19 ms·

The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

64 points by tosh 6mo ago

davidw 6mo ago
LLMs represent a big shift of power towards capital until such time as local ones are 'good enough'.
- dormento 6mo ago
  That's true. But keep in mind capital can be trivially used to influence policy so that local ones are eventually disallowed.
  - XorNot 6mo ago
    When has that ever happened though? LLMs are software there's no plausible way to stop them running locally.
    - AlexandrB 6mo ago
      California is trying to ban the sale of 3d printers that don't detect and block "gun parts" from being printed[1]. All Anthropic and friends need is some kind of safety rationale and we won't be able to buy computers that can run local models. The plausible way to do this is to force all software through some kind of signing process. This would be trivial for Apple to pull off and not much harder for Microsoft. On the Linux side, I expect the systemd folks would be happy to add some kind of signature checking to "head off the inevitable". [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1rek7ky/new_california_bill_would_ban_sale_of_3d_printers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1rek7ky/new_cal...
    - pessimizer 6mo ago
      They're already nearly there. Once everybody's computers are rooted for age verification, with government-approved OSes, it's barely even a step to only allow government-approved AI on them. For some reason, people assume that mandatory age/identity verification on people's machines is primarily geared toward reporting across the network. If you wanted to age-restrict across the network, there are any number of trivial ways to do it that they have never even entertained. The reason that the first victims of this legislation are operating systems is because they, like Apple, Google, and Microsoft already have, want to restrict the software you can run. They have to make sure that you can't have AI that can make pictures of naked children, or naked anything, or that might "underreport" the number of casualties in the Tienanmen Square protests, or could cast doubt on the vaccine (whichever vaccine), or say anything that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic (like that the Palestinians aren't savage animals), etc., etc.... This is already easy to get public support on, because in the same way they whipped up bizarre mind control allegations against genuinely evil social media companies to throw the public off the scent, the public is being groomed with absolutely bizarre and incoherent predictions of the evils of generative AI in order to throw them off the actual evils of the people behind generative AI. The same way that the anti-social media agitprop just resulted in TikTok being sold to explicit propagandists during a genocide and age attestation (as the social media giants do business without interruption), the "AI scaremongering" is just going to result in physical restrictions on individuals running AI - it will be tracked like explosives or nuclear material. The giant AI companies will be sold as the solution, just like closed platform software "stores" from Apple and Google are sold as consumer protection. > When has that ever happened though? Microsoft has to sign Linux so it can be installed under Secure Boot. Encryption was regulated as arms export, and is fully under attack again.
      - XorNot 6mo ago
        It's perfectly legal to sell a computer without secure boot.
        dormento 6mo ago
        > keep in mind capital can be trivially used to influence policy in other words, its _still_ legal.
- adamors 6mo ago
  Yes, this is the main point, employees will have less and less leverage (I'm even seeing AI doing interviews now, good luck). Soon we'll be explaining to an AI why we aren't as productive as two weeks ago.
  - jnovek 6mo ago
    AI interviews are a hard “no”. If I’m going to invest my time in an interview, the company must as well.
jameskilton 6mo ago
> At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being. If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) and communications team (again, staffed by humans, for humans). As both of these are actually on par with Silicon Valley standards (between medicore and atrociously bad), Anthropic cannot and should not be trusted with anything to do with AI, because whatever they do will not benefit humanity.
- alach11 6mo ago
  > If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) I know Anthropic support is slow from firsthand experience, but it has to be pretty difficult to scale support 10-80x per year. And even more so when you have a long-tail of very low revenue usage in the form of $20/month subscriptions.
  - tomashubelbauer 6mo ago
    There is basically no support to speak of. Scaling a zero is not hard. You can be paying 200 USD a month with barely any chance of ever hearing back. Your best chance of getting support from Anthropic is the same as with any other big tech company: have a Twitter following or know someone who works there.
  - ausbah 6mo ago
    their world changing agents surely make this a non problem?
- adampunk 6mo ago
  How would you staff a support line for a product with a billion users?
  - Wowfunhappy 6mo ago
    I mean, the simplistic answer is that if a billion people are paying you, you should be able to hire a proportional number of support staff, because you're getting additional revenue from each customer. I can imagine scaling may be difficult, but that should be a temporary problem.
qaz_plm 6mo ago
https://xcancel.com/josevalim/status/2054887621336174799 https://xcancel.com/josevalim/status/2054887621336174799
siliconpotato 6mo ago
Find it surprising that there are people still under the delusion that they have an audience of humans on twitter worth speaking to
- skrebbel 6mo ago
  You think a bot cross-posted this tweet to HN?
- Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago
