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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

#601

Post by nl »

skerit wrote: post #546
reticulates wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The individual plans are heavily subsidized Not this again. There is not a single shred of evidence for this. In fact multiple times this year alone, people from Anthropic have said that inference and deployed models have positive margins. The big bucks are always being spent on training the next model.

I agree the API prices are profitable (or at least break even) on an operational basis.

I don't think that means the subscriptions aren't subsidized though! I expect they are, at a carefully calibrated rate.

They want to maximize people trying them.

The real money is the enterprise plans which need a seat price plus API rates (unlike the Teams plans which are a pretty good deal).

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

#602

Post by dboreham »

Since this seems to be a thread for people to criticize Anthropic let me add my $0.02 that I'm a very happy customer and see none of the various terrible things everyone is complaining about. Except Fable refused to give me some flags for nmap. That was pretty annoying.

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

#603

Post by kbrannigan »

edgyquant wrote: post #574
nananana9 wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this exact comment what feels like twice a day for the last 2 years, and not once have I seen the person making it back it up and show something even remotely impressive.

I dislike these comments just as much. What do you want people to show you? Most of us work on projects for other people where tasks that used to take a week take a day or less. It’s also a no true Scotsman as nothing we could show would be “good enough” because it’s just the same software engineering as before but faster. But for instance I used to work in 1-2 client projects at a time and they take months now I can…

I wonder if the project you build are more one off Disposable(sorry for my choice of words) software.

Do you have project that needs to be maintained. I am also interested in your workflow. Do you Vibe code , never look at the code or do you hold the LLM agent's hand.

I feel like it's a spectrum

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

#604

Post by isqueiros »

kibibu wrote: post #570

This isn't the reason I'm considering leaving Anthropic. I don't think I can tolerate its writing style anymore. Reading Claude output is starting to cause actual psychological harm. I have tried many ways to get it to stop writing in its stupid punchy linked-in marketing-team voice, and I can't. Is there a model out there that sounds sound this awful? It's like rubbing sand into the folds of my brain.

Kimi K3 is slightly better at this. I'm using it via oh-my-pi. Can definitely sound like it's trying to be clever, but I found it less than Claude.

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

#605

Post by stellamariesays »

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…

[flagged]

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

#606

Post by carlosjobim »

tock wrote: post #597
carlosjobim wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tourism and travel is 10% of global GDP, or about 10 trillion dollars. And it's not the only sector where translation between languages is a benefit. However, I am not sure that the trillions of dollars of value from LLM translation in the coming few years will translate into trillions of dollars of income for the AI companies.

Yep translation is going to be a free feature on all devices using on-device LLMs. I see no revenue flowing to AI companies.

Commercial grade translation between dozens of languages would take enormous amounts of disk space.

But we'll see. Text editing tools are included on all digital devices, yet companies pay for commercial solutions like MS Office. Cameras and basic image editing tools are included on all smart phones, yet there are millions of advertising agencies around the world. And so on.

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

#607

Post by queenkjuul »

skerit wrote: post #546
reticulates wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The individual plans are heavily subsidized Not this again. There is not a single shred of evidence for this. In fact multiple times this year alone, people from Anthropic have said that inference and deployed models have positive margins. The big bucks are always being spent on training the next model.

It costs $10B+ a quarter just to train?

It's a simple fact that paying enterprise token rates would cost many times what the individual plans cost. It may well be that the enterprise income outweighs the cheaper tokens on the individual plans for net profit, but using the individual accounts as subsidy is a common tech industry tactic and what you said doesn't prove they're not doing it, either.

It's a little hard to believe they wouldn't be trying to slow the burn rate for an IPO if the inference were truly so profitable. And i find anything they say a little hard to believe all the time anyway (though admittedly they're a lot more trustworthy than OAI)

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

#608

Post by fearmerchant »

kibibu wrote: post #570

This isn't the reason I'm considering leaving Anthropic. I don't think I can tolerate its writing style anymore. Reading Claude output is starting to cause actual psychological harm. I have tried many ways to get it to stop writing in its stupid punchy linked-in marketing-team voice, and I can't. Is there a model out there that sounds sound this awful? It's like rubbing sand into the folds of my brain.

It's become Oswald Bates from In Living Color:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71xxvp5R9hE

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

#609

Post by queenkjuul »

rustcleaner wrote: post #271
dlcarrier wrote: post #63

Transformer models are quickly becoming a commodity, and I suspect in time we'll all be running them locally. Even now, you can run something pretty useful on a 16 GB graphics card, and I suspect a decade into the future, entry level hardware will be running better models than high-end graphics cards can run now, as entry-level hardware gets better and models get more efficient. It doesn't mean hosted frontier models…

>and I suspect a decade into the future, entry level hardware will be running better models than high-end graphics cards can run now, as entry-level hardware gets better and models get more efficient. I doubt it. The play seems to be: lock what was once commodity compute up into datacenters depriving us regular folk of it, then sell it back to us on subscription. Even if my #NeverSubscribe movement succeeds, all that…

But the Chinese models exist, are competitive, and have locally useful quantized versions.

If you're actually willing to pick up old DC inference hardware on the cheap you can already do a lot at home. The new hardware not so much admittedly but if the Chinese models keep getting better and running on less hardware... I don't see a reason to be quite so pessimistic.

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

#610

Post by wing-_-nuts »

kbrannigan wrote: post #264
cle wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife's startup made the mistake of building her internal operations around Claude Team. Then she hired a VA in the Philippines. Anthropic promptly banned her account without warning once the VA connected to the account. It took her weeks to get her account reinstated, at which point she had already moved on to OpenAI.

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…

>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.

I can't tell you how many times I've experienced this with comcast. The last time I had to deal with it, was when I bought a new cable modem. I call in to provision it, the automated system assumes I have one of their modems and fails. For some reason I can't get technical support on the line and finally I resort to yelling 'cancel my account' over and over again until I finally get someone on the phone.

The guy was able to solve the issue in 5 minutes flat. The problem with automation is it's only ever going to be able to handle the 'happy path'

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