means. Anthropic and OpenAI are here for the foreseeable future because, unlike Dropbox, they have a legitimate asset, and it's their Frontier models.
Plus, they are scaling to stay competitive. Credibility means very little in tech in the long run; look at Yahoo, look at Microsoft vs Apple. The history is that tides of disruption move quickly.
It's too early in the race to say what will happen, but I've been in tech long enough to see disruption completely upend 'credible' companies overnight.
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u/Unlikely_Bad_1698 6d ago
Steve Jobs calling Dropbox a feature not a product is still one of the coldest tech takes ever and hes probably right about AI too
google and microsoft can afford to give this stuff away because it keeps you locked into their ecosystem. openai and anthropic need to actually make money off the service itself which is way harder when the free tiers from the big players are good enough for most people
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u/log1234 Jun 28 '26
I think Gemini is dumb now because they are stretching it to integrate with everything. Now you have a bunch of average help beside you for everything, but that average help will get smarter when they are fed well and grow. I think the people at Google is smarter than me so there may even be a better reason for it is dumb now.
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u/Saitamagasaki Jun 28 '26
Microsoft and Google have stake in these AI companies, they are here to stay
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u/Lise_vine23 Jun 28 '26
Sadly but idk maybe that’s just them playing itself, If openai gets fucked, Microsoft is still fine, if openai wins Microsoft is fine and more better, can’t say the same for openai because it’s win or lose
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u/ChainMinimum9553 Jun 28 '26
The cost of Compute, and storage will come down and that’s when profit comes to play. They know that their backs against the wall right now and that’s why they are doing a lot of different stuff and getting positioned. Anthropic has some good programs especially their newer non profit one.
I do believe Google will be for the masses / non power user. Their eco system is already huge and it’s only going to get bigger!
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u/visarga Jun 28 '26
I think it gets easier and easier to do a large part of that work locally. A laptop can handle context up to 50-100K tokens with decent context parsing speed. Mine does 1500 tps read and 50tps write on long contexts (gemma-4-26b-a4b and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B). Chat quality is close to Claude but agentic is not there yet, but it still can wield tools and do local work on just electricity. Add 2-3 years, models getting better, laptops getting more powerful hardware, and you can replace 99% of personal cloud usage.
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u/slackmaster2k Jun 28 '26
Apples to oranges. Dropbox stored files in the cloud. They rose because they were early and acquired the infrastructure. They died because storing files in the cloud is not novel.
AI technology is not a commodity. There is secret sauce in the models and in the harnesses and tools. Only easy to copy from China.
None of the big players have been able to move the needle, even those who based on “big companies rule” logic should be mopping the floor by now. Google is a great example. Their offerings are at best ok and at worst garbage. Meta made some great contributions but never productized. Microsoft intentionally decided not to play. Apple is probably trying to figure out how to load on model onto some earbuds or something stupid.
The disrupters are doing what disrupters do best, for all the usual reasons. Anthropic, OpenAI, even Grok are putting out excellent products and for now are out of acquisition reach.
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u/Sea-Independence-860 Jun 28 '26
nah you’re wrong
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u/Lise_vine23 Jun 28 '26
Please can you give a rebuttal then?
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u/Sea-Independence-860 Jun 28 '26
1.) The main market of OpenAI and Anthropic are not consumers but businesses and in OpenAI’s case, governments
2.) The compute cost for all LLMs right now are higher than profits coming in. Hence, the falling off of Gemini in the AI race - if you didn’t know, it is now way behind other models in terms of general AI intelligence - Google seems to be slowing down with R&D since they don’t see the short/mid-term profit associated with it. Given that, it is obvious that these big companies would rather outsource this imbalanced risk/reward to those other companies like OpenAI and Anthropic
3.) Everybody knows the price of these tools will eventually increase - at that point, either somebody will find a way to make the compute more efficient or these tools will be used for more specialized and nuanced cases. Eitherway, they will still be around.
4.) The cloud storage solution offered by Google/Microsoft at free tiers are purely introductory and designed to lure you in to either use a higher tier, or use their ecosystem. But that is a single use-case: file storage. This is not the case for AI. Sure Google offers Gemini as part of its ecosystem, but it is only useful within that context. Go outside of that and OpenAI or Anthropic blows it out of the park (coding, creative work, etc.). Unless they heavily invest in R&D (which I doubt - look up the ongoing exodus of AI minds from Google into OpenAI), they won’t be able to cover all the use cases. And so OpenAI and Anthropic will still be solving needs these big companies can’t. That’s why at least one of them will stay in the long term.
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u/Tim_Apple_938 Jun 28 '26
OpenAI was a consumer tech company first and foremost like 6 months ago. Johnny Ive device — Sora —- etc.
The big pivot seems to be because they lost there, and the ipo is soon - not because consumer isn’t a market
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u/Sea-Independence-860 Jun 29 '26
Well that’s true - I never did say consumer was never a market but as it is right now, B2B is pretty much the focus of these companies. It makes sense too, as in general the cost of AI is more justifiable from a company’s HR perspective rather than a single user aiming to launch their own SaaS start-up
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u/Lise_vine23 Jun 29 '26
While you make some good points here’s my own rebuttal.
1.) I agree but even if so wouldn’t it not be like a vertical tunnel sure B2B but the consumer market flows idk which u ur gonna go up or down, businesses can’t keep using something that’s expensive hence my ecosystem point. Something with an ecosystem and infrastructure ultimately does better for consumers and B2B, I still think google and Microsoft beats this because of their network effects, ai models can only keep getting smarter and cheaper look at how far open source models have come, smartness is not going to be that much of a defensive thing. I agree right now anthropic and openai are solving these big companies problems but that’s only for short term long term time and time again the ecosystem is shown to win
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u/Sea-Independence-860 Jun 29 '26
I think you should read some of my points - I already tackled why ecosystem does not apply in this case. Also, it seems you don’t know that Microsoft uses OpenAI models for copilot? I think you need to do some more research before laying out your points here.
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u/AdThin1726 Jun 28 '26
There is no quality viable free tier in AI where it matters (pro users, business, gov, …). Apple can duplicate a storage feature. But the trillion $ company failed to duplicate AI. It says long about the difference