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Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model

164 points · 109 comments · iacguy

2001zhaozhao · 1790979207 · focus · HN ↗
This couldn't be more true. Companies will be driven by AI harnesses (as defined by this article) that automate decision-making and prioritization. In the medium term, may the company with the best harness win.
In the longer term, the downstream impact is massive commoditization of software and invalidation of most existing moats. Data moats are gone if you can simulate the data with AI. Even platform effects can be sidestepped if AI replaces one side of the platform.
In addition, while right now agile startups have the advantage, at some point the balance will start tilting towards whoever has the most tokens (OR perhaps durable moats will trump even near-infinite tokens; we will have to see). Startups have a limited time window to have whatever impact in the world they are hoping to have, or to build a moat that won't be disrupted by AI, but there are few of them left in the world.
The upside is that when there is a lot of commoditization, then the consumer benefits.
1. ForHackernews · 1790979680 · focus · HN ↗
  > Data moats are gone if you can simulate the data with AI.
  This is a hilarious premise if you work in a domain where it matters even a little bit whether the data is correct or not.
  1. theturtletalks · 1790980089 · focus · HN ↗
    There’s 2 arguments.
    1. He’s talking about training new models and at one point, having data was valuable. Now synthetic data is being used to train models
    2. Companies like SalesForce who’s moat is having all your customer data so you’ll be locked in. You could extract it but you’d have to clean it and then change it to your new schema. With LLMs, you can do that in minutes and even use SalesForces MCP or API to get all your data and leave.
    It’s exactly why companies like Figma are gate keeping their MCP. They know that swapping their MCP with Paper’s or any new one is easy.
    The moats are evaporating as we speak. Distribution is one of the smaller ones left, but the personal software trend might eat that too.
    2001zhaozhao · 1790980633 · focus · HN ↗
    > Distribution is one of the smaller ones left, but the personal software trend might eat that too
    Being a platform for personal software is gonna be valuable, but it needs a lot of trust. (I have a nonprofit idea around this right now)
    Btw, I think distribution might temporarily become less important (because with better AI you can actually pull so far ahead of competitors quality-wise and therefore succeed despite a distribution drawback), but long run it actually becomes more important because of AI persuasion and commodification? If you are the super app then, well, you are the super app

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