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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

#721

Post by nananana9 »

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…

The issue is that the amount of useful software written—or more broadly, the value, or even profits, businesses are making—hasn't increased in any measurable way.

I don't dispute that your tasks are taking less time, but I suspect that to be temporary. This is a forum of AI frontrunners and early adopters, so I expect it's a matter until people catch on, and recalibrate their expectations for amount of output a programmer can produce in a given timeframe.

What I dispute is that this increased output amounts to actual value. There may very well be a HN-wide 10x productivity boost, if HN measures productivity in Jira tickets per day. But if that's the only measurable result, we should expect the only long term change to be a 10x increase in Jira tickets once orgs catch on.

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

#722

Post by dlcarrier »

gritzko wrote: post #411
DiscourseFan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well nobody thought you could write software that helps tightly coordinate processes happening simultaneously from millions upon millions of nodes on nearly every corner of the world, but here we are. When industry expands further off earth, we will need more complex and intricate software to coordinate its movements, why wouldn’t our systems become more powerful. If you are hopeful for humanity than you must expect…

Also, pairing a wireless mouse to a laptop is not getting easier as years pass.

That's a Bluetooth thing: https://xkcd.com/2055/

My theory is that it's because the Bluetooth protocol is named in honor of the Viking king Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, who conquered several disparate peoples into a single kingdom, so as an act of solidarity toward those peoples, the Bluetooth protocol is written in a way where a devices are as likely to rebel against consolidation as they are to pair together.

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

#723

Post by bluegatty »

carlosjobim wrote: post #543
bluegatty wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Product marketing and contracts will be a 'common use case' we think of, but it will be 0.000001% of tokens consumed. A developer using sub-agents will consume more tokens 1 Day than a marketing manager will consume 1 Month, easily. Unless there is something inherently automated about the nature of the AI, it will be a tiny % use case. Even a lawyer, using AI daily for contracts - that will be relatively light use. T…

If a salesperson uses 100 000 tokes for translation, which gives him $10 000 in sales. And a programmer uses one million tokes, which gives him $100 in sales (or value). What is then the value of a token? The comment I answered asked where there is an industry finding 10s or 100s of billion of dollars in value from LLMs. The answer is translation. It's the value they as customers get out of the LLMs, not what cost th…

1) A sales person won't make $10K from a little translation - we can already automate basic translation using tech and humans.

2) 'Because there was a bit of translation involved in the job' - does not mean that AI is really driving that economic activity.

Again: translation is extremely common. The AI might make that part a bit more efficient, it will be barely noticeable.

3) That level of AI activity will just be some 'compute' on your local machine, nobody will be counting tokens.

Think of it like this:

"Translation is going to get easier because you can download some software that does it". It happens to use the GPU instead of CPU.

The vast majority of this kind of compute will be automation, software and a few other things.

'Translation' will just be a little app on your iPhone.

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

#724

Post by tabs_or_spaces »

I started using llm's on a $20 claude license, then it became a $100 license.

Then all the mythos warnings happened, then the fable access issues started.

At that point, I just wanted to try something else because I didn't want to feel vendor locked by anthropic.

Then I tried codex on the $100 plan. I've never been happier. It does everything claude can do, without any token limit issues or anything for me.

I don't see myself going back to claude anytime soon. I also highly recommend folks to not vendor lock yourself to a model. You need to try multiple models for yourself and see what's possible. There should be zero loyalty to any frontier lab because of how fast things change and how volatile model access, uptime and customer experience can be with these things.

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

#726

Post by sfn42 »

esseph wrote: post #703
exceptione wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think you hit a limit where you can't support any new customer anymore, you just tell them you have no capacity at the moment. Like any normal practice does.

What's the support staff required for a few billion people?

Their problem, not ours.