  Jose valim is the creator of elixir for reference. He definitely includes a fan following within the elixir community. So its not much about twitter as much as the guy. I mean even on top of my head, I still remember when jose commented back to me and it was a highlight for a few days as I told my friend about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234633 > I have a fun anecdote. About 5-6 years ago, Elixir completely disappeared from the top 100 after spending some time in the top 50. People reached out to me and then I reached out to TIOBE to understand why and the reason given was "bad presence on Amazon". > After further investigation, the root cause seemed to be that we finally had enough published Elixir books. At the time, if you searched for "xyz programming" on Amazon and only found a few results, Amazon would pad those results with non-relevant entries. However, because Elixir reached about 20-30 books, we were no longer padded, so we suddenly got worse rankings than every other language with only a handful of books. This happened on every Amazon domain they searched on, so it compounded and effectively kicked us out of the top 100 altogether. This all happened at a time Elixir language activity had already reached top 25 on GitHub PRs/stars. So although my comment has gotten a little offtopic but people have literally written books about elixir (the language he created). My point is, people like to listen to jose and he's a really chill guy from what I know of him and elixir feels like a great language :-D
  - DiabloD3 6mo ago
    That doesn't actually answer the original poster's commentary, however. Humans have left Twitter, its all propaganda and spam bots just spamming and propagandizing each other. José Valim needs to move to either Bluesky (if he prefers to stay within the corporate ecosystem) or Mastodon (which is where the entirety of the FOSS universe went).
parliament32 6mo ago
It really is the doordash/uber playbook all over again eh? Sell at a massive loss, gain userbase, then gradually boil the frog by adding fees, removing features, and increasing prices. Except instead of doing this a few years down the line, they're speedrunning the tighten-the-noose phase. Unfortunately the competition is nipping at their heels so there's a good chance this blows up in their faces.
- intrasight 6mo ago
  There is competition. And there is no moat nor network effect. I don't think it'll blow up in their faces if they provide a product and service that people value which demonstratively they have. But it may not be so lucrative to them or their shareholders.
- pigpag 6mo ago
  [dead]
- Aboutplants 6mo ago
  “Unfortunately”? Uh, that’s a good thing
- ealready_value 6mo ago
  As far as I can tell, it seemed very clear that was the playbook for about a year now. Its been regularly assumed they're selling plans as a major loss-leader because people can "spend" thousands of dollars a months on a plan if they were charged at API rates. I think there's good evidence that even the API rates are sold at a loss. I think its assumed in the LLM model business that the models themselves are not a good moat, the next model by another company is just as likely to be as good as the current model. So companies like Anthropic have to tighten the noose slowly to start recovering their costs. This appears to be one of those steps.
  - infecto 6mo ago
    The simpler explanation is probably some mix of marketing and also an expected use from people paying for a plan. The money to be made is not from plans ever. It’s in everyone’s best interest for these companies to accurately oversubscribe plans. Enterprise is where the money is to be made and I don’t feel that pricing has changed much on that end.
tommek4077 6mo ago
If you would be honest, everyone understood that this is a work around that us not there to last.
jadar 6mo ago
What's the subtext here? I don't live under a rock, but there have been so many Anthropic kerfuffles that I have lost track.
- schnitzelstoat 6mo ago
  Using -p (non-interactive mode) now uses API pricing, not subscription (so it's now more expensive). But if you have a subscription you get some free credits for it.
- walthamstow 6mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125552
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
frangonf 6mo ago
> Impacting devrel is just collateral damage, which is on par for a company which believes coding is going away any time now. This makes sense.
ochronus 6mo ago
Yeah, claude code is mostly unusable at this point. It's been in a constant decline for a good 1-2 months. It's more like a scam now.
- quietsegfault 6mo ago
  What are the biggest problems you've seen? Is it mostly related to limits for the subscription plans? Within my circles (mostly big enterprises), I see more and more of my friends using Claude, and spending money on it, so they must be getting some sort of value out of it. For my uses, I've also been successful with Claude Code, though someone else is paying for my tokens.
  - ochronus 6mo ago
    Yes, it's related to the limits of the subscription plans. 2ish months ago the same sub started hitting limits earlier and earlier on very similar tasks/codebases. Then they said, Oh, sorry, it was a caching bug, now it's fixed. It wasn't. Then a couple more bugs. Still no fix. Recently they announced "doubling the limits" (made possible by the Grok deal) - still hitting limits super fast compared to how it used to be 2+ months ago. Moreover, the models got somewhat dumber and slower, too.
    - electric_mayhem 6mo ago
      Also, they seem to ignore auto mode, seizing on any reason to stop, and sometimes just stopping despite saying they’re proceeding with something. Basically, ongoing enshittification.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
nickdothutton 6mo ago
I really wish Anthropic would consult some monetization experts. Their recent strategy has been all over the place and they are burning early goodwill.
- ochronus 6mo ago
  I don't think they are clueless, but rather, struggling. Being an AI provider is a money burner, and they probably don't have enough fuel for the fire anymore, so they are trying things to squeeze more $$$ and limit usage at the same time.
  - potsandpans 6mo ago
    I don't really expect a company run by radical effective altruists / ai doomers to have good business sense. They had a decent product and squandered a lot of dev goodwill almost overnight.
    - ochronus 6mo ago
      I see your point, but I'd be surprised if they'd lose a significant user base in the end; the hype is just way too high
- Henchman21 6mo ago
  They asked Claude, what more can they do?!
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 6mo ago
Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126281
radu_floricica 6mo ago
Max x20 usage is so cheap, that it's pretty obviously subsidized. And the non-interactive usage is the easiest to explode. They could play games with "reasonable use" and whack a mole accounts that are obviously farming it, but their approach is ultimately more fair. And I say this as somebody who just discovered agent orchestration and would absolutely love their limits to remain as they are.

