Modern tupperware party.

A colleague was convinced Claude is better so we played a game. We used the claude code and codex harness and I implemented some prs they needed with gpt5.5 and opus4.7 and asked them to identify which came from which only from the code.

Couldn’t tell.

Edit: i bet 99% of people here, if presented with a test where i gave 5 models but all of the results came from one, would not be able to discern this. Just vibes all the way down.

Frontier models being commoditize is inevitable. OpenAI thinks they're still competing on technology, and not user experience and market reputation otherwise they'd understand the continuous negative PR generated by Altman's chaos is going to cost them everything.

Anthropic capitalized upon a brief window of being more code-focused, which turned into enterprize contracts.

Then on renewal rug-pulled those same enterprises - going from your seat includes all the usage a user would reasonably need, to being you pay for the seat + all tokens at API pricing. (Which they raised by how many times in a year? I don't know the actual number.)

Revenue spikes like crazy through basically hostage taking made possible by Sonnet 3.5 era sentiment + enterprise purchasing lag.

Parlay the revenue spike into the valuation.

Crazy. Those same enterprises will get sticker shock and leave. Absurd short-term thinking.

OpenAI is the better company (transparency, open sourcing things, how they handle things in general e.g. OpenClaw, how they compete, etc.) and they have the vastly better brand, the better consumer presence, and (for me and many others) they have the better coding app + models.

Anthropic doing deeply customer hostile stuff - again and again - to produce a short term revenue spike does NOT make for a long-term sustainable business.

For such a young business to have such a long history of bait-and-switch is absolutely crazy. (Raising prices repeatedly, lowering rate-limits repeatedly, changing the terms, banning calls which contain "OpenClaw", turning on their IDE partners, turning on their enterprise partners.)

AFAICT anyone who's ever shown faith in Anthropic has been immediately exploited by them to some degree. They will quickly get the reputation of being "the Oracle of AI companies".

I wouldn't even value them at half of OpenAI.

Not saying that’s right or wrong, but it’s clearly a factor holding OpenAI back at this point.

I was cracking up. I'm 5'7 on a good day. I feel like that's how valuation works. We are propping up five foot tall giants.

Upshot - poetry expertise does not seem to be the primary focus these days, perhaps to the detriment of the entire world. We did move on from training scaling to “test time” scaling (which I hate as a name btw), Ilya does not seem to have been needed, (although I am really curious what he’s building).

My prediction that you want to be deeply embedded and really rich and part of global infrastructure feels good. My suggestion that oAI / MS would be able to use the lead in 2024 to extend was wrong.

Neither of us talked much about coding as a product that would drive value and behavior, which is super interesting to me, we were probably six months from seeing real competence of any sort there way back in June 2024.

We both seemed to think there would be a single breakout company, or could be one, (although I did suggest buying the basket), clearly not the case with GOOG oAI and Anthropic all posting serious revenues this last quarter / year.

One area of Anthropic that was nascent in 2024, but that I have come to think is super valuable is their mechinterp group. I still don’t see work done by other labs (at least published) to nearly the quality of Anthropic. And the group has clearly moved into a period of productivity; there’s a good chance in my mind it could provide a truly enduring strategic advantage as a tool to be used by the taste makers steering the ship. In 2024, interpretability seemed almost impossible to get a handle on — today, the sustained chipping away at the problem makes a lot more look possible.

They'll kill us all, or they'll kill each other. They sure as hell ain't making the world a better place, like they promised.

And here’s the core tension. The models keep getting better. GPT 5.5 improved. But it also got more expensive. Opus 4.7 to 4.8 has become outrageously priced too, up 50%, and 4.6 was already brutally expensive to begin with. API pricing is a real pain.

What’s missing is any meaningful supply of affordable, democratically priced models you can actually embed into your own service. For me that’s playcode.io, whether it’s the website builder or the app builder. The moment we give users access to these models, the cost becomes a serious blocker. There’s no way around it.

The same dynamic explains Cursor. Why did they go build their own Composer 2.5 model? Because relying on third-party models is simply too expensive for users unless they’re carrying a Claude Code or Codex subscription. So Cursor had to roll their own. It’s a real mess, honestly.

And Chinese models don’t close the gap either. They’ve improved, the free-tier ones especially, which is great to see. But the limitations are significant:

• No multimodality. They don’t accept image input. • You can’t attach a screenshot, show a UI, or hand it a PDF. • They feel heavily stripped down overall. • They’re just not polished. Not even close.

Opus, by contrast, feels like a finished, deeply refined product. Everything else is still rough around the edges. And that’s exactly why Anthropic can charge what they charge: because they actually deliver. That’s the whole problem in a sentence.

One day one feels better than the other. Then, by the end of the day, the other feels better than the first. I have no idea why.

I still don’t have a favorite.

In the end, I think both are incredibly useful when I take the time to instruct them properly.

The problems come when I let them run wild.

Doubling down on coding was just infinitely smarter. Has there actually been a successful company which uses AI images and video effectively?

UPD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazinform

Of course every AI company has been over promising and pumping the numbers as much as possible but OpenAI has been hitting the reality wall more because both their people not being able to keep improving at a faster rate and their whole cost structure and financial plates spinning.

This doesn't invalidate the fact Anthropic is also overhyped to the max for their IPO.

The chutzpah is remarkable.

> The new valuation is nearly three times higher than the company’s February valuation, when Anthropic was estimated to be worth around $380 billion.

> In March, OpenAI was valued at $852 billion following a record $122 billion funding round.

Basically, today (Late May) we're declaring Anthropic the most valuable. They've nearly tripled in value since February. But also, OpenAI was $852B in March and presumably has grown since then.

In a few weeks we'll either have a new rounding of funding for OpenAI or they'll announce their IPO and the hype train will be abuzz that they're now the most valuable.

Stealing peoples tokens because you use a product they don't like... That shows the morals they have. Actions speak louder than words. Disabling peoples caches because they disable telemetry was another juicy one that I don't believe is on this site. In fact there are far more I remember that aren't even listed here.

Like actually iterating hard to make them useful. Many, many details matter here.

I haven't tested the similar OpenAI/Google tools in detail lately though. Previously I found them way too generic and unpolished to be useful.

Is there something to this?

These are the new .net developers who will know nothing but c# for 20 years.

OpenAI. Spent its resources on AGI whilst Claude worked on making programming work.

Google Gemini is out of the race entirely its programming AI is a joke.

What I find fascinating is how many inside the bubble defend this for no other reason than they think they're personally going to make their bag out of AI. You're not Sam Altman. Or Elon Musk. Or Jeff Bezos. And you're not going to be.

What's going to happen is that in a few years the sky-high AI salaries are also going to disappear. More work will be done by fewer people in this space too. And only then will many people change their tune because the rising waters have finally reached them.