Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 161 posts

Re: OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic

#141

Post by Syntaf »

Syntaf wrote: post #78
xhevahir wrote: post #6

Odd timing...Everything I've read about Claude the last several days suggests that its users are disappointed, even furious at what's happened to its performance.

I probably use a couple thousand session hours monthly between work & personal; very pleased with the results I get. But I’m not necessarily oozing about it online — vocal minority and all.

Self-edit: a couple thousand session hours is probably hyperbolic; it's likely closer to a thousand after discussing usage with another user in a separate thread.

Maybe a better metric: Across work + personal I have 1,000+ sessions in the last 30 days, longest session was 3d 20h

Re: OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic

#142

Post by jjfoooo4 »

oofbey wrote: post #128
jjfoooo4 wrote: post #126

Both companies have the same issue: the unit economics are bad, and there’s no moat. I’ve been primarily on Claude for the last 6 months or so, but have been hitting rate limits. I switched work to Codex seamlessly, just like I could switch to any other provider seamlessly

The unit economics at this point are about utilization. Their cost is well below what they’re charging, but only when there is enough traffic to keep the GPUs busy. So the game is about increasing demand to level the load. GPT has negligible moat because they gave up on all their integrations. Claude code is starting to develop one as people start to build things that require Claude Code specifically, not just any LL…

> Claude code is starting to develop one as people start to build things that require Claude Code specifically, not just any LLM.

I hate to be a "source?" guy, but I'm curious if you have any examples of this. Skills and MCP are really the only extensions on CC itself I'm aware of, and these are both supported in Codex.

Things like Dispatch / remote sessions is something CC has that Codex does not, but these features are quite easy to replicate (and I expect Codex to do so in short order).

Re: OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic

#143

Post by casey2 »

brookst wrote: post #3

I don’t know how OpenAI screwed this up. They had the best tech, the largest installed base, the best brand recognition. And somehow instead of prosecuting the lead in all areas, they got all hubristic and sloppy and just failed to iterate on the core product, while also failing to respond quickly when Anthropic showed that coding agents are the flywheel that makes the whole company faster. It’s like they thought the…

Congrats to OpenAI for having this fake "beef" with itself through Anthropic, but Google is still going to win the most users. Users aren't so stupid that they will fall for this kind of obvious psychological manipulation in perpetuity.

Re: OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic

#144

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

nl wrote: post #67
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's raised in the sense that some people made a pinky promise to give them cash. But those people also don't have the money and have to raise it from other places. It's largely SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft and Nvidia, all of whom don't have big piggybanks full of hundreds of billions. They ask for loans based on the promise of making cash to pay for it, and that cash is based on people wanting to use OpenAI. So it's…

This isn't right > It's largely SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft and Nvidia, all of whom don't have big piggybanks full of hundreds of billions. Actually SoftBank, Microsoft and Nvidia literally have free cash sitting there. NVIDIA for example had over $60B in audited, reported free cash flow in 2025[1] > loans from Nvidia (at high interest rates), Is this just something you are making up? "NVIDIA intends to invest up to…

Just because they have cash doesn't mean they're going to lay it all on the table for one risky business. Which is why the actual solution is mostly loans.

In being a guarantor, Nvidia isn't directly giving the money now, but it is promising to be liable for the loan if OpenAI defaults. That's a risk they have to budget for.

But in addition to being a guarantor, they're also loaning out chips:

"OpenAI plans to pay for Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) through lease arrangements, rather than upfront purchases." "By leasing the processors, OpenAI can spread its costs out over the useful life of the GPUs, which could be up to five years a person said, leaving Nvidia to bear more of the risk."

Nvidia is leasing them the GPUs, which is basically a loan.

"In addition to offering a cost-efficient way for OpenAI to access chips, Nvidia’s lease option and long-term commitment can help the company land better terms from banks when it comes to raising debt, a person said. "

"As a non-investment-grade startup that lacks positive cash flow, financing remains costly. OpenAI executives have called equity the most expensive way to fund data centers, and said that the company is preparing to take on debt to cover the remainder of the expansion."

"“Folks like Oracle are putting their balance sheets to work to create these incredible data centers you see behind us,” Friar said. “In Nvidia’s case, they’re putting together some equity to get it jumpstarted, but importantly, they will get paid for all those chips as those chips get deployed.”"

Nvidia leases (loans) them GPUs with a promise to pay for them later. Getting this lease (loan) from Nvidia helps them secure more debt.

"OpenAI’s path to a $500 billion private market valuation has been enabled by hefty investments from Microsoft and others that allow the company to burn billions of dollars in cash while building its AI models that power services including ChatGPT."