64 points by tosh 6mo ago

davidw 6mo ago

LLMs represent a big shift of power towards capital until such time as local ones are 'good enough'.

dormento 6mo ago
That's true. But keep in mind capital can be trivially used to influence policy so that local ones are eventually disallowed.
- XorNot 6mo ago
  When has that ever happened though? LLMs are software there's no plausible way to stop them running locally.
  - AlexandrB 6mo ago
    California is trying to ban the sale of 3d printers that don't detect and block "gun parts" from being printed[1]. All Anthropic and friends need is some kind of safety rationale and we won't be able to buy computers that can run local models. The plausible way to do this is to force all software through some kind of signing process. This would be trivial for Apple to pull off and not much harder for Microsoft. On the Linux side, I expect the systemd folks would be happy to add some kind of signature checking to "head off the inevitable". [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1rek7ky/new_california_bill_would_ban_sale_of_3d_printers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1rek7ky/new_cal...
  - pessimizer 6mo ago
    They're already nearly there. Once everybody's computers are rooted for age verification, with government-approved OSes, it's barely even a step to only allow government-approved AI on them. For some reason, people assume that mandatory age/identity verification on people's machines is primarily geared toward reporting across the network. If you wanted to age-restrict across the network, there are any number of trivial ways to do it that they have never even entertained. The reason that the first victims of this legislation are operating systems is because they, like Apple, Google, and Microsoft already have, want to restrict the software you can run. They have to make sure that you can't have AI that can make pictures of naked children, or naked anything, or that might "underreport" the number of casualties in the Tienanmen Square protests, or could cast doubt on the vaccine (whichever vaccine), or say anything that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic (like that the Palestinians aren't savage animals), etc., etc.... This is already easy to get public support on, because in the same way they whipped up bizarre mind control allegations against genuinely evil social media companies to throw the public off the scent, the public is being groomed with absolutely bizarre and incoherent predictions of the evils of generative AI in order to throw them off the actual evils of the people behind generative AI. The same way that the anti-social media agitprop just resulted in TikTok being sold to explicit propagandists during a genocide and age attestation (as the social media giants do business without interruption), the "AI scaremongering" is just going to result in physical restrictions on individuals running AI - it will be tracked like explosives or nuclear material. The giant AI companies will be sold as the solution, just like closed platform software "stores" from Apple and Google are sold as consumer protection. > When has that ever happened though? Microsoft has to sign Linux so it can be installed under Secure Boot. Encryption was regulated as arms export, and is fully under attack again.
    - XorNot 6mo ago
      It's perfectly legal to sell a computer without secure boot.
      - dormento 6mo ago
        > keep in mind capital can be trivially used to influence policy in other words, its _still_ legal.
adamors 6mo ago
Yes, this is the main point, employees will have less and less leverage (I'm even seeing AI doing interviews now, good luck). Soon we'll be explaining to an AI why we aren't as productive as two weeks ago.
- jnovek 6mo ago
  AI interviews are a hard “no”. If I’m going to invest my time in an interview, the company must as well.

