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Funny because many people here were so confident that OpenAI is going to collapse because of how much compute they pre-ordered. But now it seems like it's a ma

Funny because many people here were so confident that OpenAI is going to collapse because of how much compute they pre-ordered. But now it seems like it's a major strategic advantage. They're 2x'ing usage limits on Codex plans to steal CC customers and it seems to be working. I'm seeing a lot of goodwill for Codex and a ton of bad PR for CC. It seems like 90% of Claude's recent problems are strictly lack of compute related.

energy123 7mo ago
Is that 2x still going on I thought that ended in early April
- aurareturn 7mo ago
  They did it again to "celebrate" the release of the $100 plan.
  - indigodaddy 7mo ago
    On plus?
- lawgimenez 7mo ago
  It’s for Pro users only, I think the 2x is up to May 31.
- arcanemachiner 7mo ago
  Different plan. The old 2x has been discontinued, and the bonus is now (temporarily) available for the new $100 plan users in an effort, presumably, to entice them away from Anthropic.
  - wahnfrieden 7mo ago
    For the $200 users, it never ended.
llm_nerd 7mo ago
Most of the compute OpenAI "preordered" is vapour. And it has nothing to do with why people thought the company -- which is still in extremely rocky rapids -- was headed to bankruptcy. Anthropic has been very disciplined and focused (overwhelmingly on coding, fwiw), while OpenAI has been bleeding money trying to be the everything AI company with no real specialty as everyone else beat them in random domains. If I had to qualify OpenAI's primary focus, it has been glazing users and making a generation of malignant narcissists. But yes, Anthropic has been growing by leaps and bounds and has capacity issues. That's a very healthy position to be in, despite the fact that it yields the inevitable foot-stomping "I'm moving to competitor!" posts constantly.
- guelo 7mo ago
  How is droves of your customers leaving, whether they're foot stomping or not, healthy?
  - llm_nerd 7mo ago
    Droves? I mean, if we take the "I'm leaving!" posts seriously, the company has people so emotionally invested they feel the need to announce their departure is a pretty good place to be. Some tiny sampling of unhappy customers is indicative of nothing. Honestly at this point I am pretty firmly of the belief that OAI is paying astroturfers to post the "Boy does anyone else think Claude is dumb now and Codex is better?" (always some unreproducible "feel" kind of thing that are to be adopted at face value despite overwhelming evidence that we shouldn't). OAI is kind of in the desperation stage -- see the bizarre acquisitions they've been making, including paying $100M for some fringe podcast almost no one had heard of -- and it would not be remotely unexpected.
    - guelo 7mo ago
      We have no idea the ratio of foot stompers to quite quitters but I'm sure most people don't announce it. I cancelled my subscription and hadn't told anybody. And I quit based on personal experience over the last few weeks, not on social media pr.
afavour 7mo ago
> people here were so confident that OpenAI is going to collapse because of how much compute they pre-ordered That's not why. It was and is because they've been incredibly unfocused and have burnt through cash on ill-advised, expensive things like Sora. By comparison Anthropic have been very focused.
- aurareturn 7mo ago
  I don't think that was the main reason for people thinking OpenAI is going to collapse here. By far, the biggest argument was that OpenAI bet too much on compute. Being unfocused is generally an easy fix. Just cut things that don't matter as much, which they seem to be doing.
  - airstrike 7mo ago
    It really wasn't. Most of the argument was around product portfolio and agentic coding performance.
    - aurareturn 7mo ago
      That’s just short term talk. The main thesis behind their collapse is that they won’t be able to pay their compute bills because they won’t have enough demand to.
      - airstrike 7mo ago
        That doesn't really track because their compute isn't like a debt obligation. The compute topic was more around how OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, and others were all announcing commitments to spend money in each other in a circular way which could just net out to zero value.
  - scottyah 7mo ago
    Nobody was talking about them betting too much on compute, people were saying that their shady deals on compute with NVIDIA and Oracle were creating a giant bubble in their attempt to get a Too Big To Fail judgement (in their words- taxpayer-backed "backstop").
madeofpalk 7mo ago
Seems very short term. Like how cheap Uber was initially. Like Claude was before! Eventually OpenAI will need to stop burning money.
- superfrank 7mo ago
  OpenAI will need to stop burning money eventually, but so does everyone else in the space. The longer they can do this the more squeeze it puts on their competitors. I would call out though that I think there is one way in which this differs from the Uber situation. Theoretically at some point we should hit a place where compute costs start to come down either because we've built enough resources or because most tasks don't need the newest models and a lot of the work people are doing can be automatically sent to cheaper models that are good enough. Unless Uber's self driving program magically pops back up, Uber doesn't really have that since their biggest expense is driver wages. I think it's a long shot, but not impossible, that if OpenAI can subsidize costs long enough that prices don't need to go too much higher to be sustainable.
l5870uoo9y 7mo ago
