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I don’t know how OpenAI screwed this up. They had the best tech, the largest installed base, the best brand recognition. And somehow instead of prosecuting the
by brookst 7mo ago
I don’t know how OpenAI screwed this up. They had the best tech, the largest installed base, the best brand recognition.
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.
- morcutt 7mo agoSam lost the plot for me. He took too many interviews which led me to not trust him. Last straw came with him standing by Anthropic one day then throwing them under the bus the next. He showed little awareness on why that is problematic.
- tombert 7mo agoThat's why I changed as well. I got really irritated how Altman tried to get the social credit by having principles, only to change them the moment it was convenient.
- jimbokun 7mo agoI have appreciated Amodei’s brutal honesty about their intentions. On podcasts his attitude is basically “oh yeah all of you are basically fucked our products will take everyone’s jobs in a couple years.” Altman is a lot more coy and comes across as saying what’s politically expedient at any given point in time.
- bayarearefugee 7mo ago> On podcasts his attitude is basically “oh yeah all of you are basically fucked our products will take everyone’s jobs in a couple years.” I also appreciate his honesty, and don't really understand why the others don't emulate it because there's no cost to them to be honest. At every level of society we've decided to stick our heads in the sand and pretend like this very large tsunami isn't racing toward the coast, so as someone producing this technology you can be honest (and mostly ignored by people in denial), or be cagey and mistrusted (like Sam Altman).
- nostrebored 7mo agoBecause it isn’t honest, it is investor hype that these frontier labs need people to believe despite obviously hitting the sublinear part of the improvement curve. “It’s so dangerous, we’ve reached AGI, we just have to release models that are obviously incapable of abstraction for your safety”
- taurath 7mo agoWe still think Amodei is honest and his hype recycling is not ultimately incredibly self serving?
- sifar 7mo agoUpton Sinclair[1] has something relevant for Amodei. Funnily enough, the same thing can be used against those who criticize his view on AI. I wonder if there is a word for this. [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
- palmotea 7mo ago> Sam lost the plot for me. He took too many interviews which led me to not trust him. Last straw came with him standing by Anthropic one day then throwing them under the bus the next. He showed little awareness on why that is problematic. It should have become clear to all that he was an untrustworthy person when he was fired from OpenAI by its then-board. My understanding is their complaint was he was lying, untrustworthy, and manipulative; and enough stories came out at the time to confirm that.
- morcutt 7mo agoYeah, it likely should have. I've however been on the receiving end of some very odd board behavior and most founders I know have a story or two as well. I don't always take board decisions at face value. Reality is often askew, personality disorders run rampant in places of power, and there can be unknown incentives at play.
- saeranv 7mo agoFor me, it was when I found out Greg Brockman's MAGA donations. From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Brockman#Personal_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Brockman#Personal_life): Brockman and his wife were the biggest donors to Donald Trump's Super PAC, MAGA Inc., in 2025 with each of them donating US$12.5 million. Brockman and his wife also donated $50 million to Leading the Future, a super PAC dedicated to AI deregulation that he helped found with Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
- oezi 7mo agoCoding assistants won't win this game. They sure will win the hearts of developers, but to scale you need mass adoption and products for which users want to pay substantially. OpenAI is falling behind in the small features in their chat and app offering and have failed to innovate in their expensive offerings. Codex btw is getting very competitive. It is fast and no longer far behind.
- igtt 7mo agoThe reality is given how much OAI has raised, they have to get to a place where they are doing insane revenues… We’re talking on the level of meta, google and probably more if they keep raising money. They really went all in with hubris and they’re gonna get punished eventually.
- fragmede 7mo agoJust like Uber did?