jameskilton 6mo ago

> At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being. If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) and communications team (again, staffed by humans, for humans). As both of these are actually on par with Silicon Valley standards (between medicore and atrociously bad), Anthropic cannot and should not be trusted with anything to do with AI, because whatever they do will not benefit humanity.

alach11 6mo ago
> If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) I know Anthropic support is slow from firsthand experience, but it has to be pretty difficult to scale support 10-80x per year. And even more so when you have a long-tail of very low revenue usage in the form of $20/month subscriptions.
- tomashubelbauer 6mo ago
  There is basically no support to speak of. Scaling a zero is not hard. You can be paying 200 USD a month with barely any chance of ever hearing back. Your best chance of getting support from Anthropic is the same as with any other big tech company: have a Twitter following or know someone who works there.
- ausbah 6mo ago
  their world changing agents surely make this a non problem?
adampunk 6mo ago
How would you staff a support line for a product with a billion users?
- Wowfunhappy 6mo ago
  I mean, the simplistic answer is that if a billion people are paying you, you should be able to hire a proportional number of support staff, because you're getting additional revenue from each customer. I can imagine scaling may be difficult, but that should be a temporary problem.

qaz_plm 6mo ago

https://xcancel.com/josevalim/status/2054887621336174799 https://xcancel.com/josevalim/status/2054887621336174799

siliconpotato 6mo ago

Find it surprising that there are people still under the delusion that they have an audience of humans on twitter worth speaking to

skrebbel 6mo ago
You think a bot cross-posted this tweet to HN?
Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago
Jose valim is the creator of elixir for reference. He definitely includes a fan following within the elixir community. So its not much about twitter as much as the guy. I mean even on top of my head, I still remember when jose commented back to me and it was a highlight for a few days as I told my friend about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234633 > I have a fun anecdote. About 5-6 years ago, Elixir completely disappeared from the top 100 after spending some time in the top 50. People reached out to me and then I reached out to TIOBE to understand why and the reason given was "bad presence on Amazon". > After further investigation, the root cause seemed to be that we finally had enough published Elixir books. At the time, if you searched for "xyz programming" on Amazon and only found a few results, Amazon would pad those results with non-relevant entries. However, because Elixir reached about 20-30 books, we were no longer padded, so we suddenly got worse rankings than every other language with only a handful of books. This happened on every Amazon domain they searched on, so it compounded and effectively kicked us out of the top 100 altogether. This all happened at a time Elixir language activity had already reached top 25 on GitHub PRs/stars. So although my comment has gotten a little offtopic but people have literally written books about elixir (the language he created). My point is, people like to listen to jose and he's a really chill guy from what I know of him and elixir feels like a great language :-D
- DiabloD3 6mo ago
  That doesn't actually answer the original poster's commentary, however. Humans have left Twitter, its all propaganda and spam bots just spamming and propagandizing each other. José Valim needs to move to either Bluesky (if he prefers to stay within the corporate ecosystem) or Mastodon (which is where the entirety of the FOSS universe went).

