Anthropic is not in the model business. They were smart and they are building productivity ecosystem business. Look at what claude artifacts are doing now -- inline multi-user editing, comments that users and/or models can respond and take action on, import/export from all common formats. It's at least a Google Docs killer if not an M365 killer.

And claude code as a harness and skill/plugin/mcp ecosystem is far more valuable than any one model.

And coward for long-running tasks, though they're slipping on that one because they're really trying hard not to make Claude an assistant. We'll see if they react to Muse and change course.

But the Chinese free-weight models? Not a competitor. If/when those companies (or others) build vertically integrated productivity stacks on those free models, then we'll talk. Microsoft certainly saw that opportunity but couldn't get out of their own way and are basically roadkill at this point.

I have a hard time believing that making “a really good harness” justifies pre-ordering half the world’s GPU compute for years in advance.

>Anthropic is not in the model business. They were smart and they are building productivity ecosystem business... It's at least a Google Docs killer if not an M365 killer.

Google Workspace revenues are something like $25bn/q, and that's the entire workspace division, (including enterprise gmail sales, so the productivity suite is meaningfully smaller than that figure). It's taken Google a long time to carve that slice out of Microsoft's entrenched market position. It's not small money, but they'd basically be going to war with two of the largest and most profitable companies in history on their turf.

I don't think they can credibly take that business plan to the market and say it'll be worth $1.75tn. They're all-or-nothing on being in the model business, and everything else is superfluous.

>claude code

The same one that leaked itself a few months ago?

I mean, a lot of people before them were "not in the model business" (Cursor et al) and it seems they got disintermediated by the model companies. Step 1 is still to have the best model, or hope for model progress to taper out.