In hindsight, it is painfully clear that Antropic’s conservative investment strategy has them struggling with keeping up with demand and caused their profit margin to shrink significantly as last buyer of compute.
Leynos 7mo ago
Their top tier plan got a 3x limit boost. This has been the first week ever where I haven't run out of tokens.
- wahnfrieden 7mo ago
  No
redml 7mo ago
they've also introduced a lot of caching and token burn related bugs which makes things worse. any bug that multiplies the token burn also multiplies their infrastructure problems.
__turbobrew__ 7mo ago
All of the smart people I know went to work at OpenAI and none at Anthropic. In addition to financial capital, OpenAI has a massive advantage in human capital over Anthropic. As long as OpenAI can sustain compute and paying SWE $1million/year they will end up with the better product.
- KaiserPro 7mo ago
  > OpenAI has a massive advantage in human capital over Anthropic. but if your leader is a dipshit, then its a waste. Look You can't just throw money at the problem, you need people who are able to make the right decisions are the right time. That that requires leadership. Part of the reason why facebook fucked up VR/AR is that they have a leader who only cares about features/metrics, not user experience. Part of the reason why twitter always lost money is because they had loads of teams all running in different directions, because Dorsey is utterly incapable of making a firm decision. Its not money and talent, its execution.
- scottyah 7mo ago
  Attracting talent with huge sums of money just gets you people who optimize for money, and it's usually never a good long-term decision. I think it's what led to Google's downturn.
  - HighGoldstein 7mo ago
    > I think it's what led to Google's downturn. What downturn is that exactly?
    - scottyah 6mo ago
      It used to be THE mecca that all engineers wanted to go to, and they almost never laid anybody off for a long stretch of time. Things changed around COVID. It's very obvious that a lot of their services have gotten much worse- my Google home can barely even set timers anymore and it used to be nearly magical at knowing what song I wanted to listen to even if I didn't know the artist or song name. They have made great strides recently in a lot of areas, but the massive seemingly random layoffs of senior engineers is very apparent.
kaliqt 7mo ago
That’s more a leadership decision because Anthropic are nerfing the model to cut costs, if they stop doing that then they’ll stay ahead.
- solenoid0937 7mo ago
  Proof they are nerfing the model? It is stable in benchmarks: https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code-historical-performance/ https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code-historical-perform... All this just reads like just another case of mass psychosis to me
  - ewild 7mo ago
    Proof they don't nerf it only after testing that the benchmarks there stay the same? So overall performance degrades but they isolate those benchmarks?
    - solenoid0937 7mo ago
      You are dramatically overestimating how much time people have to waste at these smaller hypergrowth companies
  - conception 7mo ago
    https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ Opus less so.
zamalek 7mo ago
> It seems like 90% of Claude's recent problems are strictly lack of compute related. Downtime is annoying, but the problem is that over the past 2-3 weeks Claude has been outrageously stupid when it does work. I have always been skeptical of everything produced - but now I have no faith whatsoever in anything that it produces. I'm not even sure if I will experiment with 4.7, unless there are glowing reviews. Codex has had none of these problems. I still don't trust anything it produces, but it's not like everything it produces is completely and utterly useless.
- scottyah 7mo ago
  So many people confuse sycophantic behavior with producing results.
saltyoldman 7mo ago
I have both Claude and OpenAI, side by side. I would say sonnet 46 still beats gpt 54 for coding (at least in my use case) But after about 45 minutes I'm out of my window, so I use openai for the next 4 hours and I can't even reach my limit.
pphysch 7mo ago
The market here is extraordinarily vibes-based and burning billions of dollars for a ephemeral PR boost, which might only last another couple weeks until people find a reason to hate Codex, does not reflect well on OAI's long term viability.
simplyluke 7mo ago
My standing assumption is the darling company/model will change every quarter for the foreseeable future, and everyone will be equally convinced that the hotness of the week will win the entire future. As buyers, we all benefit from a very competitive market.
- brightball 7mo ago
  This is the primary reason I won’t sign up for an annual plan.
raincole 7mo ago
> I'm seeing a lot of goodwill for Codex and a ton of bad PR for CC. AI is one of the things that you cannot find genuine opinions online. Just like politics. If you visit, say, r/codex, you'll see all the people complaining about how their limits are consumed by "just N prompts" (N is a ridiculously small integer). It's all astroturfed from all sides.
- hcurtiss 7mo ago
  I agree. And I am seeing it in a lot of venues, especially political discourse. Commenting is increasingly AI driven I fear the whole thing is going to collapse and nobody will be able to rely on online commentary to make decisions. At least not without a lot of independent research, maybe that’s for the best, but it’s definitely going to change the Internet.
esjeon 7mo ago
Funny because the general consensus is that everyone is burning money so fast that they would not be able to get it back from their AI business in the near future. OpenAI is simply the one with the most aggressive expenditure. Google has its own cash cows. Anthropic has been conservative all around.

