If your competitor can put out a model that functions really similarly to yours for $2 less per month, and your entire userbase can just leave and move to them… explain to me why investors would want to pump hundreds of billions into your business to be ‘first to market’? That’s a really dumb thing to admit for Anthropic.
Who is ‘first to 100 million users’ is utterly irrelevant under a business model where your sole value is Intellectual Property (IP) and that IP can be “illicitly extracted” by a clever competitor without ever hacking into your nextwork or doing anything explicitly illegal.
I’ve had to explain this to a lot of people who seem to think Anthropic/OpenAI are incredibly valuable companies because “they’ll make money long-term so long as they keep being pumped full of it investment cash to be the first to earn a big userbase”, but that just doesn’t make sense. OpenAI owns no datacenters…zero. Theyre 100% IP. Anthropic “is building” some datacenters, but they exist on paper only so far, so they’re also presently 100% IP.
Can this obvious scam just collapse already so I can upgrade my PC without a personal loan?
I think your take is completely reasonable but I think the ‘first to 100 million users’ is actually noteworthy because if they can become entrenched and people become unwilling to learn anything else, they’ve won and can charge nearly whatever the fuck they want (at least in the medium term). See Microsoft and Adobe. They charge whatever they want for their subscription programs because what else are you going to do, use GIMP? Even in situations where the FLOSS alternative is legitimately good, a lot of people will still refuse to switch. I don’t think Anthropic can survive long enough for them to become the only thing Susan from HR knows or is willing to use, but I think there’s a path to profit somewhere here.
Yeah this is a key realization that I suspect most investors aren’t privy to. With proven viable local, accessible, scalable, and energy-efficient 2TB infiniband clusters and routed multi-agentic stacks of open source models constantly nipping at their heals, achieving longterm market dominance for any of these AI developers is simply a tenuous prospect.
The only legitimate option is to maintain a meaningful lead at the cutting edge of performance and/or offer a superior efficiency/value proposition via SLA guarantees. Beyond that, the brute force options are limited to things like short-term market manipulation (such as outbidding everyone else for existing talent pool, chip manufacturing capacity, etc) or suppression of competition via regulatory capture.
In every case, above or below board, there is no permanent longterm global breakaway strategy, only treading water as long as investors are willing to inject enough funds to temporarily outrun market efficiency.
That’s not exactly true. The implementation details around context management matter to the user a use case. It’s totally feasible for providers to go into different directions, especially if they’re hoping to target different subsections of the same market.
Except Microsoft and Adobe never bankrupted a company by getting adopted. It was a tax that companies could afford since they were still rounding errors compared to labor.
If the adoption of a tech can be measured as being roughly equal to higher than the labor expense of a company, that decision isn’t going to be dictated by what Susan in HR knows.
If your competitor can put out a model that functions really similarly to yours for $2 less per month, and your entire userbase can just leave and move to them… explain to me why investors would want to pump hundreds of billions into your business to be ‘first to market’? That’s a really dumb thing to admit for Anthropic.
Who is ‘first to 100 million users’ is utterly irrelevant under a business model where your sole value is Intellectual Property (IP) and that IP can be “illicitly extracted” by a clever competitor without ever hacking into your nextwork or doing anything explicitly illegal.
I’ve had to explain this to a lot of people who seem to think Anthropic/OpenAI are incredibly valuable companies because “they’ll make money long-term so long as they keep being pumped full of it investment cash to be the first to earn a big userbase”, but that just doesn’t make sense. OpenAI owns no datacenters…zero. Theyre 100% IP. Anthropic “is building” some datacenters, but they exist on paper only so far, so they’re also presently 100% IP.
Can this obvious scam just collapse already so I can upgrade my PC without a personal loan?
I think your take is completely reasonable but I think the ‘first to 100 million users’ is actually noteworthy because if they can become entrenched and people become unwilling to learn anything else, they’ve won and can charge nearly whatever the fuck they want (at least in the medium term). See Microsoft and Adobe. They charge whatever they want for their subscription programs because what else are you going to do, use GIMP? Even in situations where the FLOSS alternative is legitimately good, a lot of people will still refuse to switch. I don’t think Anthropic can survive long enough for them to become the only thing Susan from HR knows or is willing to use, but I think there’s a path to profit somewhere here.
I’d argue that agentic AI by nature makes transition to a different model easy.
Yeah this is a key realization that I suspect most investors aren’t privy to. With proven viable local, accessible, scalable, and energy-efficient 2TB infiniband clusters and routed multi-agentic stacks of open source models constantly nipping at their heals, achieving longterm market dominance for any of these AI developers is simply a tenuous prospect.
The only legitimate option is to maintain a meaningful lead at the cutting edge of performance and/or offer a superior efficiency/value proposition via SLA guarantees. Beyond that, the brute force options are limited to things like short-term market manipulation (such as outbidding everyone else for existing talent pool, chip manufacturing capacity, etc) or suppression of competition via regulatory capture.
In every case, above or below board, there is no permanent longterm global breakaway strategy, only treading water as long as investors are willing to inject enough funds to temporarily outrun market efficiency.
Once that reality sinks in… pop.
There’s nothing to “learn”. Using one of these is in no way different than using the other.
Unless you start using fancy little features that let you do things the others don’t do quite as well.
No, because any cool feature will be immediatelly replicated everywhere.
This isn’t a real product. Just bullshit generator.
That’s not exactly true. The implementation details around context management matter to the user a use case. It’s totally feasible for providers to go into different directions, especially if they’re hoping to target different subsections of the same market.
Except Microsoft and Adobe never bankrupted a company by getting adopted. It was a tax that companies could afford since they were still rounding errors compared to labor.
If the adoption of a tech can be measured as being roughly equal to higher than the labor expense of a company, that decision isn’t going to be dictated by what Susan in HR knows.