Anthropic and OpenAI Found Product-Market Fit? Well, Almost
Big language models seem to have stopped being toys and started making real money — but with caveats.
Simon Willison, the open data enthusiast and creator of many handy tools, dropped an observation: Anthropic and OpenAI appear to have found product-market fit. It sounds like a startup evangelist's mantra, but there's actually something interesting behind it.
In a nutshell, the companies have stopped burning investor cash on training models and started generating steady revenue from real users. Not from hype-driven startups, but from everyday businesses: lawyers reviewing contracts, doctors writing notes, and developers (yes, us) debugging code with Claude or ChatGPT. It's not "let's build AGI and save the world" — it's boring, reliable monetization.
Of course, there's a catch. Some experts doubt that current growth rates truly indicate PMF, rather than a temporary hype wave riding on the post-COVID automation boom. But the fact remains: if before AI products sold "the future," now they sell "solutions for problems right here, right now." Kind of like grandma's Wi-Fi — works unreliably, but you can't live without it.
Studio METABYTE's take: We've also noticed clients increasingly asking to embed AI into their products. Not for world domination, but to automate email blasts. Hey, it's progress — as long as the CI doesn't break.
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