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

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

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 740 posts

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

#361

Post by nl »

nevertoolate wrote: post #339
nl wrote: post #295

Wow the sentiment here is so negative. I'm on the $200 plan (work pays) and I also have the $20 OpenAI plan (I pay) and keep a balance on OpenRouter. There is nothing as good as Fable, not even close. I recently had it run a 18 hour autonomous rebuild of a project (moving from Spark to Pandas for performance/data size trade off issues). It orchestrated Opus sub-agents flawlessly for 18 hours. It even did a great job…

I like this story. How did you verify the output? How big is the codebase? Why it took 18 hours? Could you implement it with a small local agent and breaking the task down yourself in two days (i know it sounds like a loaded question, it is not). I think the rewrites are the main story for llms in code (hot take). Writing greenfield code at the seams also something which might work well.

It's a differential privacy framework.

It's a fairly large code base split across 3 repos.

The good thing was that it is fairly easy to verify: we have a working (but slow) version that uses Spark, with lots of existing unit tests.

We verified by using those unit tests as well as running our end-to-end process in the Spark and Pandas version and verifying the two databases were within the differential-privacy noise bands of each other.

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

#362

Post by larodi »

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…

Opus and Sonnet 5 babble like crazy - this’ one reason. At some point one feels as if staring at the Random himself, not a conversation. Fable is super expensive.

From a cost-effective perspective the GPT models are much cheaper - one can easily tell it takes longer with GPT5.x to exhaust limits and this matters A LOT.

I can’t say which of these corpos I despise more though. I though for a while Dario was cool, but a massive distrust is piling and the first third player offering decent experience (and showing some decency) will win me over.

For the record - I’m also unsure whether I despise more Exxon or BP or burning fuel as a whole. Hope u get the point...

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

#363

Post by nl »

dakolli wrote: post #353
nl wrote: post #295

Wow the sentiment here is so negative. I'm on the $200 plan (work pays) and I also have the $20 OpenAI plan (I pay) and keep a balance on OpenRouter. There is nothing as good as Fable, not even close. I recently had it run a 18 hour autonomous rebuild of a project (moving from Spark to Pandas for performance/data size trade off issues). It orchestrated Opus sub-agents flawlessly for 18 hours. It even did a great job…

You could just write decent specs, or generate decent specs and get this done in 1/5th of the time with smaller models. Complete waste of electricity to run $500k in GPUs full throttle, if not more, for 18 hours straight to migrate from spark to pandas. Maybe try using your brain.

Yes, and 4 months ago I'd have done it this way.

I'd estimate that generating the specs would have been maybe 2 weeks work? It's across 3 repos, and I'm only really familiar with one.

> done in 1/5th of the time with smaller models

The coding itself might have been faster, but the end to end time would have been much longer.

> Maybe try using your brain.

Believe me, my brain was a load bearing seam in this task,

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

#364

Post by lnenad »

philipbjorge wrote: post #164
lnenad wrote: post #41

As a small background, I have a local server and I've been trying out different models with different inference engines, quants, configurations etc... I'm also using Opus and Sol at work consistently. I've used AI since the first wave, first as a toy, then as a highly specific tool, last 6+ months as the primary LoC generator. This is the first time I've felt, and I use the word *felt* since I don't have a suite of b…

> When you actually put them to the test you see 500k tokens of reasoning with "Actually..." and "Wait..." in every third paragraph of their reasoning trace. I've wondered if this is part of why we don't see the reasoning traces for Anthropic's models before -- Open models might just be accurately surfacing how the sausage is made.

I'm assuming it's definitely part of the equation, but considering that I'm getting more tps but still waiting a lot more time for code to come out I'd assume it's not a 1:1 comparison. Plus I'm running quants, maybe with full precision it's better.

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

#365

Post by LaurensBER »

visarga wrote: post #330
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…

> That forces people to look beyond the walled garden. Every time I get "you used your quota, come back in 3 hours, or 2 days" -> that is experimentation time with their competition, leading to changed service plans. When they said "claude -p" will be billed at API pricing even for plan users I moved my harness off claude. After I integrated codex, then it was never going to be a full claude project again. What busin…

>™Every time I get "you used your quota, come back in 3 hours, or 2 days" -> that is experimentation time with their competition, leading to changed service plans.

I guess this is why they're pushing Claude code hard (not supporting agents.md, not allowing third party harnesses, etc) but when switching to another provider is as easy as opening a new terminal and typing omp/pi/codex your moat is effectively zero.

