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Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
661–670 of 740 posts
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#662This isn't the reason I'm considering leaving Anthropic. I don't think I can tolerate its writing style anymore. Reading Claude output is starting to cause actual psychological harm. I have tried many ways to get it to stop writing in its stupid punchy linked-in marketing-team voice, and I can't. Is there a model out there that sounds sound this awful? It's like rubbing sand into the folds of my brain.
I did a comparison between Opus 5 and Sol and the results were night and day. Basically took a feature in my app and asked it to explain to me how it works.
Sol gave me a straightforward bulleted list, easy to scan and read. Opus 5 though....it gave me a solid 7 paragraphs of how it worked. I read through it and yeah it nailed the same points Sol did but the output was way harder to read.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#663Earlier quoted context omitted.
I stopped using Claude because of this BS. If I pay for a service, I want to know what I’m paying for, I want it to be predictable. Anthropic have been anything but. Flip flopping on model availability, model access behind an opaque filter, their past behaviour of model degradation as they prepared their next model… these are not signs of a reliable service. I’ve mostly settled on using a mixture of open weights mode…
I run LFM2.5 8B locally. It's not very smart, to say the least. But then, there are plenty of mindless, menial tasks out there, and it would go through those like a champ. And quickly, too.
Exactly, not all tasks require smarts, they just need to be good enough. I’ve found that if prompts are really focused, the tiny models do alright.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I agree with this. The constant state of "...will the rug be pulled?!?" does discourage relying on it as a model and building a workflow on it. Anthropic used to just be a reliable thing you could play with. Now it's this constant source of anxiety. It also didn't help that the government yanked it which adds another source of anxiety since OpenAI is on much better terms with the administration and the administ…
My wife's startup made the mistake of building her internal operations around Claude Team. Then she hired a VA in the Philippines. Anthropic promptly banned her account without warning once the VA connected to the account. It took her weeks to get her account reinstated, at which point she had already moved on to OpenAI.
we have 7 coworkers we have been trying to re-instate for nearly 4 months now. All using the same google workspace sso, so there really was no special reason to ban them...
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#665It's a bit of a non-headline. We are a period of massive up-take from people who aren't really familiar with what works well for their use-case and how much that costs.
I have tried fable, gone back to sonnet, tried to use agent mode to mix and match and various other combinations. If I decide that Fable is the only one that can save me hours or days of time, I will go back to it and pay the cost. If the cheaper or free ones do well enough, I will stick with them.
When you see the price of hardware needed for these models, we are generally not paying very much towards that price so I expect prices to start ramping up as the honeymoon ends and these companies' investors get itchy for their ROI.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of it is scale. If you have a small number of clients/users it is possible to provide that support. If you have millions or billions of users then you can't scale the support to handle the support requests, so some form of automation becomes inevitable.
So you overextend, such that the quality of your support suffers? You can just call it what it is: greed. Have you considered that maybe a company shouldn’t have millions or billions of users? That’s a lot of eggs to put in one basket.
You mean like Microsoft, Google (GMail, YouTube, Android), Apple, Facebook, and others?
Sorry, you can't buy an iPhone because Apple has got too many customers.
Sorry, you can't have a GMail account because Google has too many customers.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#667Where 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…
Not just that once I hit my Fable limit I naturally experimented with other options and realized that 5.6 Sol + Grok 4.6 gives me same quality of results
as Fable + 5.6 Sol so not really that reliant on Fable anymore.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#668This article is a tiny bit deceptive -- it should read "struggles to attract API users". I imagine that subscription demand for Fable 5 is very high. But clearly Fable 5 is a much less attractive model for enterprise service use; you can clearly thank the Trump administration for some adoption hesitancy as continuity of service for Fable has been demonstrably insecure. We do not use Fable at the service level at our organization for several reasons: cost, service continuity, and data privacy. But we use Fable extensively for code development.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
They haven't communicated well the fact that the default model should be Sonnet 5, which should give you unlimited use for common coding tasks (say with occasional subagents use) on the Pro plan. Instead they're pushing Opus and even Fable, to try and get people addicted to the higher tier, without realizing that nearly everybody has a Sonnet for peanuts via DeepSeek V4 on OpenRouter, or completely free through Qwen…
Sonnet 5 is a trash model and stupidly expensive if you accidentally set reasoning tokens high - more expensive than fable - it absolutely should not be the default lmao. If the common coding tasks you use ai for is doable with sonnet or local qwen - you're either not using Claude code (if you are, you'll very quickly see that sonnet 5 in Claude code is not a model for "occasional subagent use" - spinning up subagent…
Yeah Opus 5 on low is faster, cheaper, and better than Sonnet 5 on high...
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#670This isn't the reason I'm considering leaving Anthropic. I don't think I can tolerate its writing style anymore. Reading Claude output is starting to cause actual psychological harm. I have tried many ways to get it to stop writing in its stupid punchy linked-in marketing-team voice, and I can't. Is there a model out there that sounds sound this awful? It's like rubbing sand into the folds of my brain.
I did a comparison between Opus 5 and Sol and the results were night and day. Basically took a feature in my app and asked it to explain to me how it works. Sol gave me a straightforward bulleted list, easy to scan and read. Opus 5 though....it gave me a solid 7 paragraphs of how it worked. I read through it and yeah it nailed the same points Sol did but the output was way harder to read.
Sounds like both models are guessing at what you want and one guessed right. Or you can just tell it...