"Jamie Zakalik, an analyst at Neuberger Berman, said the Nvidia deal is the latest example of OpenAI raising money that it pours right back into the company providing the capital. Investors are concerned about the “circular nature of this deal goosing up everyone’s earnings and everyone’s numbers,” said Zakalik. “But it’s not actually creating anything.”"

They get a loan of chips, use it to get a loan of money from someone else, and spend that money on the company that loaned them the chips. It's a Ponzi scheme.

(https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/24/nvidia-openai-investment-in-...)

Re: OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic

#145

Post by anthonypasq »

LoFiSamurai wrote: post #135
anthonypasq wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cant take anyone seriously who thinks > ChatGPT most of the time one-shots complex solutions in comparison is an intelligible sentence.

Hmm. I can definitely understand what the author was saying. Paraphrased: ChatGPT often completes complex solutions in one try whereas Claude does not (or performs less well). I guess you can’t take me seriously?

no i cant. chatgpt is a mobile app/website, not a model or agentic harness. if you are confusing these things then sadly you have no idea whats going on.

Re: OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic

#146

Post by acdha »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #127
phist_mcgee wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter that codex is now as good as claude code? Check dev spaces like twitter and discord and all anyone talks about is claude-code, openclaw, opus 4.6 etc. The mindshare went to anthropic.

Nothing about AI mindshare is durable. As Anthropic tightens rate limits and/or raises prices, everyone will move to something else. This week I’ve been hitting CC rate limits, and I switched to Codex with virtually no disruption to my workflow. It’s not good for Anthropic that I was able to do that!

One of the things I’ve been wanting to see is basically an estimate of their minimum revenue to meet investor expectations, too. I’ve heard people talking about using even cheaper local models aggressively to save on tokens and it increasingly makes me wonder if they’re caught in a vice where prices need to go up but if they raise them they’ll just shed usage to the competition, especially since at least Google has a much longer runway.

Re: OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic

#147

Post by dgellow »

depressedpanda wrote: post #116
jimbokun wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just appreciate the honesty of Amodei telling us pretty much straight up we’re all fucked because the AIs are taking all the jobs in a couple years or less.

Honesty? Sounds like investor hype to me.

I of course cannot read his mind but he has been very consistent, even before he was raising money

Re: OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic

#148

Post by dgellow »

Duplicake wrote: post #112

People are so late to Anthropic, I used Claude 1.3 back when it released, and I've stood by Claude since the early days. I don't think people quite realized the potential of Anthropic

Mind sharing with us? What is the potential being missed?

Re: OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic

#149

Post by morcutt »

palmotea wrote: post #77
morcutt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sam lost the plot for me. He took too many interviews which led me to not trust him. Last straw came with him standing by Anthropic one day then throwing them under the bus the next. He showed little awareness on why that is problematic.

> Sam lost the plot for me. He took too many interviews which led me to not trust him. Last straw came with him standing by Anthropic one day then throwing them under the bus the next. He showed little awareness on why that is problematic. It should have become clear to all that he was an untrustworthy person when he was fired from OpenAI by its then-board. My understanding is their complaint was he was lying, untrus…

Yeah, it likely should have.

I've however been on the receiving end of some very odd board behavior and most founders I know have a story or two as well. I don't always take board decisions at face value. Reality is often askew, personality disorders run rampant in places of power, and there can be unknown incentives at play.

Re: OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic

#150

Post by oofbey »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #142
oofbey wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unit economics at this point are about utilization. Their cost is well below what they’re charging, but only when there is enough traffic to keep the GPUs busy. So the game is about increasing demand to level the load. GPT has negligible moat because they gave up on all their integrations. Claude code is starting to develop one as people start to build things that require Claude Code specifically, not just any LL…

> Claude code is starting to develop one as people start to build things that require Claude Code specifically, not just any LLM. I hate to be a "source?" guy, but I'm curious if you have any examples of this. Skills and MCP are really the only extensions on CC itself I'm aware of, and these are both supported in Codex. Things like Dispatch / remote sessions is something CC has that Codex does not, but these features…

I agree that’s a great question which I don’t really know the answer to. These tools have been moving in lock step for some time now. One will innovate and within 2-3 weeks the others have that feature. Where I sit the mind share all seems to be going to Claude though. The moat develops when people build something that only works on one - even if the others have the same features it doesn’t matter unless they’re literally binary compatible. Skills are just prompts at the end of the day with nothing more specialized than a file naming convention.

Having written several orchestrators I’ll say that the code to invoke the tool is pretty equivalent but it’s the details that matter. Exact CLI flags and json fields.

Post reply on HN