- rchaud 7mo agoUber doesn't have to convert hundreds of millions of users to a paid plan - it was paid to begin with. Much easier to raise prices from a low base than to raise them from $0. When push came to shove, Uber also cut payments to drivers and replaced them with a tip screen. Is Nvidia going to accept tip annuities on ChatGPT responses instead of full payment on its chips? Most importantly, Uber did not have fast-depreciating cars on its balance sheet - OAI meanwhile is planning to spend the GDP of a mid-size nation on owning fast-depreciating datacenters, which they deem necessary to cope with the demand for their services.
- nayroclade 7mo agoThe strategic playbook of the web era said: Get a huge userbase of normies, then figure out how to monetise them (usually via advertising). OpenAI stumbled into the userbase via ChatGPT, but it's unclear if the strategy or the economics apply to AI. Anthropic tried to compete in the consumer market, but couldn't, so focussed on coding and enterprise, and it looks like that's actually turning into a smart choice, at least right now, because it turns out people will pay subscription costs for agents that do their job for them.
- hmartin 7mo agoWhat kind of OI slop is this? 5.4 Extra high >> Opus 4.6
- noosphr 7mo agoDepends on your work flow. I find that for human in the loop Gemini beats both.
- neya 7mo agoBeen my experience as well, but generally the anti-Google sentiment here is pretty loud so you'll never see anyone praising Gemini here pretty much
- zbrozek 7mo agoI think Antigravity w/Gemini is a great product; it's been super useful on a bunch of my hobby projects. It's especially wonderful when writing firmware and needing to add support for a new chip. I can point it at a PDF datasheet and it'll do a much better job of reading it and parsing out all of the register fields than anything else. Saves me enormous amounts of time.
- neya 7mo agoThanks, been meaning to try it. I heard the limits on that is an issue and people are supposedly blowing the limits off way too easily? How has your experience been so far in this regard?
- zbrozek 6mo agoOn a free Google plan the limits are comically low. On any paid One plan, they are high enough that I almost never hit them.
- gabriel-uribe 7mo agoIs anti-Google sentiment still pretty loud? People seem excited about Gemini catching up + Gemma 4
- tombert 7mo agoIt's clearly because they didn't hire me after I applied :) In all seriousness, I use Codex for work and Claude at home, and I feel like nowadays they're actually pretty competitive with each other. I don't know that it's that far behind. I agree that they clearly erroneously assumed that no one would be able to catch up with them, though. OpenAI had such a head start that that should have been by itself a moat.
- phist_mcgee 7mo agoDoes it matter that codex is now as good as claude code? Check dev spaces like twitter and discord and all anyone talks about is claude-code, openclaw, opus 4.6 etc. The mindshare went to anthropic.
- nickstinemates 7mo agothat's why openai bought openclaw
- phist_mcgee 7mo agoI mean they hired the guy who created it. It's not exactly like openclaw is a real product.
- oofbey 7mo agoAlso not like it’s a particularly good piece of tech. It was the first to show a new category. But jeebus the design and security are a nightmare. Any of the numerous other claws are better choices for anything serious.
- nickstinemates 7mo agoSure it is.. you can download and use it right now. Helps you understand why people are interested in it, at the very least.
- efromvt 7mo agoJust like OpenAI's original moat, I don't think that's particularly durable. I've already seen plenty of people swing back to preferring codex, and it'll probably swap again with the next model drop. Openclaw is potentially better integrated with ChatGPT at this point because of the explicit subscription support.
- neya 7mo agoAnecdotally, I would actually argue tbe opposite - Anthropic is overrated, ass-kissed way too much here for mediocre coding abilities (especially for Elixir). ChatGPT most of the time one-shots complex solutions in comparison. The only reason why people shit on OpenAI so much is because of the defence deal, but, it's not like Anthropic is a saint either: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-to-group-pushing-for-ai-regulations-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-t...
- phinnaeus 7mo agoWhy pick elixir specifically here? I’m using opus/sonnet via Claude code for a moderately complex personal project built on phoenix and have had a good experience
- FireBeyond 7mo agoYeah, I've been building a fairly complex app with Claude and it has been great. Backend stack is a Go service, with TS front end and a solver running or-tools in Python. I do think I do a good job of being very structured at breaking down my requirements and acceptance criteria (thanks dual lives as a devops and SRE guy and then PM). Extensive unit testing, discipline in use of sessions and memories and asking it to think of questions it should be asking me before even formulating a plan.
