A couple of points.

First, it does not really reflect my experience. I find modern models to be largely interchangeable when it comes to common software engineering tasks, including some of the more recent open weight ones. The strongest models become interesting for Ph.D. level of work for me, which is not something I deal with regularly anymore.

None of them are perfect; they all have their strengths and shortcomings, but I can reasonably work with all of them and it honestly doesn't matter much anymore. I do sometimes wonder what exactly people are doing to see such a difference; at a minimum, their workflows must be very different from mine.

Second, you're arguing based on subscription pricing. But Anthropic makes the bulk of its revenue (and has its biggest margins) from enterprise/API pricing, where they are the most expensive provider by far. Anthropic isn't going to make a lot of money off your $20 subscription. With a subscription, you currently get more usage per dollar out of Anthropic's than OpenAI's plans, which approximately offsets the difference in API pricing.

You're admitting the problem here, anthropic needs revenue to keep growing and growing, yet you're already settled into a willingness to pay of only $20/month as probably a fairly ideal customer, bigger better models just aren't valuable to most people at the price they need to be to make the money back.

If some later version of Deepseek had the capability as Opus 5.5, would you use Opus?

What many of us experienced this year is that Fable 5 and Opus 5.5 are good enough and future model improvements may have diminishing returns even if benchmarks improve.

I’m very excited for smarter models but what I really want now is not capability but speed, cost and open weights.

The history of tech is one where “good enough” beats “best in class” nearly every time. Anthropic’s whole business plan is that for reasons they can’t explain this time “best” is what matters.

All indications are the models are increasingly worth less and less and rapidly approaching zero. Even worse, everyone is rapidly shifting to “router” architecture where they switch models constantly. LLMs are perhaps the least sticky product in the history of tech.

The only money to be made is selling compute to run models on. The only real out I see for Anthropic is if somehow compute becomes so constrained that they can flip to sell all their committed compute at a markup to run commodity models. Absent something like that it would appear they don’t have a viable business plan. As many have been pointing out, they casually left Q3 off their charts. Put that back in and suddenly the charts look very worrisome.

Ngl, I've been on Opus 5.5 but had to switch to open for a while. DSv4/Minimax 3.1 were pretty damn good/comparable. Definitely not the same but completely servicable.

I do a similar thing with 6.1 Sol. I find it pretty comparable to Opus 5.5 in many ways.

Anthropic does not make money if everyone is like you, spending $20/m on their SOTA model and are happy. That sounds very commoditized to me.

this conversation happens over and over every 6 weeks. It is absolutely a commoditized product. The models are getting better but they're _all_ getting better. GPT beats Claude beats Gemini. Then open models distill them at cheaper prices, etc.

This is great for us, but that behavior is the behavior of a commoditized product.

Eh, we have cursor at work with most of the top models and I switch regularly. I went from Claude to sol 5.6 and preferred its prose. Then my work took away the frontier models because they want to see if we can get by on cheaper models. I using Gemini Astra now because it’s discounted and it’s 90% of sol level and completely functional for planning and coding. Some coworkers are using muse coding, some Kimi and glm. Everyone is still producing code. I don’t think it’s a real moat as in you don’t have other options or switching models is actually a difficult process

"Yahoo! is the best search engine, and I cant imagine anyone making anything better."

Yes it is a newer business but doesn’t change the fact that models are trending towards a commodity. And that’s a huge problem for the business model on offer.

Its already commoditized. Thats why things like OpenRouter are useful and successful because it lets you route inference at the click of a button between different providers after balancing cost and availability. Exactly how commodities behave.

Selling subscription productivity tools is a business that has existed for decades if not centuries. Just because their product is new does not mean their business is.

> Anthropic is in a business that didn't exist 3 years ago.

but it's already commoditized.

And is already commoditizing. If not already commoditized

Someone should do the same thing Karen Hao did for OpenAI with the furniture costs of their office, if Anthropic's HQ decoration and office equipment value stops growing then we start worrying

This is hilarious lol

Nobody was saying subleasing offices wasn’t a business. It was just WeWork’s setup that was untenable and ultimately insolvent.

Similarly nobody is saying AI can’t be a successful business, but here too the big labs have dug themselves into a giant hole such that a bankruptcy reset may ultimately be the only way out of it. Time will tell.

and are much much smaller than they were at IPO

EBITDA profitable is not a substantial vote of confidence.

Well every startup plays the game of “we’re profitable if you ignore all the reasons why we’re not profitable.”

GAAP isn’t perfect, but it exists for a reason.

Shorting a company is not a trade against the future of a company, it is a trade against the market. You can know a company is going to zero and the company can go to zero and you can still lose your shirt from shorting it.

A lot of people will, if this IPO actually happens. But as is frequently pointed out a short is a market bet not a bet against the company and the market remains wild and irrational. You can be right about the company ultimately failing and still lose your shirt on a short.

However the price of CDS on bonds is already a strong market indication of where the market thinks all of this is heading. And none of that looks good if you’re betting on the AI exuberance continuing.

When you've got companies like Tesla valued at what they're valued at. Shorting is pretty dumb.

Shorting is not the only way to protect yourself from a bad investment.

You can simply not buy shares in companies you think are on a doomed trajectory.

That said, depending on the IPO target price, I might short it.