And somehow instead of prosecuting the lead in all areas, they got all hubristic and sloppy and just failed to iterate on the core product, while also failing to respond quickly when Anthropic showed that coding agents are the flywheel that makes the whole company faster.

It’s like they thought they had an unassailable monopoly and speedran to the lazy incumbent position, all in a matter of months.

Interesting, so there are a lot of people still eager to invest in valuations of well greater than a-quarter-trillion, but OpenAI's latest raise has sucked up all the oxygen for enthusiasm of that valuation going even higher.

Which could be a "dumb money" move ("competitor number lower, already-big-number is scary") or a "smart money" move ("Anthropic is gaining position-wise, and currently is lower valued, let's bet on the one we think is better positioned") or some mix of both.

OpenAI just raised a shit-ton so clearly there is plenty of money out there who don't think there's a bubble or even a blown opportunity there. But the wider community doesn't think they have the competition in the bag, while still being willing to invest in big-AI-cos at absolutely enormous valuations.

If local hardware/models get good enough to take 80%-90% of what people use subscriptions for today... hoo boy. Big-AI is a bet I wouldn't be confident placing billions on. Unless your horizon is more "wait for IPO or next raise or positive news, then get out ASAP" than "hold for 5+ years."

The Chinese models are catching up in quality while being a fraction of the price. The market will speak, how many devices that contributed to this thread were made in the USA?

Sure you can argue the Chinese companies are heavily subsidized, but no major LLM lab is remotely close to making a profit this decade.

Then shortly after Codex was released which made that more accessible and instantly preferred that compared to Code since much more generous allotments for $20 plan. Claude constantly kept hitting. And Code actually had a more robust UI and was more accurate when doing the same project side by side vs Claude Code.

But imagine many haven't tried Codex recently since all we hear about is Claude Code. So while they may have momentum, at least for me with no stake in the game, Codex finding far better, but I suppose that could all change again on a whim.

As a small business owner whose team is entirely in Google Workspace (Drive, Gmail, Chat -- so inbuilt RAG right there), I wonder if Gemini will be the darkhorse. As a user Gemini's a distinct third in "AI smarts", but most business owners aren't power users who are gonna setup Codex or Code to slurp up their work emails and internal docs/SOPs.

The article feels a touch clickbait-y since people love a good fight between the top players and OAI's lost a buncha public goodwill over the past year.

> large gap between OpenAI’s $852-billion valuation and Anthropic’s $380 billion

IIRC Anthropic's revenue is either roughly at parity with or larger than OpenAI's, and Anthropic is growing faster[1]. All indicators are that Anthropic should be worth more than OpenAI. Given that, one could reasonably expect the relative valuations to change a great deal. In any case, it's not clear why OpenAI would command such a price premium over Anthropic.

1 - OpenAI says they are doing $2B/mo run rate https://openai.com/index/accelerating-the-next-phase-ai/

Anthropic's run rate increased from $12B to $19B in the period between February 12 and the end of the month. If the implied growth rates held through March, Anthropic may well be larger than OpenAI now.

I’ve been primarily on Claude for the last 6 months or so, but have been hitting rate limits. I switched work to Codex seamlessly, just like I could switch to any other provider seamlessly

What’s interesting is that they’re both still losing money on their models and are essentially giving away compute for free, although lossy.

They’ve bought up computing power and are now renting it back to the rest of us, with a decent HMI, while subsidising us to use it.

ChatGPT's chat quality has recently dropped hard. While Claude is pricier, it actually takes the effort to think through complex tasks.

All the while, Chinese models are providing cheaper alternatives.

“We literally couldn’t find anyone in our pool of hundreds of institutional investors to take these shares“

This doesn’t bode well for an IPO. The market is smelling a stinker.

Get your popcorn ready for a mad scramble to salvage investments if indeed the shark has been jumped.

I'm inclined to think there isn't much of an association becauss investors don't seem very concerned with morality, but I know ~dozen developers that either switched to, or started using Claude in the past month or so, while not knowing anyone that uses Codex.