- neya 7mo agoClaude is good, I'm definitely not saying it's bad. But if you work with LiveView, it will tend to choose more complexity over simplicity. Weirdly enough I have a feeling it's trained more on Python/Ruby (Object oriented paradigms) style code than functional code, so it tries to get things done not so functionally.
- ls612 7mo agoClaude Code is IMO the benchmark today. For all of the various contexts I’ve used it in it has mostly oneshot the tasks I’ve given it and is very user friendly for someone who is not a professional software engineer. To the extent it fails I can usually figure out quickly why and correct it at a high level.
- 0xbadcafebee 7mo agoInvestors do not care about the product, the users, etc. They care about cash. There are lots of ways to make cash that don't involve having a good product. But if you commit to spending a trillion dollars on hardware, then borrow hundreds of billions in the short term, and it turns out there's no way to recoup the cost, the investors go looking for better returns. This would've worked back in the old days of a bull market, angels looking for the next whale (with "modest" $5BN investments), and startups with no rivals. But in a bear market with multiple competitors trading on a commodity? Lol. Finally the bubble bursts.
- xnx 7mo agoSame thing happened to Blackberry. Tech head start wasn't that big and product wasn't that sticky.
- jimbokun 7mo agoiOS had an API and a platform. Is there any equivalent for turning an AI LLM into a sticky platform? Right now seems like it’s pretty easy to use harnesses and tooling across models, including open weight and locally running ones.
- xnx 7mo ago> Is there any equivalent for turning an AI LLM into a sticky platform? Not with AI specifically. Having a large, private, data store (e.g. GMail, Google Drive) is the biggest advantage.
- tqi 7mo agoDespite what the folks here like to believe about themselves, I think the reality is we as attuned to what is in fashion and on trend as everyone else, just about different stuff. Last year it was Chatgpt, this year Claude is the new hotness. Things move so fast we barely have time to form our own opinion, so we fall back on what we read or hear from others. In 12 months who knows what it will be... Gemini? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Long term, my feeling is Anthropic's focus on enterprise is the most obviously lucrative but also least defensible application of LLMs. If (more likely when) open source models reach the point of being "good enough" then it's a race to the bottom on pricing. Maybe it will be like AWS vs GCP et al, but I kinda doubt it.
- oofbey 7mo agoClassic SV hubris. Talk to OpenAI people and they’re so convinced they’re untouchable, they don’t bother worrying about things like revenue, or product strategy. All they cared about was being the first to AGI. Well it looks like that isn’t happening soon enough. And now they have zero moat except brand recognition, which is quickly getting eroded.
- Art9681 7mo agoAside from the fabricated drama and the trend chasing, OpenAI still has the best overall model and API service. Anthropic is really good, no doubt. But gpt-5.4 is a better model than even Opus, even if its a marginal advantage. I use both.
- patcon 7mo agoDo you feel the companies' positionings are only marginally different in the same way the product is only marginally different?
- satvikpendem 7mo agoThese days, yes.
- ramraj07 7mo agoThe advantage is marginal and sporadic, and its slower. Why would I use it over anthropic?
- bhadass 7mo agoI dunno, my experience mirrors the parent posters: we use opus for all our coding, but gpt 5.4 for all of our enterprise agentic work via api (much bigger amount of tokens). it just seems to be more optimized for this.
- tatrions 7mo ago[flagged]
- senordevnyc 7mo agoIt’s much cheaper, for starters.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- casey2 7mo agoCongrats to OpenAI for having this fake "beef" with itself through Anthropic, but Google is still going to win the most users. Users aren't so stupid that they will fall for this kind of obvious psychological manipulation in perpetuity.