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

#727

Post by carlosjobim »

bluegatty wrote: post #723
carlosjobim wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a salesperson uses 100 000 tokes for translation, which gives him $10 000 in sales. And a programmer uses one million tokes, which gives him $100 in sales (or value). What is then the value of a token? The comment I answered asked where there is an industry finding 10s or 100s of billion of dollars in value from LLMs. The answer is translation. It's the value they as customers get out of the LLMs, not what cost th…

1) A sales person won't make $10K from a little translation - we can already automate basic translation using tech and humans. 2) 'Because there was a bit of translation involved in the job' - does not mean that AI is really driving that economic activity. Again: translation is extremely common. The AI might make that part a bit more efficient, it will be barely noticeable. 3) That level of AI activity will just be s…

Of course a sales person can make $10k from a transaction. It depends entirely on what he is selling. But you can split it into smaller chunks if you so wish. Since unlimited high quality LLM translations are about $120 per year right now.

But why are you talking about "basic translation"? There is no commercial need for that. It has to be high quality, and LLMs deliver that. Human translators deliver that as well, but at a much higher price.

Your number 2 point, what do you mean? In many cases if there was no translation, then there wouldn't have been a sale. It's a direct driver.

Your number 3 point: No matter how cheap it is for the user, the economic value from LLM translation will still be counted in the trillions of dollars. Just like e-mail (which is cheap or free for the user). But you will need an enormous amount of storage space on your local machine to have perfect quality translation between dozens of languages.

I don't know why hackers want to diminish the value of LLM translations. The commercial need for translation is not for finding out what a word means. It needs to be of the highest quality, comparable to professional human translators.

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

#728

Post by carlosjobim »

tock wrote: post #613
carlosjobim wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLM frontier companies are more akin to infrastructure like chips and airplanes and the internet than applications built on top of it. There will be products built on top of them that generate revenue. eg. processors are needed for everything on the planet. No Intel isn't going to generate annual revenue in the trillions because of that. In the case of frontier companies the moat is even smaller with dozens of player…

> eg. processors are needed for everything on the planet. No Intel isn't going to generate annual revenue in the trillions because of that.

No, but Intel processors are going to generate revenue in the trillions for the economy, which was the original question as far as I understood it.

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

#729

Post by queenkjuul »

jayGlow wrote: post #635
queenkjuul wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free tier Gemini is good enough for my personal projects and hopefully a local model can replace it before i ever personally pay for a single token from anyone. Work can pay a Claude sub. At home i see no need

local models are getting pretty close. they still require some serious hardware to run at a reasonable rate but they're about smart enough to be useful.

Yeah i just don't have the hardware to run them at a reasonable rate and am not ready to invest that much at today's prices. My tinkering with DeepSeek last year was promising but the minutes-per-response made it unusable.

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

#730

Post by nonameiguess »

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…

Piling on to the other responses, I don't really want to see anything at all from you. What I want to see to believe that any meaningful number of people out there are generating 10x the value they used to is a visibly more valuable world.

My skepticism is we're not getting that because the world mostly doesn't need more software and it doesn't need all software to be ultra-personalized to each user, either. There are plenty of valuable problems that may be solved via computation, but thus far, it seems we're getting the software equivalent of movie theaters disappearing and being replaced with people watching TikTok from bed. It re-routes the monetary value extraction from consumers of audio-visual entertainment, and TikTok probably has at bare minimum 1000x the content-length of the Criterion Collection, but it isn't making the world 10x better for anyone but the owners of TikTok.

It reminds me of my best friend from college, who was bipolar. His goal in life was to become a writer and he eventually did become an Emmy winner, but back in school, he's go into manic episodes in which he'd stay up all night five nights in a rows and churn out thousands upon thousands of pages of free-form text that incorporate prose, poetry, play scripts. It was definitely more than 10x the output of a non-manic period, and there were nuggets here and there of intensely evocative single phrases, snippets of dialogue that looked like they could come from a more compelling story, but they were ultimately sketches and drafts, not anything publishable that another person would want to read.

Would we call him 10x as productive when he was writing more total output as measured by number of words or when we was writing much less but in a form that millions of other people enjoyed and remembered?

If we purely mean economic productivity, that is pretty straightforward in a case like yours. If you were previously completing 4 projects every 3 months and now you're completing 42 every 3 months, are you earning 14x as much money as you used to?

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