saw the news about meta buying manus for 2 billion. 8 months old company, 125m arr already.
been building a saas with ai features for the past year. nothing fancy, just using various coding agents to speed up development. verdent for the heavy lifting, cursor for quick edits, chatgpt for brainstorming.
but this acquisition got me thinking. if big tech is gonna gobble up every promising ai agent company, whats the play for us smaller folks?
manus was doing ai agents for general tasks. meta wants it for facebook, instagram, whatsapp integration. makes sense. but it also means one less independent option in the market.
the 10 day deal timeline is wild. shows how desperate these companies are to lock down ai talent and tech. zuckerberg apparently offering 300m packages to poach ai researchers.
my concern is this: right now we have choices. cursor, windsurf, cline, bunch of others. competition keeps prices reasonable and features improving. what happens when 3 or 4 big players own everything?
already seeing consolidation. anthropic got acquired pieces, google buying up talent, now meta.
for those of us building products, the tools we rely on could get absorbed into walled gardens any day. your favorite coding agent might become meta exclusive or google only.
not saying sky is falling. just feels like the indie ai tool golden age might have an expiration date.
meta just dropped 2b on an ai agent startup. feeling like the window for indie ai tools is closing fast
byu/AlbatrossUpset9476 inEntrepreneur
Posted by AlbatrossUpset9476
1 Comment
As with everything. At some point the market gets consolidated. But with capital intensive tech there will be only a handful left in a very short period of time. The rest of us can build stuff, but only with their tools.
The next phase will be buying non-public data, because AI will run out of new content to train on besides content thats made with AI in the first place.
Some dutch guy had a website for easily recording and sharing gaming clips, he already had 3 billion clips in his database. He declined a 500 million dollar offer from Open AI because his database would be 30% bigger by the end of the year, and nobody else has a database like he does.