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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

#711

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.

I think the average corporation has 2 concerns largely:

1. Getting some exposure to LLMs while building out their AI strategy. 2. Preventing data loss via end users following desire paths to Gemini, OpenAI etc.

You really don't need bleeding edge models for that. A lot of these things are going to be writing emails and adjusting config files and whatnot.

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

#712
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…

The whole fable thing really did the company a number. Their filters are incredibly sensitive now and I got banned for bootstrapping a react app. 13 days and still no response, and they haven't even refunded the subscription as the FAQ says they should have. Their support system is designed around using your account to contact support, and if you are banned you cannot. How are you supposed to build trust around that. The last half year has been more and more haphazard.

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

#713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't it silently downgrade to Opus for ML work?

You are saying it could say "Fable" in the model description (e.g. bottom left of TUI for Claude Code) when it is secretly Opus? That would be absolutely insane... I don't think it's doing that?

It appears they rolled it back, but yes that is how it initially worked.

https://readysolutions.ai/blog/2026-06-10-claude-fable-5-sil...

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

#714

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 VA had her own account on the Team plan.

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

#715
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 really grating. It’s made technical analysis so tiring to read I often give up and give the output to another llm to make it readable.

Yeah but, which other llm?

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

#716

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.

And yet, building city-sized datacenters is somehow totally doable.

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

#717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's when you do the Enterprise deal. I have first hand knowledge of household name companies with billion euro IP who use OpenAI and Athropic products quite liberally. They have WAY more lawyers than I do and their sole job is to keep the IP safe. They wouldn't sign a deal with even a slightest whiff of the IP being used to train anything. And if it happens, the penalty for breach of contract would have so many ze…

> Although the LLM providers state that they will not use your data for training when you sign an enterprise deal It can be very hard to prove in court that your data was used for training

If they did not use my data for training, they should permit me to run the first 1-3 layers of the model locally and send them dense hidden state vectors. In my experience these compress very nicely without much effort.

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

#718
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.

I dropped back to Opus 4.8 and it's so much better. Opus 5 was - to your point - actually driving me insane.

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

#720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP5 will do long running work, you just have to make it write a plan. And - trick - give it a little cli so it can run Codex if you have them both. Let it do codex to do the bulk of the work, get a OP5 sub-agent to audit the work of the codex worker. Just let Op5 manage and have 'specific oversight. You can run for 2 days on 1 context window in the manager, the advantage is that it will stick to a broad plan.

It's kind of funny you describe it that way. I'm literally doing the exact opposite, which is why I have both. I have Sol xhigh drive Claude via tmux and I get amazing results until I run out of Fable. Then Opus comes in and starts acting like some sort of autistic academic with OCD. It tries as hard as Fable, but isn't smart enough to do it well. It starts designing ever more elaborate tests, frameworks, and procedu…

'Loops' are the hackiest thing ever invented I don't think they're good for anything.

I think a researched plan is much better, the agent will follow the plan.

You can allow for an 'iterative' strategy for solving a problem, with guardrails so that it doesn't try to many times.

Yes - you can use Codex as the 'manager AI' but I don't see much benefit - it has a much shorter context window. Codex is better 'at the front' where it matters.

That said - it's 'auto-compaction' is quite good.

I don't believe the hype over OP5 lagging that much, it's fine as a working AI.

Other than for truly automated tasks, I don't think there's much that an AI can 'work a few days on'.

That form of 'loop for days until it works' produces nightmare code and architecture.

Fun for experiments and learning but not for code u want to keep.

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