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The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

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Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#41

Post by infecto »

ealready_value wrote: post #33
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 go…

The simpler explanation is probably some mix of marketing and also an expected use from people paying for a plan. The money to be made is not from plans ever. It’s in everyone’s best interest for these companies to accurately oversubscribe plans. Enterprise is where the money is to be made and I don’t feel that pricing has changed much on that end.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#42

Post by XorNot »

dormento wrote: post #19
davidw wrote: post #11

LLMs represent a big shift of power towards capital until such time as local ones are 'good enough'.

That's true. But keep in mind capital can be trivially used to influence policy so that local ones are eventually disallowed.

When has that ever happened though?

LLMs are software there's no plausible way to stop them running locally.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#44

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #20
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jose valim is the creator of elixir for reference. He definitely includes a fan following within the elixir community. So its not much about twitter as much as the guy. I mean even on top of my head, I still remember when jose commented back to me and it was a highlight for a few days as I told my friend about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234633 > I have a fun anecdote. About 5-6 years ago, Elixir compl…

That doesn't actually answer the original poster's commentary, however. Humans have left Twitter, its all propaganda and spam bots just spamming and propagandizing each other. José Valim needs to move to either Bluesky (if he prefers to stay within the corporate ecosystem) or Mastodon (which is where the entirety of the FOSS universe went).

> José Valim needs to move to either Bluesky (if he prefers to stay within the corporate ecosystem) or Mastodon (which is where the entirety of the FOSS universe went).

Personally, I am not particularly on X so much as much as I am on bluesky, and I would really appreciate Jose joining bluesky.

But at the end of the day, I might take critique with the idea of needs

Nobody needs to do anything. It's his freedom and I just searched and Jose is literally on bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:6h6jhmuogujxac24oilywd45 but his account is inactive since last message of 11 months ago.

So I think that he's open to new platforms and old habits die hard perhaps. I don't wish to defend X because I don't particularly like it, but being honest, it is what it is.

> Humans have left Twitter, its all propaganda and spam bots just spamming and propagandizing each other.

Can't say about all but I can indeed confirm that when I tried to make a new account and post something, I was literally recommended tweets basically saying "like this tweet/follow us to get 1000 followers or buy these followers" when I had posted a video for an product.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#45

Post by AlexandrB »

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.

How do we tell the doordash/uber playbook from the moviepass playbook? Because the latter would be awful to build your business on.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#46

Post by hdndjsbbs »

infecto wrote: post #35
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 f…

They have to speedrun boiling the frog because the capital expenditure is insane. Remains to be seen just how fast you can boil a frog before the frog notices

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#48

Post by adampunk »

0gs wrote: post #13
adampunk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

it's hard, but not THAT hard, to find a few dozen people who can deal with large volumes of support tickets every day. so for a company like anthropic, you'd use a customized claude to triage and then those few dozen people spend all day actually caring about solving users' problems. a contract with fin fka intercom (lol) to offload this is a step in the wrong direction imo, but then nobody pays for support so it's h…

I'm sorry but a few dozen people actually caring about the problems of a billion users is a fart in a windstorm. You might as well hire a half-dozen to care, or none, for all the work you'll do. You'd need a dozen people just to design a scheduler for handling tickets only to watch that catch fire too.

I don't get it. None of the hyperscalers have human support teams at scale because it's obviously infeasible. Why, just because it would be nice, do we take leave of the requirement that something actually be possible before demanding it.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#49

Post by mock-possum »

troyvit wrote: post #12
adampunk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's just it. If they were prioritizing humans they'd have a product with a measely million users, charge more, and offer great support. Their game isn't a good product though, their game is scale because they think that's the only way to win, and winning is the only way to survive.

Love how you’re literally saying “instead of serving humanity they should serve the wealthiest 0.1%”

Very humanitarian

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#50

Post by AlexandrB »

XorNot wrote: post #42
dormento wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. But keep in mind capital can be trivially used to influence policy so that local ones are eventually disallowed.

When has that ever happened though? LLMs are software there's no plausible way to stop them running locally.

California is trying to ban the sale of 3d printers that don't detect and block "gun parts" from being printed[1]. All Anthropic and friends need is some kind of safety rationale and we won't be able to buy computers that can run local models.

The plausible way to do this is to force all software through some kind of signing process. This would be trivial for Apple to pull off and not much harder for Microsoft. On the Linux side, I expect the systemd folks would be happy to add some kind of signature checking to "head off the inevitable".

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1rek7ky/new_cal...

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