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It’s crazy how Anthropic keeps coming up with sticky “so simple it seems obvious” product innovations and OpenAI plays catch up. MCP is barely a protocol. Skill
by extr 10mo ago
It’s crazy how Anthropic keeps coming up with sticky “so simple it seems obvious” product innovations and OpenAI plays catch up. MCP is barely a protocol. Skills are just md files. But they seem to have a knack for framing things in a way that just makes sense.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoThe RSS of AI
- uoaei 10mo agoI like this line of analogy. The next obvious step would be IRC (or microservices?) of AI (for co-reasoning) which could offer the space for specialized LLMs rather than the current approach of monoliths.
- jbgt 10mo agoOh wow conreasoning through an IRC like chat. That's a great idea. Would be cool (sci fi) for LLMs of different users to chat and discuss approaches to what the humans are talking about etc.
- exe34 10mo agoomg that's how crystal society starts and then it goes downhill! highly recommended series in this space.
- robrenaud 10mo agoThey are the LLM whisperers. In the same way Nagel knew what it was like to be a bat, Anthropic has the highest fraction of people who approximately know what it's like to be a frontier ai model.
- uoaei 10mo agoIt's surprising to me that Anthropic's CEO is the only one getting real recognition for their advances. The people around him seem to be as or more crucial for their mission.
- blueblisters 10mo agoAmanda Askell, Sholto Douglas have somewhat of a fan following on twitter
- adastra22 10mo agoThat’s always the case.
- ACCount37 10mo agoIs that really true? I can name OpenAI CEO but not Anthropic CEO off the top of my head. And I actually like Anthropic's work way more than what OpenAI is doing right now.
- uoaei 10mo agoPick up the newest edition of Time.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo agoHuh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
- gabaix 10mo agoNagel's point is that he could not know what it was like to be a bat.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- extr 10mo agoOh yeah I forgot the biggest one. Claude fucking code. Lol
- baby 10mo agoI was very skeptical about anything not OpenAI for a while, and then discovered Claude code, Anthropic blogposts, etc. It's basically the coolest company in the field.
- mh- 10mo agoClaude Code and its ecosystem is what made me pick Anthropic over OpenAI for our engineers, when we decided to do seat licensing for everyone last week. It's a huge asset.
- skeptic_ai 10mo agoSame here. Until I read more about them and actually seem sketchy too. All about “safety” reasons not to do certain things.
- joemazerino 10mo agoI appreciate Claude not training on my data by default. ChatGPT through the browser does not give you that option.
- lacy_tinpot 10mo agoTheir name is Anthropic. Their entire schtick is a weird humanization of AIs. MCP/Tool use, Skills, and I'm sure others that I can't think of. This is might be because of some core direction that is more coherent than other labs.
- JoshuaDavid 10mo ago... I am pretty sure that the name "Anthropic" is as in "principle" not as in "pertaining to human beings".
- GlitchInstitute 10mo agoanthropic is derived from the Greek word anthropos (human) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
- yunohn 10mo agoReally? Anthropic is /the/ AI company known for anthropomorphizing their models, giving them ethics and “souls”, considering their existential crises, etc.
- JoshuaDavid 10mo agoAnthropic was founded by a group of 7 former OpenAI employees who left over differences in opinions about AI Safety. I do not see any public documentation that the specific difference in opinion was that that group thought that OpenAI was too focused on scaling and that there needed to be a purely safety-focused org that still scaled, though that is my impression based on conversations I've had. But regardless anthropic reasoning was extremely in the intellectual water supply of the Anthropic founders, and they explicitly were not aiming at producing a human-like model.
- simonw 10mo agoThey tried to fire Sam Altman and left to form their own company when that didn't work. https://simonwillison.net/2023/Nov/22/before-altmans-ouster-openais-board-was-divided-and-feuding/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Nov/22/before-altmans-ouster-...
- nl 10mo agoAlso `CLAUDE.md` (which is `AGENTS.md` everywhere? else now)
- altmanaltman 10mo ago> https://www.anthropic.com/news/donating-the-model-context-protocol-and-establishing-of-the-agentic-ai-foundation https://www.anthropic.com/news/donating-the-model-context-pr... This is a prime example of what you're saying. Creating a "foundation" for a protocol created an year ago that's not even a protocol Has the Gavin Belson tecthics energy
- beng-nl 10mo agoTethics, Denpok.
