Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
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Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
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Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
#2> More importantly, as sustainable long-term businesses, model-only providers are particularly at risk. Knowledge Atlas, Moonshot Labs, and Anthropic face defensibility challenges versus OpenAI, Alibaba, SpaceX, Meta, and Google.
Hm. How is OpenAI not a “model-only” provider just like Anthropic? Seems like they are vulnerable in the same way.
Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
#3Anthropic will get squeezed by open models for 80% of the use cases that don't require frontier capabilities and by vertical specific labs for the high value tasks that would (bio, finance, math, etc.), where smaller use case specific models will beat them on cost and speed while matching or exceeding the performance of their largest general models.
Even their hail mary of being first to "AGI" will never happen because all it takes is China blockading Taiwan or Nvidia cutting them off to stop them from eating up a large chunk of the economy.
There is no scenario where the rest of the world will sit on their toes and let OpenAI or Anthropic monopolize "AI". Too many countries, large well capitalized players and partners / suppliers who could never let that happen.
Kimi K3 allows all existing players to restart at the frontier and keep competing with OpenAI/Ant. It also gives employees at these labs a better more lucrative path of starting new labs with fresh books and clean cap tables, building on top of K3 without needing to spend all the capex on pretraining their own models. Plenty of them already vested their stock and would have 0 problems raising 100s of millions of dollars for new labs, making them paper billionaires over night.
Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
#4> More importantly, as sustainable long-term businesses, model-only providers are particularly at risk. Knowledge Atlas, Moonshot Labs, and Anthropic face defensibility challenges versus OpenAI, Alibaba, SpaceX, Meta, and Google. Hm. How is OpenAI not a “model-only” provider just like Anthropic? Seems like they are vulnerable in the same way.
They are trying to diversify into consumer hardware and also are further along in owning data centers. The consumer hardware product, assuming it launches and does decently well, puts them in a very unique position relative to pretty much every other frontier lab. It's more speculative, but I'd argue it can change things quite a bit for them if it works out.
Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
#5I think the risk is overstated.
For one, on the margin people are willing to pay a lot for slightly better models. I know personally the value the LLM adds to my workflow is considerably more than the $200/m I pay the frontier labs. I have no interest in optimizing that to get it slightly lower. There are a very vocal minority that optimizes this or companies whose LLM expense is marginal, but I think that's the minority (correct me if I'm wrong, curious what their customer base looks like)
Also the actual LLM is a tiny portion of the value added. Anyone that tried to build agentic solutions from LLM apis quickly realizes that a huge value is the Claude Code / Codex harness. There are open source implementations like OpenCode but they're not nearly as good.
Think about it another way. Consider how much money Microsoft spends on maintaining Excel. There are open source alternatives that have >90% of the functionality, they'll even work w/ Excel files and generate them. Google sheets is probably 99% and available to everyone and better in a lot of regards. But the immense value spreadsheet software produces workers above the $100 or whatever a year makes it so that there is a real moat and no one bothers exploring alternatives.
Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
#6I think the risk is overstated. For one, on the margin people are willing to pay a lot for slightly better models. I know personally the value the LLM adds to my workflow is considerably more than the $200/m I pay the frontier labs. I have no interest in optimizing that to get it slightly lower. There are a very vocal minority that optimizes this or companies whose LLM expense is marginal, but I think that's the mino…
What is your workflow such that frontier models increases productivity considerably?
Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
#7I think the risk is overstated. For one, on the margin people are willing to pay a lot for slightly better models. I know personally the value the LLM adds to my workflow is considerably more than the $200/m I pay the frontier labs. I have no interest in optimizing that to get it slightly lower. There are a very vocal minority that optimizes this or companies whose LLM expense is marginal, but I think that's the mino…
You assume everyone has extra 200$ to pay. For someone living in a low wage country, it's hard to pay that much, even if you produce a multiple of that value in theory
Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
#8I think the risk is overstated. For one, on the margin people are willing to pay a lot for slightly better models. I know personally the value the LLM adds to my workflow is considerably more than the $200/m I pay the frontier labs. I have no interest in optimizing that to get it slightly lower. There are a very vocal minority that optimizes this or companies whose LLM expense is marginal, but I think that's the mino…
The $200 you’re paying is heavily subsidized, you need to consider the real inference cost which could be closer to $10k if you’re using the maximum permitted by your plan.
Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
#9Nope, I'll still buy Claude because the overall XP is better than Kimi and Qwen who literally copied basic harnesses to make kimi-cli and qwen-cli, respectively.
Also, you can tell if a model is genuinely powerful and well-thought-out vs a model that acts like it.
It's like Apple vs Xiaomi/Huawei. Sure, you can get a Huawei with bells and whistles, but most people learnt the hard way that those companies just copy the iPhone, so might as well get the real deal.
Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
#10> More importantly, as sustainable long-term businesses, model-only providers are particularly at risk. Knowledge Atlas, Moonshot Labs, and Anthropic face defensibility challenges versus OpenAI, Alibaba, SpaceX, Meta, and Google. Hm. How is OpenAI not a “model-only” provider just like Anthropic? Seems like they are vulnerable in the same way.
They've been doing hardware stuff as well. Both "consumer facing" bs like wearables / portables, but also more importantly chips for inference.
Having a good model is one thing, being able to serve that model at good speeds and match demand is another. See Anthropic ~6months ago. Or Moonshot, they've already suspended subscriptions to their coding plans, because they can't meet demand.