Comment by falloutx 6 hours ago
Everyone says that but I don't see anyone cooking up the next photoshop and selling it at $3/month. Why are we not seeing more options of every tool? Most Saas companies are sales companies at their core rather than software companies. And those sales people are so good that they can sell a todo list for millions.
This is an extremely bold claim and I think that it completely overlooks how Photoshop is used by professionals in practice. Professional users want extremely fine grained and precise control over their tools to achieve the specific results that they want. AI "image editing" is incapable of providing anything remotely similar.
I've recently re-instated a Photoshop subscription and its now part of my core AI generated asset workflow. AI is fantastic at art direction but it needs minor adjustments to make it production ready. E.g putting real screenshots in with correct placement, smoothing, editing out artefacts etc. I can't imagine the lengths I'd have to go to to instruct an LLM to do these tasks with words.
> I don't see anyone cooking up the next photoshop and selling it at $3/month.
That's not the situation we're talking about though. It's someone saying "hmm, I need to edit this picture. Can I get ChatGPT to do it?" where 3 years ago they would have had to buy Photoshop and learn how to use it.
Similarly, if they need a tool to batch-convert a thousand images, they're getting an LLM to construct the specific tool they need in a couple of hours and then running that, rather than buying a software product that can do it.
You don't need a whole dev team to build a one-off tool for a specific job, which is probably 90% of the demand for those software products. LLMs are becoming the general-purpose tool for a lot of use cases.
>they're getting an LLM to construct the specific tool they need in a couple of hours and then running that
This is something I really hope takes off for the common person. ChatGPT is perfect for bespoke little programs that do one thing and can be discarded after use.
> Everyone says that but I don't see anyone cooking up the next photoshop and selling it at $3/month.
Yup, same reason you can't throw manpower at a software project and expect a proportional outcome (Brooks's Law). AI amplifies what's already there; it doesn't conjure taste or product vision out of thin air.
> Everyone says that but I don't see anyone cooking up the next photoshop and selling it at $3/month. Why are we not seeing more options of every tool?
I expect the markets are reflecting that soon there will be more competition.
It'll take time, and as LLMs improve, it'll take even less time.
> I expect the markets are reflecting that soon there will be more competition.
> It'll take time, and as LLMs improve, it'll take even less time.
People have written great software in ed(1). We have tools like uxn[0] written on potato computers and billions and years later, we still have to hope for AI output.
In the case of Photoshop it is the software itself that is becoming useless. In a few years, using photoshop will be viewed the same as developing physical film, a process from a by-gone era that is still possible, but impractical.