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The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

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Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#71

Post by troyvit »

mock-possum wrote: post #49
troyvit wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Honestly I never thought about it that way, but I do think that's an exaggeration. I don't see any believable sign that Anthropic's goal was ever to "serve humanity." That said, how do you serve humanity properly? Do you scale a mediocre product to a billion people and treat them like shit or do you build it deliberately and support what you make, even if that costs more?

You sound like "AI" is something people deserve for free when clearly, if you look at the garbage energy footprint alone, it's going to have to cost. Supporting it is going to have even more.

P.S. How can you "serve humanity" if you literally don't support the humans who use your stuff?

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#72

Post by troyvit »

brookst wrote: post #17
troyvit wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, how would limiting a great tool to 0.1% of the TAM demonstrate caring for humans? Are you picturing them running a lottery for who’s allowed to use it, or an auction? And with the loss of scale economies, it would have to be much more expensive. So you end up charging, what, $10,000/month and only making it available to the very wealthy? I don’t see how this game plan is better for humans. And I’m honestly not…

I mean look at how Apple prices their computers and phones, or how WSJ charges for subscriptions, or how "Linux" keeps its market small by being awful at marketing. The point is there are plenty of ways to scale sustainably and support your customer base in a long-term way that keeps them, and it doesn't seem like Anthropic is doing that.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#73

Post by radu_floricica »

Max x20 usage is so cheap, that it's pretty obviously subsidized. And the non-interactive usage is the easiest to explode. They could play games with "reasonable use" and whack a mole accounts that are obviously farming it, but their approach is ultimately more fair.

And I say this as somebody who just discovered agent orchestration and would absolutely love their limits to remain as they are.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#74

Post by ungovernableCat »

Applejinx wrote: post #31
ungovernableCat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Anyone for whom "paying salaries" is a problem they wanna solve.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#75

Post by gruez »

parliament32 wrote: post #70
gruez wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>when the competition is.. near-equivalent-capability DeepSeek/Qwen/Llama on a $1k GPU with a break-even of 5 months of subscription costs Lol no. Chinese AIs are definitely not "near-equivalent-capability". The empirical proof is pretty obvious: how many people have you heard talking about using their codex/claude code subscription vs their z.ai or qwen subscription? Moreover even the Chinese models require epic amo…

Today, sure. But we already see diminishing returns with Claude releases, and we know the open models are closing the gap (~6 months behind according to the benchmarks). And when the pitch is "our models are 5% better but cost $200/mo.. also here's a mountain of restrictions" it just won't make sense anymore. Give it a year or two. I could see the "avoid the hardship of running a local model for $20/mo" angle but Ant…

>and we know the open models are closing the gap (~6 months behind according to the benchmarks).

Looking at just the benchmarks might be misleading: https://x.com/scaling01/status/2050616057191072161

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#77

Post by davidw »

afavour wrote: post #36
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.

If it continues to be a numbers game - the more resources you throw at it, the better it is - then on-device is always going to be not as good. I guess it might be good enough for some uses?

I kind of loathe the move away from a world where we could control our own computers and run our own software on them.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#78

Post by parliament32 »

gruez wrote: post #75
parliament32 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today, sure. But we already see diminishing returns with Claude releases, and we know the open models are closing the gap (~6 months behind according to the benchmarks). And when the pitch is "our models are 5% better but cost $200/mo.. also here's a mountain of restrictions" it just won't make sense anymore. Give it a year or two. I could see the "avoid the hardship of running a local model for $20/mo" angle but Ant…

>and we know the open models are closing the gap (~6 months behind according to the benchmarks). Looking at just the benchmarks might be misleading: https://x.com/scaling01/status/2050616057191072161

Good article. But it concludes with "Open models may be only 4–5 months behind on coding-heavy, benchmark-visible tasks... the gap is likely much larger and closer to 8 months."

So, fine. In 2024, being 8 months behind was massive. In 2025, pretty big. This year.. I guess CC has improved a bit between October and now? How much do you think it'll matter a few more years down the line?

Even now.. I bet a non-trivial number of people would happily be 8 months behind just to avoid another rent-seeker. And this will only get worse over time, which makes it an unwinnable situation for Anthropic. Hence all the panicked flailing about with restricting tooling and trying to get something even resembling a moat.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#79

Post by 0gs »

adampunk wrote: post #48
0gs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, j…

oh i think i agree, with the economics tech companies (all companies, really) and their users currently accept/demand.

but if caring about and solving customer problems was an actual income driver for a company, it could be very different.

i don't think that's going to happen, because i think most users (like Anthropic's) will continue to refuse to pay >$0 for support -- or to claim that their subscription payment should somehow also cover support, which is ridiculous, since they can see with their own "eyes" how little support their "compute subscription" gets them -- and thus companies will continue to invest ~$0, if not less, in meaningful support models.

it still blows my mind that nobody is willing to try charging people an extra $20 a month for unlimited support calls. most customers are DESPERATE for people to talk to about their problems.

instead, they all just try to winnow the cost down as low as possible, and then point to the expense to explain the degradation of service.

Re: The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

#80

Post by 0gs »

adampunk wrote: post #48
0gs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, j…

also, remember that MOST of those "billion users" generally don't have problems that require product support expertise every day. if each of them were still paying a retainer for access to high-touch support, all kinds of crazy fun stuff would be possible.
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