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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

#671

Post by steveBK123 »

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…

Isn't it just tipping the hand at where the actual businesses are going to end up inevitably?

The only B2C is going to be watered down ad-driven BS, and they will charge B2B via tokens.

The $50/mo - $200/mo consumer LLM subscription is not something I expect to last long / or to drive much of the revenue share... like individuals paying for Gmail vs Googles overall business.

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

#673

Post by Majromax »

chasd00 wrote: post #650
exceptione wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you scale up support you'd end up with a call center larger than most cities. It's not feasible.

If your maximum addressable market is “the whole economy,” as seen in SpaceX filings, then a city-sized call centre (distributed, of course) really is ‘t that much of an ask.

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

#674

Post by chermi »

kbrannigan wrote: post #600
lelanthran wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the first time, tech feels like the 90's-00's again. It feels like the opposite of 90s - 00s: they were filled with periods where a person could self-study technology and get a job using those skills that few others had. Where we are going (according to the AI-proponents) is children being able to replace you. In brief; the 90s - 00s were a skill-valuation time, now we are looking at a skill devaluation time. U…

We used to get paid to code now we think we need to pay a subscription fee just to write software. They push marketing campaigns saying Manual coding no more, just vibe code, gain 10x speed for $100. Then they hit you with hourly and weekly limits, you are wondering when you are going to get cut off. Since LLM at probabilistic it often feels like pulling the lever of a slot machine, hoping our prompt is the jackpot.…

As we've clearly seen, technology is static and the price to performance will never go down. And never be infiltrated by open source.

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

#675

Post by bostik »

senordevnyc wrote: post #509
bostik wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> concerns around data residency Funny you should say that. I read somewhere (not on HN, but I think it was a post linked from here) that a number of law firms who deal with extremely sensitive documents have started buying amped-up Macbooks with 512GB of memory to be able to run local models. These are businesses who literally - and for once this word fits - cannot afford to let some of those documents get anywhere…

Macbook Pros max out at 128GB

Turns out the books do, studio setups can go up to 512GB.

There was a thread earlier this year about the option getting pulled from selection (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47296302) but I'd guess you can still top the thing up yourself.

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

#676

Post by cheeze »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #670
_fat_santa wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a comparison between Opus 5 and Sol and the results were night and day. Basically took a feature in my app and asked it to explain to me how it works. Sol gave me a straightforward bulleted list, easy to scan and read. Opus 5 though....it gave me a solid 7 paragraphs of how it worked. I read through it and yeah it nailed the same points Sol did but the output was way harder to read.

Sounds like both models are guessing at what you want and one guessed right. Or you can just tell it...

> I have tried many ways to get it to stop writing in its stupid punchy linked-in marketing-team voice, and I can't.

One of them writes better by default. One of them doesn't. That's the thing.

With enough steering, I can get a cheap low-capability model to do things correctly in most cases as well. But why bother?

You can tell it to write high quality code, to test things, and to come up with a proper rollout plan of a feature. Or it could just do it by default.

I know where I'm putting my money in that case.

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

#677

Post by cheeze »

Rover222 wrote: post #633
nik736 wrote: post #547

For me Opus 5 was the nail in the coffin. Fable without the restrictions was a great model, but became unusable with the security guardrails. Opus 5 became so bad and slow it's unbearable. And since Fable falls back to Opus all the time it was time to switch. Me and my friends are calling it Slowpus by now... Up until some weeks ago Anthropic was the king, but we all switched to Grok 4.6. It became slow as well but i…

Grok 4.6 is great

Similarly to the cars, I won't use it on moral grounds.

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

#678

Post by mv4 »

WhyComboNadir wrote: post #641
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.

This is why I re-did the AI operating system I originally placed in Claude. For my 2.0 version I pulled it into OpenClaw (then eventually migrated to Hermes). All our work can be preserved after we change the model, even at a moment's notice or temporarily. Right now we're using OpenAI's models by default since (unlike Anthropic) will allow us to use our pro subscription rather than token metering, but I've already h…

Hermes is the way to go. Accounts provided by the frontier labs are just too volatile.

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

#679

Post by snovv_crash »

steveBK123 wrote: post #671
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…

Isn't it just tipping the hand at where the actual businesses are going to end up inevitably? The only B2C is going to be watered down ad-driven BS, and they will charge B2B via tokens. The $50/mo - $200/mo consumer LLM subscription is not something I expect to last long / or to drive much of the revenue share... like individuals paying for Gmail vs Googles overall business.

If they can make a business like that, yes. But with how rapidly the competition is catching up, I'm not sure that's a viable strategy.

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

#680

Post by cl-coder »

bitexploder wrote: post #112
bentt wrote: 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 _…

I kind of still chill out on Opus 4.6 too. 4.8 is good too. I go between them. Opus 4.8 is a little smarter some of the time. Their use of language is both very different from Opus 5. Some of the time I have a hard time believing Opus 5 is even related to Opus 4.6 and 4.8.

4.6 has been most reliable model for me to get readable text out.
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