energy123 7mo ago

Is that 2x still going on I thought that ended in early April

aurareturn 7mo ago
They did it again to "celebrate" the release of the $100 plan.
- indigodaddy 7mo ago
  On plus?
lawgimenez 7mo ago
It’s for Pro users only, I think the 2x is up to May 31.
arcanemachiner 7mo ago
Different plan. The old 2x has been discontinued, and the bonus is now (temporarily) available for the new $100 plan users in an effort, presumably, to entice them away from Anthropic.
- wahnfrieden 7mo ago
  For the $200 users, it never ended.

llm_nerd 7mo ago

Most of the compute OpenAI "preordered" is vapour. And it has nothing to do with why people thought the company -- which is still in extremely rocky rapids -- was headed to bankruptcy. Anthropic has been very disciplined and focused (overwhelmingly on coding, fwiw), while OpenAI has been bleeding money trying to be the everything AI company with no real specialty as everyone else beat them in random domains. If I had to qualify OpenAI's primary focus, it has been glazing users and making a generation of malignant narcissists. But yes, Anthropic has been growing by leaps and bounds and has capacity issues. That's a very healthy position to be in, despite the fact that it yields the inevitable foot-stomping "I'm moving to competitor!" posts constantly.

guelo 7mo ago
How is droves of your customers leaving, whether they're foot stomping or not, healthy?
- llm_nerd 7mo ago
  Droves? I mean, if we take the "I'm leaving!" posts seriously, the company has people so emotionally invested they feel the need to announce their departure is a pretty good place to be. Some tiny sampling of unhappy customers is indicative of nothing. Honestly at this point I am pretty firmly of the belief that OAI is paying astroturfers to post the "Boy does anyone else think Claude is dumb now and Codex is better?" (always some unreproducible "feel" kind of thing that are to be adopted at face value despite overwhelming evidence that we shouldn't). OAI is kind of in the desperation stage -- see the bizarre acquisitions they've been making, including paying $100M for some fringe podcast almost no one had heard of -- and it would not be remotely unexpected.
  - guelo 7mo ago
    We have no idea the ratio of foot stompers to quite quitters but I'm sure most people don't announce it. I cancelled my subscription and hadn't told anybody. And I quit based on personal experience over the last few weeks, not on social media pr.

afavour 7mo ago

> people here were so confident that OpenAI is going to collapse because of how much compute they pre-ordered That's not why. It was and is because they've been incredibly unfocused and have burnt through cash on ill-advised, expensive things like Sora. By comparison Anthropic have been very focused.

aurareturn 7mo ago
I don't think that was the main reason for people thinking OpenAI is going to collapse here. By far, the biggest argument was that OpenAI bet too much on compute. Being unfocused is generally an easy fix. Just cut things that don't matter as much, which they seem to be doing.
- airstrike 7mo ago
  It really wasn't. Most of the argument was around product portfolio and agentic coding performance.
  - aurareturn 7mo ago
    That’s just short term talk. The main thesis behind their collapse is that they won’t be able to pay their compute bills because they won’t have enough demand to.
    - airstrike 7mo ago
      That doesn't really track because their compute isn't like a debt obligation. The compute topic was more around how OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, and others were all announcing commitments to spend money in each other in a circular way which could just net out to zero value.
- scottyah 7mo ago
  Nobody was talking about them betting too much on compute, people were saying that their shady deals on compute with NVIDIA and Oracle were creating a giant bubble in their attempt to get a Too Big To Fail judgement (in their words- taxpayer-backed "backstop").

madeofpalk 7mo ago

Seems very short term. Like how cheap Uber was initially. Like Claude was before! Eventually OpenAI will need to stop burning money.

superfrank 7mo ago
OpenAI will need to stop burning money eventually, but so does everyone else in the space. The longer they can do this the more squeeze it puts on their competitors. I would call out though that I think there is one way in which this differs from the Uber situation. Theoretically at some point we should hit a place where compute costs start to come down either because we've built enough resources or because most tasks don't need the newest models and a lot of the work people are doing can be automatically sent to cheaper models that are good enough. Unless Uber's self driving program magically pops back up, Uber doesn't really have that since their biggest expense is driver wages. I think it's a long shot, but not impossible, that if OpenAI can subsidize costs long enough that prices don't need to go too much higher to be sustainable.

l5870uoo9y 7mo ago

In hindsight, it is painfully clear that Antropic’s conservative investment strategy has them struggling with keeping up with demand and caused their profit margin to shrink significantly as last buyer of compute.

