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

The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 89 posts

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#31

Post by Applejinx »

ungovernableCat wrote: post #15
jameskilton wrote: post #2

> At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being. If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) and communications team (again, staffed by humans, for humans). As both of these are actually on par with Silicon Valley standards (between medicore and atrociously bad), Anthropic cannot and should not be trusted with anything to do…

Extremely cynical take, but they're probably being honest. They wanna serve humanity. But maybe they only consider a small part of the population to be relevant humans.

To whom?

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#32

Post by Aboutplants »

parliament32 wrote: post #18

It really is the doordash/uber playbook all over again eh? Sell at a massive loss, gain userbase, then gradually boil the frog by adding fees, removing features, and increasing prices. Except instead of doing this a few years down the line, they're speedrunning the tighten-the-noose phase. Unfortunately the competition is nipping at their heels so there's a good chance this blows up in their faces.

“Unfortunately”?

Uh, that’s a good thing

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#33

Post by ealready_value »

parliament32 wrote: post #18

It really is the doordash/uber playbook all over again eh? Sell at a massive loss, gain userbase, then gradually boil the frog by adding fees, removing features, and increasing prices. Except instead of doing this a few years down the line, they're speedrunning the tighten-the-noose phase. Unfortunately the competition is nipping at their heels so there's a good chance this blows up in their faces.

As far as I can tell, it seemed very clear that was the playbook for about a year now. Its been regularly assumed they're selling plans as a major loss-leader because people can "spend" thousands of dollars a months on a plan if they were charged at API rates. I think there's good evidence that even the API rates are sold at a loss.

I think its assumed in the LLM model business that the models themselves are not a good moat, the next model by another company is just as likely to be as good as the current model. So companies like Anthropic have to tighten the noose slowly to start recovering their costs. This appears to be one of those steps.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#34

Post by alehlopeh »

maplethorpe wrote: post #23
adampunk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you staff a support line for a product with a billion users?

Don't have a billion users if you can't offer them support?

Like, what? Since when can you control how many people want your product?

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#35

Post by infecto »

parliament32 wrote: post #18

It really is the doordash/uber playbook all over again eh? Sell at a massive loss, gain userbase, then gradually boil the frog by adding fees, removing features, and increasing prices. Except instead of doing this a few years down the line, they're speedrunning the tighten-the-noose phase. Unfortunately the competition is nipping at their heels so there's a good chance this blows up in their faces.

I think people are being too generous with these comparisons. Not defending Anthropic but at the same time they are releasing new features and adjusting cost at pretty record speed for a new industry. Uber/doordash were subsidizing cost for what felt like a decade. Anthropic and related companies are adjusting price within months.

To me the bigger takeaway is that these business are seeing massive volume in use and figuring out how to price the products accordingly.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#36

Post by afavour »

parliament32 wrote: post #18

It really is the doordash/uber playbook all over again eh? Sell at a massive loss, gain userbase, then gradually boil the frog by adding fees, removing features, and increasing prices. Except instead of doing this a few years down the line, they're speedrunning the tighten-the-noose phase. Unfortunately the competition is nipping at their heels so there's a good chance this blows up in their faces.

I still think/hope/pray the future will be on-device models that don't need constant retraining. That will blow up the existing business model but I think a company could still make good money with a "majority local/remote for the really challenging stuff" model.

The problem is that today's AI companies have taken on so much funding that a reasonable, not crazy profit ratio isn't enough for them.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#37

Post by doikor »

parliament32 wrote: post #18

It really is the doordash/uber playbook all over again eh? Sell at a massive loss, gain userbase, then gradually boil the frog by adding fees, removing features, and increasing prices. Except instead of doing this a few years down the line, they're speedrunning the tighten-the-noose phase. Unfortunately the competition is nipping at their heels so there's a good chance this blows up in their faces.

It was very clear from the beginning purely from how much it costs to train and run the inference.

Someone has to pay the 7 trillion (the current projections for the AI datacenter build up)

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#38

Post by schnitzelstoat »

jadar wrote: post #29

What's the subtext here? I don't live under a rock, but there have been so many Anthropic kerfuffles that I have lost track.

Using -p (non-interactive mode) now uses API pricing, not subscription (so it's now more expensive). But if you have a subscription you get some free credits for it.
Post reply on HN