Coding assistants won't win this game. They sure will win the hearts of developers, but to scale you need mass adoption and products for which users want to pay substantially. OpenAI is falling behind in the small features in their chat and app offering and have failed to innovate in their expensive offerings.

Codex btw is getting very competitive. It is fast and no longer far behind.

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nayroclade 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The strategic playbook of the web era said: Get a huge userbase of normies, then figure out how to monetise them (usually via advertising). OpenAI stumbled into the userbase via ChatGPT, but it's unclear if the strategy or the economics apply to AI. Anthropic tried to compete in the consumer market, but couldn't, so focussed on coding and enterprise, and it looks like that's actually turning into a smart choice, at least right now, because it turns out people will pay subscription costs for agents that do their job for them.

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chromacity 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are three possible paths that sort of substantiate current valuations:

1) Business: LLMs become essential to every company, and you become rich by selling the best enterprise tools to everyone.

2) Consumer: LLMs cannibalize search and a good chunk of the internet, so people end up interacting with your AI assistant instead of opening any websites. You start serving ads and take Google's lunch.

3) Superhuman AGI: you beat everyone else to the punch to build a life form superior to humans, this doesn't end up in a disaster, and you then steal underpants, ???, profit.

Anthropic is clearly betting on #1. Google decided to beat everyone else to #2, and they can probably do it better and more cheaply than others because of their existing infra and the way they're plugged into people's digital lives. And OpenAI... I guess banked on #3 and this is perhaps looking less certain now?

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phist_mcgee 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But will they pay the unsubsidized cost when anthropic needs to turn a profit?

	▲	igtt 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And they actually can’t increase the price much. Token generation is the metric Jensen Huang keeps pushing to temper analysts, which also affect nvidia’s future expected cash flows of course. If increasing the price causes that metric to drop, the whole narrative falls apart and fear will spread in the stock market. They’re all racing very close to the edge. Some closer than others.

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igtt 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The reality is given how much OAI has raised, they have to get to a place where they are doing insane revenues…

We’re talking on the level of meta, google and probably more if they keep raising money.

They really went all in with hubris and they’re gonna get punished eventually.

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7e 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Agents increase the velocity of OpenAI and Anthropic; whomever has the best in-house agent moves the quickest.

	▲	maxnevermind 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Any publicly available evidence to back that up? There have been post-exit blog posts from OpenAI employees on HN before and it did sound like the only black magic they use there is that many employees work 16 hrs a day during launch of new features. I know that some current Claude Code devs are doing interviews where they claim that they use Claude Code extensively but they clearly have a conflict of interest while they are still employed at Anthropic, so it would be like asking a barber if you need a haircut.