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

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

#371

Post by cherryteastain »

Aurornis wrote: post #283
a1371 wrote: 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…

> 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: The consumer side cheap monthly plans exist for the same reason companies like Cloudflare and Vercel have a free tier: When it’s cheap and easy to get developers familiar with the tools, they will push their companies to pay the real money for those tools. It’s a hard b…

> There’s a short sighted cheering on of the 3rd tier and lower companies offering lower rates, but we’re already seeing them ratchet up the pricing and keep larger models closed after they get market attention.

Sorry, but people are cheering on Chinese companies (of whom your are unduly dismissive with your '3rd rate' comment given how good GLM-5.3, Kimi K3 are) not only because they are more economical, but also because they do not constantly refuse to do legitimate tasks and provide you with the weights for self hosting these models.

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

#372

Post by nl »

runako wrote: post #307
nl wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US government basically told them they can't sell "Fable" and so they aren't.... They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable), But this isn't what happened? It was only a couple of months ago! How can we be getting this completely backwards already! Fable was aready what they were selling to the general public, and that is what the US government stopped them selling (not Mythos!) Anthropic tuned th…

You're agreeing with me. Mythos was locked down to a few customers. Fable went wide. USG told them to stop selling Fable. They tweaked Fable to appease the USG, but it clearly refuses/downshifts more requests than e.g. Opus 5. (I have run into Fable refusals even doing really normal stuff like fixing bugs reported by static security scanners like Brakeman. Not downshifts, outright refusals.) So the net result is they…

> The US government basically told them they can't sell "Fable" and so they aren't.

> You're agreeing with me.

No I'm not. They are selling it.

I used Fable very extensively before the ban (100% usage in every window available) and continue to use it now.

I haven't noticed any change in the refusals before vs after.

> it was perceived to be a worse overall experience,

Sure, people will believe whatever they want to believe. Doesn't make it right though.

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

#373

Post by weird-eye-issue »

svachalek wrote: post #302
Grimburger wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know there wasn't account sharing though? I've seen some amazingly dodgy stuff when hiring people from south east Asia, sharing a paid account with friends worth a months rent there seems milquetoast in comparison.

There clearly was account sharing, someone logged into the wife's account from the Phillipines.

You aren't supposed to add other users to your Team plan?

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

#374

Post by jurgenburgen »

svachalek wrote: post #302
Grimburger wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know there wasn't account sharing though? I've seen some amazingly dodgy stuff when hiring people from south east Asia, sharing a paid account with friends worth a months rent there seems milquetoast in comparison.

There clearly was account sharing, someone logged into the wife's account from the Phillipines.

The core complaint was that it took weeks for Anthropic support to restore access. For a startup that might as well be years.

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

#375

Post by zymhan »

visarga wrote: post #330
a1371 wrote: 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…

> That forces people to look beyond the walled garden. Every time I get "you used your quota, come back in 3 hours, or 2 days" -> that is experimentation time with their competition, leading to changed service plans. When they said "claude -p" will be billed at API pricing even for plan users I moved my harness off claude. After I integrated codex, then it was never going to be a full claude project again. What busin…

It drove me to setup Qwen 3.8 this weekend. I couldn't see the value in just giving them money for a higher tier plan instead.

I've never run a local LLM model before. Certainly won't take as long to iterate on this.

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

#376

Post by embedding-shape »

noosphr wrote: post #358
zeafoamrun wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah just had a power engineer and physicist out for lunch and batteries are the answer (according to them)

Funny I'm a physicist and worked as a power grid quant. Batteries aren't the answer.

This battle of giants is so interesting I can't wait for the next information-filled reply to teach me something new about the batteries vs no batteries battle.

I love how both of you are arguing about what the solution is, yet the problem isn't even clearly defined yet :P

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

#377

Post by whateveracct »

kbrannigan wrote: post #266
adriand wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as I started using Fable I was like, okay, this is probably as good a model as I will need for software engineering going forward. I still feel that way. I don’t need a better model, I need a faster Fable. The thing I miss most about programming is flow, and the constant bouncing between terminal tabs sucks. I’d love to do one thing at a time, with Fable, quickly.

remember 4 year ago we use to : have stack overflow open, documentation, obscure forums plus other tabs. An ide open with 20 tabs open each file a component, a class or an interface We also use to hold entire codebases in our brain.

i still do :)

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

#378

Post by reticulates »

nl wrote: post #357
yellow_lead wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $200 plan (work pays) so violating the TOS? Or work pays for a plan you cannot use at work?

I have no idea what you think violates the TOS here? I was doing work at work on a work task using a plan paid for by work.

The $200 max plan is for individuals. The individual plans are heavily subsidized. Employers should be using either the Team plan (which has much lower limits than max) or the Enterprise plan (which is entirely billed on usage).

Anthropic know that lots of people are doing all sorts of “bad” things like employers paying for Individual plans, (and using multiple accounts to get more usage) and aren’t yet enforcing the rules… but by the letter of the Anthropic terms, your employer should be paying Anthropic a whole lot more (and that’s one of the reasons why AI usage is going to get very very expensive as soon as the subsidies stop, you and a lot of other people are already paying a lot less than you should)

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

#380

Post by nl »

jsisto wrote: post #345
nl wrote: post #295

Wow the sentiment here is so negative. I'm on the $200 plan (work pays) and I also have the $20 OpenAI plan (I pay) and keep a balance on OpenRouter. There is nothing as good as Fable, not even close. I recently had it run a 18 hour autonomous rebuild of a project (moving from Spark to Pandas for performance/data size trade off issues). It orchestrated Opus sub-agents flawlessly for 18 hours. It even did a great job…

hours working on a problem is a weird metric. you could use a slower model and get those numbers way higher.

Fair.

I was chatting to the maintainers on 2 of the 3 repos this affected and we estimated 4-6 person months work of we were hand coding.

The PRs on those 2 repos are 48,000 lines of code (which is a problem in itself!)

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