Leynos 7mo ago

Their top tier plan got a 3x limit boost. This has been the first week ever where I haven't run out of tokens.

wahnfrieden 7mo ago
No

redml 7mo ago

they've also introduced a lot of caching and token burn related bugs which makes things worse. any bug that multiplies the token burn also multiplies their infrastructure problems.

__turbobrew__ 7mo ago

All of the smart people I know went to work at OpenAI and none at Anthropic. In addition to financial capital, OpenAI has a massive advantage in human capital over Anthropic. As long as OpenAI can sustain compute and paying SWE $1million/year they will end up with the better product.

KaiserPro 7mo ago
> OpenAI has a massive advantage in human capital over Anthropic. but if your leader is a dipshit, then its a waste. Look You can't just throw money at the problem, you need people who are able to make the right decisions are the right time. That that requires leadership. Part of the reason why facebook fucked up VR/AR is that they have a leader who only cares about features/metrics, not user experience. Part of the reason why twitter always lost money is because they had loads of teams all running in different directions, because Dorsey is utterly incapable of making a firm decision. Its not money and talent, its execution.
scottyah 7mo ago
Attracting talent with huge sums of money just gets you people who optimize for money, and it's usually never a good long-term decision. I think it's what led to Google's downturn.
- HighGoldstein 7mo ago
  > I think it's what led to Google's downturn. What downturn is that exactly?
  - scottyah 6mo ago
    It used to be THE mecca that all engineers wanted to go to, and they almost never laid anybody off for a long stretch of time. Things changed around COVID. It's very obvious that a lot of their services have gotten much worse- my Google home can barely even set timers anymore and it used to be nearly magical at knowing what song I wanted to listen to even if I didn't know the artist or song name. They have made great strides recently in a lot of areas, but the massive seemingly random layoffs of senior engineers is very apparent.

kaliqt 7mo ago

That’s more a leadership decision because Anthropic are nerfing the model to cut costs, if they stop doing that then they’ll stay ahead.

solenoid0937 7mo ago
Proof they are nerfing the model? It is stable in benchmarks: https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code-historical-performance/ https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code-historical-perform... All this just reads like just another case of mass psychosis to me
- ewild 7mo ago
  Proof they don't nerf it only after testing that the benchmarks there stay the same? So overall performance degrades but they isolate those benchmarks?
  - solenoid0937 7mo ago
    You are dramatically overestimating how much time people have to waste at these smaller hypergrowth companies
- conception 7mo ago
  https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ Opus less so.

zamalek 7mo ago

> It seems like 90% of Claude's recent problems are strictly lack of compute related. Downtime is annoying, but the problem is that over the past 2-3 weeks Claude has been outrageously stupid when it does work. I have always been skeptical of everything produced - but now I have no faith whatsoever in anything that it produces. I'm not even sure if I will experiment with 4.7, unless there are glowing reviews. Codex has had none of these problems. I still don't trust anything it produces, but it's not like everything it produces is completely and utterly useless.

scottyah 7mo ago
So many people confuse sycophantic behavior with producing results.

saltyoldman 7mo ago

I have both Claude and OpenAI, side by side. I would say sonnet 46 still beats gpt 54 for coding (at least in my use case) But after about 45 minutes I'm out of my window, so I use openai for the next 4 hours and I can't even reach my limit.

pphysch 7mo ago

The market here is extraordinarily vibes-based and burning billions of dollars for a ephemeral PR boost, which might only last another couple weeks until people find a reason to hate Codex, does not reflect well on OAI's long term viability.

simplyluke 7mo ago

My standing assumption is the darling company/model will change every quarter for the foreseeable future, and everyone will be equally convinced that the hotness of the week will win the entire future. As buyers, we all benefit from a very competitive market.

brightball 7mo ago
This is the primary reason I won’t sign up for an annual plan.

raincole 7mo ago

> I'm seeing a lot of goodwill for Codex and a ton of bad PR for CC. AI is one of the things that you cannot find genuine opinions online. Just like politics. If you visit, say, r/codex, you'll see all the people complaining about how their limits are consumed by "just N prompts" (N is a ridiculously small integer). It's all astroturfed from all sides.

hcurtiss 7mo ago
I agree. And I am seeing it in a lot of venues, especially political discourse. Commenting is increasingly AI driven I fear the whole thing is going to collapse and nobody will be able to rely on online commentary to make decisions. At least not without a lot of independent research, maybe that’s for the best, but it’s definitely going to change the Internet.

esjeon 7mo ago

Funny because the general consensus is that everyone is burning money so fast that they would not be able to get it back from their AI business in the near future. OpenAI is simply the one with the most aggressive expenditure. Google has its own cash cows. Anthropic has been conservative all around.