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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

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there's no linter for writing contracts, my experience (as a commercial lawyer) is that frontier LLMs are far better and error checking and far quicker at writing than the average senior lawyer. The main thing holding back further deployment (in my jurisdiction) are concerns around data residency, privilege and how fundamentally it will break an industry that is so heavily reliant on time based billing.

>my experience (as a commercial lawyer) How do you think the industry will respond to contract clause slop ?? I can foresee each side inserting 100s of innocent clauses with minute dependencies that provide hidden advanatges

Good question - but the state of commercial contracts (pre-AI slop) is horrifically dysfunctional, inefficient, poorly thought through and inaccessible to the average person, so the bar is quite low. I think there will be some new malicious behaviours like that to keep an eye out for but I haven't seen them in practice (yet).

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

#532
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Qwen 3.8 is excellent. With the right harness, it does about 95% of what Opus can do, in my case automation software development. Since 3.8 came out, I have significantly revised my expectations for a local model. Give it another year or two, and we'll be running fast and free local models for nearly everything that matters, and these costly subscriptions will be a thing of the past. I've always believed that AI shou…

Free tv and radio? Where do you live? Where I live you either pay taxes for it, alternatively, it is so ad infested that it is not possible to watch it.

I suspect the same will/is happening with AI. Either you will pay for it, or it will be so ad infested that it will become useless.

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

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game We all know that the subscription prices are not at all sustainable for these providers. You all do, right? Yes, they're struggling to segment the market and find a way to make money, and that basically relies upon emptying the pockets of whales. As someone enjoying a hilariously subsidized Max pl…

> We all know that the subscription prices are not at all sustainable for these providers. You all do, right? I don’t think it is fair to expect from people to know or understand this. If you buy something or subscribe to a service there is a price tag on it. You get X for Y amount of price. That is how consumers conditioned for decades. They do not care what is your customer acquisition strategy. If Antrophic cannot…

>If Antrophic cannot provide reliable services on that price, customers will be unsatisfied.

The complaint wasn't "I paid for X and now they say they aren't going to give me X", it was "I paid for X, and they said hey guess what we're doing a promo and you get a bonus extra 2X, and also you get special limited time access to our new product Y", that's a hell of a thing to complain about.

Look, I pay a lot of money to Anthropic and I'm pretty happy that competitors have forced them to abandon their plans to add premium charges on these bonuses, but it's pretty ridiculous seeing the whining and gnashing, somehow turning this into complaints. It very much has a "oh no my lobster is too buttery, my blanket too warm" kind of feel to it.

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

#534
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is likely because of your thinking level. The difference between max and ultracode is primarily that the latter is max with a bunch of agents.

*This is likely because of your thinking level. The difference between max and ultracode is primarily that the latter is max with a bunch of agents.*

I do not know why people even use Max or Ultra levels of thinking effort. Most of the time, i found its better to just run any of the frontier level models, with high or medium. Their capability beyond those levels is often diminishing returns, in exchange for double or quadrupling the costs (or usage).

And the bonus is that often at those levels, they tend to spin up less sub-agents that just eat away at tokens/usage, like its water in the desert.

A Max or Ultra is something that really only belongs if medium or high can not solve a very nasty bug or issue. Even in planning its often too much.

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

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A model bundled in your phone can do the translation, you're thinking too much of it.

A model bundled in your phone cannot do commercial grade quality of translations.

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

#536
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…

Either my $200 sub was getting nerfed, or you're dead wrong about nothing being as good as Fable. The only thing I found it was better at was UI design. The rest, Sol was the clear winner. Refusals, failure to follow instructions, doing 1/10th of the work and then claiming it was "finished" was my experience with Fable. For everything else, there's K3.

I think it really depends on what people expect from the models and how they "code".

Sol in my eyes is powerful, but it over engineers so much, that its actually a liability. Where as Opus 5 is slightly under develops but you then can give it a small push for what is missing.

I rather have it under develop and i as the human in the loop, can correct/enhance it. Vs the models that adds so much, to the point that your going "dude, stop!". Remember, removing code for a LLM is way, WAY more difficult then adding it.

My main issue is with Sol is that its designed to over engineer without thinking why its doing something. Great that you security harden 1000s of lines of code, but ... nobody will ever get to that code. Its that lack of intelligence is where the model becomes a issue for me.

Its easier to have less code and then do security audits, with you approving what needs to be changed/hardend.

It may simply depend on the developers their mindset. Some folks just want the models to do everything for them, and performance or code bloat means nothing to them (forgetting that this bloat over time makes future LLM work more expensive).

Its funny how everybody has their own opinion for what model is better, when in reality its more about that model fits your own development style better.

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

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

International trade is a giant sector already, and potentially much bigger than that, now that LLM assisted translation makes it easy to offer your products and services in any language, or make complicated and sensitive deals without a common language. Hackers always rage and down vote every time I mention this, because they are unable to see beyond their small world. Why didn't they learn that their part of the int…

I think quite cheap models will probably work with translation (I think for many use cases Google's now fairly old tech works well enough and is free?). The main problem is I think you're assuming because the current translation market is large (I'm just going to assume it's ~100B in size just from a cursory search), then it will remain large with LLMs. If LLMs are much cheaper than humans, even with a lot of growth…

LLMs are creating a new translation market.

Before AI translation became available, I would hire professional translators. Their rate was about $50-100 for a detailed product page into one language, and it would take them a few days to deliver.

Now with AI translation, I pay about $120 per year for unlimited translation. Meaning dozens of product pages into 5 languages, plus e-mail back and forth with hundreds of customers. All instantly at my convenience.

What this means is that a whole lot of people, sectors and businesses who would never hire professional translator can now have high quality translation at their disposal for a cheap price.

> Another is assuming that because something is valuable you can charge a lot for it.

Even if LLM translation won't deliver trillions of dollars in income to the AI companies, it will without a doubt deliver trillions of dollars in value to customers and users within the coming few years.

Good human translators are still higher in quality than any AI and will always be. But AI translation is currently far beyond good enough for all use cases, except fine literature and maybe complicated juridical stuff. But I'm not familiar with those sectors.

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

#538
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…

Sol for low level programming is consistently better, can work alone for more time, and is faster. If you think Fable is so superior, you need to work with Sol ways more.

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

#539
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…

There is a consumer unfriendly ethic behind this. Overly long answers are a cunning was to increase token cost and therefore profit. Consumers are savvy and will prohibit monopoly whilst there is still plentiful competition.

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

#540
post #500

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…

Part of it is scale. If you have a small number of clients/users it is possible to provide that support. If you have millions or billions of users then you can't scale the support to handle the support requests, so some form of automation becomes inevitable.

If you scale up customers, you scale up support. If you don't want to serve new customers, tell them to take their business elsewhere. But if you want to be a big boy, you need to play like you are one.
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