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Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

ft.com

171–180 of 740 posts

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#172
post #27

They've put themselves in a corner. Fable was too good and they gave it away with the $20 plan. It had to be a big step from Opus 4.8 to show progress, and Opus 4.8 is GREAT at coding in many different domains. But they're getting killed on token cost. They have to get people paying more for tokens. So then they put Fable in the $200 plan and release Opus 5. I'm suspicious of Opus 5. It is mostly worse than 4.8. It _…

The other thing I forgot to mention about Opus 5 is that at least out of the gate, it seemed very intent on spinning up agents and obliterating my token budget. It was noticeably more token hungry than 4.8. It would make sense for them to intend this behavior.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#173

My company still hasn’t been able to deploy wide access to Fable because it’s not available on a ZDR basis. This wasn’t mentioned in the article but I imagine this factor is not irrelevant.

This is the biggest factor. FT (or the analysts it cites) fumbled the ball in this article.

> Data retention rules imposed by the Trump administration have also hampered Fable’s adoption, according to Ara Kharazian, chief economist at Ramp.

This is in the article.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#175
post #102

For many coders including myself, LLM based coding agents work well enough to be useful, and in some cases worth paying for. What I don't see is vast areas of industry finding $10s to $100s of billions of value in LLMs. There's no lint or compiler that can check for correctly constructed contracts. So LLMs, which should be useful to law firms, incur a lot more manual checking of their work than coding agents. Less fo…

> What I don't see is vast areas of industry finding $10s to $100s of billions of value in LLMs.

Translation between languages.

That value dwarfs all programming value that can be had. Economically, culturally, scientifically, spiritually.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#176
With open models delivering close to frontier level capability, I really don't see how these labs can only focus on having best model to sustain their business. Although these model's usage will grow, I think and hope that the serving will be distributed among many players.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#177
post #113

Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable. They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling: "You can only use Fable for a week as a part of your plan" "Be ready! You have to start paying per token!" "Nevermind…

As Anthropic does this, OpenAI Is giving everybody resets like every other day now on Twitter.

I'm strongly considering biting the bullet and just ditching my $200/month Claude Code plan for the Codex one instead, especially because I keep running into my weekly limits (even sticking to Opus.)

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#178

GLM series has made it very practical to self host. If the new update for Deepseek flash holds up, I think it would be silly for some companies to not self host.

We're spending 225k a year on tokens. No reason not to buy the hardware necessary to run DS4 at this point.

Agreed, and you can write cool infra agents to do stuff for you that runs during off hours like nightly tests and triage.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#179
Of course I echo the universal: Opus 5 sucks. But what also sucks is still using 4.8. Are you all seeing this? It's like the older models got dumber just before Fable and Opus 5 were coming out? I've heard the theory that it's because 4.8 is getting put on older hardware? And I imagine that just ratchets down reasoning time then possibly?

Sometimes I'm just trying to sus out if I'm truly seeing things these days or going a little nuts :)

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#180
Poor analysis.

Fable is not used because it has extra retention requirement that corps can't sign off so it stays disabled for everybody in many cases.

It's also not winning on day to day work against Opus 5, which is simply available as there are no extra retention requirements and no extra paper work to do with legal.

Devs also don't like that Fable refuses to work on half of their prompts.

Then comes better pricing and on-par capabilities from competition.

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