They can compete on price, quality or value but anything else is just madness. Currently they (arguably) own quality but this won't last.

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

#366

Post by nl »

aroman wrote: post #335
nl wrote: post #295

Wow the sentiment here is so negative. I'm on the $200 plan (work pays) and I also have the $20 OpenAI plan (I pay) and keep a balance on OpenRouter. There is nothing as good as Fable, not even close. I recently had it run a 18 hour autonomous rebuild of a project (moving from Spark to Pandas for performance/data size trade off issues). It orchestrated Opus sub-agents flawlessly for 18 hours. It even did a great job…

I think you need to spend more time with Sol. If you think there is nothing even close to as good as Fable - my guess is you haven’t spent as much time getting as familiar with working with those models as you have with Claude’s. Codex is more token efficient and tends to get better results than Fable with less need for extreme token burning shenanigans like 18 hours of subagents. I spend 10+ hours a day in both agen…

> Codex is more token efficient

This is very true, especially vs Opus 5.

> tends to get better results than Fable with less need for extreme token burning shenanigans like 18 hours of subagents.

The strength here was less the code quality and rather the long horizon task tracking.

This was a very large task - I was chatting with the maintainers and we estimated 4 to 6 months work over multiple phases for human coding.

Fable is able to handle that long goal, with incremental steps along the way, handle the verification and course correct when it finds a problem.

I think the larger context helps here some, but the strength of the model on this specific thing is notably better.

I'm not alone in noticing this. https://www.primeintellect.ai/research/nanogpt-speedrun shows Fable is able to manage a run nearly 1/3 longer than Sol (8.7 days vs 6.1 days). In my use cases Sol is much closer to Opus 5 though.

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

#367

Post by protocolture »

foxylad wrote: post #301

Non-LLM user here. Why? Apart from the ecological issues, I'm very uncomfortable giving my organisation's crown jewels to {random_internet__corp}. Look at the lengths they go to for training data - 10M for Spirit's call logs? Destroying millions of obscure books to scan them? They make meth-heads look scrupulous. Your prompts, especially if they contain your entire codebase, are _way_ more data-rich than an airline p…

>Apart from the ecological issues,

Complete nothingburger. Actually worse than that, its a London Horse Manure crisis.

>Destroying millions of obscure books to scan them?

I really don't see the issue. They got slapped in the face for trying to do things the right way and torrent the lot. Why wouldn't they exercise their legal right to buy physical items and create digital backups?

>They make meth-heads look scrupulous.

My local meth head checks in on my family every 2-3 months, because when she had fled from hospital post surgery, and added some meth to some morphine, we gave her new clothes and a safe place while we convinced her that the ambulance service wasn't run by Satan. She's good people. Anyway if she wanted a whole bunch of digital books I would help her torrent them like a responsible person.

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

#368

Post by protocolture »

Vespasian wrote: post #349
foxylad wrote: post #301

Non-LLM user here. Why? Apart from the ecological issues, I'm very uncomfortable giving my organisation's crown jewels to {random_internet__corp}. Look at the lengths they go to for training data - 10M for Spirit's call logs? Destroying millions of obscure books to scan them? They make meth-heads look scrupulous. Your prompts, especially if they contain your entire codebase, are _way_ more data-rich than an airline p…

Open weights are certainly something that is very eagerly being adopted in some companies. It's not even that expensive because even the 15€/month/employee bill for people who use AI very little can stack up. Beside that though, many companies already have most if not all of their data in some cloud (Microsoft would be a prime example). Giving them a few extra bugs to get a (potentially) very useful tool is not out o…

>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.

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

#369

Post by YetAnotherNick »

Vespasian wrote: post #310
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also pay but just the $20 plan and just for chats/lightweight personal site editing. I get unlimited token usage from my company. In my company the average claude token usage is something like $5k/month/employee. Most hobby coders don't spend anywhere close to it.

I strongly suspect most companies don't spend that much either. Unlimited tokens aka unlimited cost is something that not every use case needs.

I think most good engineering companies are spending >$1000/employee/month. Subscription users spend $100-200.

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

#370

Post by madrox »

Anthropic lost all good will with me. Everything from their policies to their rhetoric has an air of "we don't trust you." The way they treated users who wanted to use them for OpenClaw didn't sit well with me, and then the Fable nonsense was the last straw.

And they're somehow shocked users aren't loyal to that. It isn't about cost.

Post reply on HN