- sigmoid10 10mo agoAnthropic is in a bit of a rough spot if you look at the raw data points we have available. Their valuation is in the same order of magnitude as OpenAI, but they have orders of magnitude fewer users. And current leaderboards for famous unsolved benchmarks like ARC AGI and HLE are also dominated by Google and OpenAI. Announcements like the one you linked are the only way for Anthropic to stay in the news cycle and justify its valuation to investors. Their IPO rumours are yet another example of this. But I really wonder how long that strategy can keep working.
- andy99 10mo agoI’d argue openAI has put their cards on the table and they don’t have anything special, while Anthropic has not. Their valuations come from completely different calculus: Anthropic looks much more like a high potential early startup still going after PMF while OpenAI looks more like a series B flailing to monetize. The cutting edge has largely moved past benchmarks, beyond a certain performance threshold that all these models have reached, nobody really cares about scores anymore, except people overfitting to them. They’re going for models that users like better, and Claude has a very loyal following. TLDR, OpenAI has already peaked, Anthropic hasn’t, this the valuation difference.
- ramraj07 10mo agoThose benchmarks mean nothing. Anthropic still makes the models that gets real work done in enterprise. We want to move but are unable to. If anyone disagrees,I would like to see their long running deep research agents built on gemini or openai.
- baxtr 10mo agoA good example of: Build things and then talk about them in a way that people remember and share it with friends. I guess some call it clever product marketing.
- smokel 10mo agoAlso, MCP is a serious security disaster. Too simple, I'd wager.
- sam_lowry_ 10mo agocomplex is synonym of insecure
- brazukadev 10mo agoMCP biggest problem is not being simple
- valzam 10mo agoId argue that this isn't so much a fault of the MCP spec but how 95% of AI 'engineers' have no engineering background. MCP is just an OpenAPI spec. It's the same as any other API. If you are exposing sensitive data without any authz/n that's on the developer.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- msy 10mo agoI get the impression the innovation drivers at OpenAI have all moved on and the people that have moved in were the ones chasing the money, the rest is history.
- speakspokespok 10mo agoI noticed something like this earlier, in the android app you can have it rewrite a paragraph, and then and only then do you have the option to send that as a text message. It's just a button that pops up. Claude has an elegance to it.
- Jimmc414 10mo agoSkills are lazy loaded prompt engineering. They are simple, but powerful. Claude sees a one line index entry per skill. You can create hundreds. The full instructions only load when invoked. Those instructions can reference external scripts that Claude executes without loading the source. You can package them with hooks and agents in plugins. You pay tokens for the output, not the code that calls it. Install five MCPs and you've burned a large chunk of tokens before typing a prompt. With skills, you only pay for what you use. You can call deterministic code (pipelines, APIs, domain logic) with a non-deterministic model, triggered by plain language, without the context bloat.
- ivape 10mo agoIt’s the only AI company that isn’t monetize at all costs. I’m curious how deep their culture goes as it’s remarkable they even have any discernible value system in today’s business world.
- blitzar 10mo agoAnthropic are using Ai beyond the chat window. Without external information, context and tools the "magic" of Ai evaporates after a few minutes.
- _pdp_ 10mo agoI hate to be that guy but skills are not an invention of sorts. It a simple mechanism that exists already in many places. The biggest unlock was tool calling that was in invented at OpenAI.
- mhalle 10mo agoSkills are not just markdown files. They are markdown files combined with code and data, which only work universally when you have a general purpose cloud-based code execution environment. Out of the box Claude skills can call python scripts that load modules from Pypi or even GitHub, potentially ones that include data like sqlite files or parquet tables. Not just in Claude Code. Anywhere, including the mobile app.
- rcarmo 10mo agoThey’re not alone in that.
- losvedir 10mo agoMCP is a terribly designed (and I assume vibe-designed) protocol. Give me the requirements that an LLM needs to be able to load tools dynamically from another server and invoke them like an RPC, and I could give you a much simpler, better solution. The modern HTTP Streamable version is light-years better, but took a year and was championed by outside engineers faced with the real problem of integrating it, and I imagine was designed by a human. OpenAI was there first, but unfortunately the models weren't quite good enough yet, so their far superior approach unfortunately didn't take off.
- CuriouslyC 10mo agoAnthropic has good marketing, but ironically their well marketed mediocre ideas retard development of better standards.
- rcarmo 10mo agoWell, my MCP servers only really started working when I implemented the prompt endpoints, so I’m happy I’ll never have to use MCP again if this sticks.