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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

#471

Post by aashu_dwivedi »

DanielHB wrote: post #441
kbrannigan wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many big tech companies let you talk to a human to get support. Automation is wonderful to cut cost for them but for the users being unable to get support is a horrible experience. But you cannot go elsewhere because they are the only player in town. How can small companies with 1000x less money able to provide live support, but if you pay 20, 100, 200 dollars for a subscription you dont have a phone number to ca…

I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers. You message support, some real person reads and gets back to you within a day.

> I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers.

What your your company do? Is it low ticket business or a high ticket business?

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

#472

Post by thisisit »

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…

Add to that at one point Claude was the go to models for the very basic use case for LLMs - text generation.

With newer models text generation outputs have gone from probably human readable text to dense philosophical treatise about "load bearing" and incomplete sentences. So much so that now you need skills or another LLM to just parse the output. Simple answers and text generation just doesn't exist.

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

#473

Post by sourcecodeplz »

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…

openai has been starting these shaningangs too, with "resets". i hate it. hope they wise up.

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

#474

Post by deadbabe »

byzantinegene wrote: post #460
deadbabe wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Anthropic. But not for the AI industry at large. Cheaper, more powerful AI will continue to expand the bubble. Projects will get more ambitious. Everyone will build out their own custom little software. Code diversity expands and requires even more AI.

most of the bubble right now is fueled from circular financing of Anthropic and OpenAI

It’s not “circular financing”, it’s cooperation between companies.

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

#475

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dv_dt wrote: post #461
cherryteastain wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 be…

I feel like many VC driven companies have completely forgotten how to compete on basic value for product and instead tie themselves into knots with meta-competitiveness games.

"We have the smartest model in the world but our company consistently does stupid things" is not a sustainable business model.

Maybe Anthropic's enterprise sales are going brilliantly, and the rest of us are just pixel dust to them.

Still. Brand perception is a thing, and between rug-pull usage policies, weirding verbedly output quality, and "I'm sorry Dave I can't do that" pushback, Anthropic are clearly having strategy issues.

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

#476

Post by irthomasthomas »

theshrike79 wrote: post #433
protocolture wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Open weights are certainly something that is very eagerly being adopted in some companies. A large local MSP that has significant colo space just started a big marketing push towards hosted LLMs for their corporate customers. I think its about to kick off everywhere.

It's not just putting up colo space for local models. It's more about the harness and API proxy you use. They need to be smart enough to know when a (self)hosted model is enough and when to forward to a SOTA model. The SOTA model _can_ do everything, it's just expensive as fuck. But so is shoving a difficult task to a sub-par model that takes (relative) ages and comes back with the wrong result.

glm-5.3, kimi k3 and qwen3.8 are SOTA.

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

#477

Post by Gareth321 »

nate wrote: post #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 g…

RIGHT!? The data suggests this isn't true but every fibre of my being is convinced that Opus 5 High was EXCELLENT at launch and has been lobotomised since then. My benchmark is Sol High. I've been using both consistently and either Sol High suddenly became MUCH more capable - and the data does not support that - or Opus 5 became much dumber. It's so bad I can't even use it anymore.

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

#478

Post by PunchyHamster »

Grimburger wrote: post #285
wahnfrieden wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was flagged for account-sharing, or detecting a compromised account

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.

why does that matter ? Why does that block entire corporate account not a given user ? Use your brain

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

#479

Post by Flow »

adriand wrote: post #143
fluidcruft wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I agree with this. The constant state of "...will the rug be pulled?!?" does discourage relying on it as a model and building a workflow on it. Anthropic used to just be a reliable thing you could play with. Now it's this constant source of anxiety. It also didn't help that the government yanked it which adds another source of anxiety since OpenAI is on much better terms with the administration and the administ…

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.

I felt the same about GPT-5.2 on High. It did all I asked and it did it good and cheap. Too bad it’s no longer an option at all.

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

#480

Post by mpweiher »

This looks like strong evidence against the claim that local models will never be competitive, because hosted frontier lab models will always be better.

The frontier models may be better, but who cares if the last generation of models are plenty good enough for what you want to actually do?

And the best local models are quite competitive with those older lab models.

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