Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other than, you know, terms and contracts.
But that's a completely different story, no? Cutting off Windsurf has nothing to do with enforcing that T&C.
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Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
91–100 of 117 posts
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think I was ignoring your points. I thought I was replying very specifically to them, to be honest, and providing very specific arguments. Arguments that you, by the way, did not respond to in any way here, beyond calling them "[you] don't even know what". That seems quite rude, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe if you could name one of those potential opportunities, it'd help ground the discu…
> But why? In the world you're positing where these queries are sold at negative margins and don't provide any other tangible benefit (i.e. cannot be used for training), the provider would be even better off not serving those queries. Or, more likely, they'd raise prices such that this traffic has positive margins, and they receive just enough for optimal batching. ... But scale from these specific workloads is only…
Maybe this is the disconnect for the token side: you seem to think they can't keep improving the margin to reach profitability. They are static and it will just get worse, not better.
I think deepseek instead just showed they haven't really bothered yet. They rather focus on growing, and capital is cheap enough for these firms that optimizing margins is relatively distracting. Obviously they do optimize, but probably not at the expense of velocity and growth.
And if they do seriously want to tackle margins, they should pull a groq/Google and go aggressively deep. Ex: fab something. Which... They do indeed fund raise on.
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#93[deleted]
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#94This seems pretty reasonable to me. I don't really understand why Windsurf, owned by OpenAI (allegedly), should expect to have API access to their main competitor's API. People can still bring their own key and use whatever models they want in that way.
It doesn't make sense and the co-founder is being an intentionally crappy communicator. He's trying to paint it as removing access to something everyone gets by default, but in reality it's removing special treatment that they were previously giving Windsurf. The default Anthropic rate limit tiers don't support something Windsurf sized, and right now getting increased rate limits outside of their predefined tiers is…
> Earlier this week, Windsurf said that Anthropic cut its direct access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.7 Sonnet, two of the more popular AI models for coding, forcing the startup to find third-party computing providers on relatively short notice. Windsurf said it was disappointed in Anthropic’s decision and that it might cause short-term instability for users trying to access Claude via Windsurf.
As a Windsurf user, maybe Sonnet 3.x models are slower right now, but they don't require BYOK like 4 does. So this is a bit of an exaggeration, isn't it? Anthropic did not cut them off, they seem to have continued honoring existing quota on previous agreements.
What did Windsurf think was going to happen with this particular exit? Also, how embarrassing is this for OpenAI that it's even a big deal?
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But why? In the world you're positing where these queries are sold at negative margins and don't provide any other tangible benefit (i.e. cannot be used for training), the provider would be even better off not serving those queries. Or, more likely, they'd raise prices such that this traffic has positive margins, and they receive just enough for optimal batching. ... But scale from these specific workloads is only…
Maybe this is the disconnect for the token side: you seem to think they can't keep improving the margin to reach profitability. They are static and it will just get worse, not better. I think deepseek instead just showed they haven't really bothered yet. They rather focus on growing, and capital is cheap enough for these firms that optimizing margins is relatively distracting. Obviously they do optimize, but probably…
No, it feels more like the disconnect is that I think they're all compute-limited and you maybe don't? Almost every flop they use to serve a query at a loss is a flop they didn't use for training, research, or for queries that would have given them data to enable better training.
Like, yes, if somebody has 100k H100s and are only able to find a use for 10k of them, they'd better find some scale fast; and if that scale comes from increasing inference workloads by 10x, there's going to be efficiencies to be found. But I don't think anyone has an abundance of compute. If you've instead got 100k H100s but demand for 300k, you need to be making tradeoffs. I think loss-making paid inference is fairly obviously the worst way to allocate the compute, so I don't think anyone is doing it at scale.
> I think deepseek instead just showed they haven't really bothered yet.
I think they've all cared about aggressively optimizing for inference costs, though to varying levels of success. Even if they're still in a phase where they literally do not care about the P&L, cheaper costs are highly likely to also mean higher throughput. Getting more throughput from the same amount of hardware is valuable for all their use cases, so I can't see how it couldn't be a priority, even if the improved margins are just a side effect.
(This does seem like an odd argument for you to make, given you've so far been arguing that of course these companies are selling at a loss to get more scale so that they can get better margins.)
> - You are hyper fixated on tokens, and not that owning a large % of distribution lets them sell other things . Eg, instead of responding to my point 2 here, you are again talking about token margin. Apple doesn't have to make money on transistors when they have a 30% tax on most app spend in the US.
I did not engage with that argument because it seemed like a sidetrack from the topic at hand (which was very specifically the unit economics of inference). Expanding the scope will make convergence less likely, not more.
There's a very good reason all the labs are offering unmonetized consumer products despite losing a bundle on those products, but that reason has nothing at all to do with whether inference when it is being paid for is profitable or not. They're totally different products with different market dynamics. Yes, OpenAI owning the ChatGPT distribution channel is vastly valuable for them long-term, which is why they're prioritizing growth over monetization. That growth is going to be sticky in a way that APIs can't be.
Thanks, good discussion.
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#96Wow excited for when Anthropic buys Cursor in a couple months and I get locked out of using OpenAI models with it. This is depressing. I just want stuff to work.
Why would they when Claude Code is night and day better? It makes Cursor look like a joke in my experience.
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#97These are two different products. It's like SpaceX launching satellites for competitive satellite internet services. They didn't care that they were providing launch capabilities for a competitor and neither should Anthropic. What if Apple stopped allowing you to use an iPhone if you worked at Google?
Another way this isn't comparable is that the training data is critical for the services each provides. Seeing answers Claude gives (at scale, for free) would be a huge competitive advantage to OpenAI, whereas Apple Mail seeing the email you send via Gmail wouldn't convey any competitive advantage in email, for example.
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#98Wow excited for when Anthropic buys Cursor in a couple months and I get locked out of using OpenAI models with it. This is depressing. I just want stuff to work.
Void is basically the same thing, but open source and better. It's easy to use with any provider API key, even LM Studio for local models. You can use it with free models available from OpenRouter to try it out, but the quality of output is just as dependent on the model as any other solution. https://voideditor.com/ https://github.com/voideditor/void
People like Windsurf and Cursor because they offer them a flatrate.
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems odd to me, I don't expect bakery to reject selling me a bread this morning, because I started working in another bakery nearby.
This is more like about cutting you off reselling their bread, which would be reasonable.
By this logic NVIDIA should cut off Claude, because Claude is reselling their GPU hours, when NVIDIA itself can do it.
IMHO, there are 3 types of products in current LLM space (excluding hardware):
* Model makers - OpenAI, Claude, Gemini
* Infra makers - Groq, together.ai and etc
* Product makers - Cursor, Windsurf and others
Re: Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally irrelevant, Anthropic isn’t cutting off OpenAI, it is cutting off Windsurf users.
Windsurf users can still plug their own Anthropic key and continue using the models. It’s Windsurf subscribers (eg OpenAI customers) that use the models through the Windsurf service (through their servers as proxy, that’s now OpenAI) are getting cut off I don’t see how this is irrelevant. Windsurf is a first party product of their most direct competitor. Imagine a car company integrating the cloud tech of a different…
Exactly, it's like car manufacturers cutting off Android because Google own Waymo. The only people that pay are the consumers.