parliament32 6mo ago

It really is the doordash/uber playbook all over again eh? Sell at a massive loss, gain userbase, then gradually boil the frog by adding fees, removing features, and increasing prices. Except instead of doing this a few years down the line, they're speedrunning the tighten-the-noose phase. Unfortunately the competition is nipping at their heels so there's a good chance this blows up in their faces.

intrasight 6mo ago
There is competition. And there is no moat nor network effect. I don't think it'll blow up in their faces if they provide a product and service that people value which demonstratively they have. But it may not be so lucrative to them or their shareholders.
pigpag 6mo ago
[dead]
Aboutplants 6mo ago
“Unfortunately”? Uh, that’s a good thing
ealready_value 6mo ago
As far as I can tell, it seemed very clear that was the playbook for about a year now. Its been regularly assumed they're selling plans as a major loss-leader because people can "spend" thousands of dollars a months on a plan if they were charged at API rates. I think there's good evidence that even the API rates are sold at a loss. I think its assumed in the LLM model business that the models themselves are not a good moat, the next model by another company is just as likely to be as good as the current model. So companies like Anthropic have to tighten the noose slowly to start recovering their costs. This appears to be one of those steps.
- infecto 6mo ago
  The simpler explanation is probably some mix of marketing and also an expected use from people paying for a plan. The money to be made is not from plans ever. It’s in everyone’s best interest for these companies to accurately oversubscribe plans. Enterprise is where the money is to be made and I don’t feel that pricing has changed much on that end.

tommek4077 6mo ago

If you would be honest, everyone understood that this is a work around that us not there to last.

jadar 6mo ago

What's the subtext here? I don't live under a rock, but there have been so many Anthropic kerfuffles that I have lost track.

schnitzelstoat 6mo ago
Using -p (non-interactive mode) now uses API pricing, not subscription (so it's now more expensive). But if you have a subscription you get some free credits for it.
walthamstow 6mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125552
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]

frangonf 6mo ago

> Impacting devrel is just collateral damage, which is on par for a company which believes coding is going away any time now. This makes sense.

ochronus 6mo ago

Yeah, claude code is mostly unusable at this point. It's been in a constant decline for a good 1-2 months. It's more like a scam now.

quietsegfault 6mo ago
What are the biggest problems you've seen? Is it mostly related to limits for the subscription plans? Within my circles (mostly big enterprises), I see more and more of my friends using Claude, and spending money on it, so they must be getting some sort of value out of it. For my uses, I've also been successful with Claude Code, though someone else is paying for my tokens.
- ochronus 6mo ago
  Yes, it's related to the limits of the subscription plans. 2ish months ago the same sub started hitting limits earlier and earlier on very similar tasks/codebases. Then they said, Oh, sorry, it was a caching bug, now it's fixed. It wasn't. Then a couple more bugs. Still no fix. Recently they announced "doubling the limits" (made possible by the Grok deal) - still hitting limits super fast compared to how it used to be 2+ months ago. Moreover, the models got somewhat dumber and slower, too.
  - electric_mayhem 6mo ago
    Also, they seem to ignore auto mode, seizing on any reason to stop, and sometimes just stopping despite saying they’re proceeding with something. Basically, ongoing enshittification.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

nickdothutton 6mo ago

I really wish Anthropic would consult some monetization experts. Their recent strategy has been all over the place and they are burning early goodwill.

ochronus 6mo ago
I don't think they are clueless, but rather, struggling. Being an AI provider is a money burner, and they probably don't have enough fuel for the fire anymore, so they are trying things to squeeze more $$$ and limit usage at the same time.
- potsandpans 6mo ago
  I don't really expect a company run by radical effective altruists / ai doomers to have good business sense. They had a decent product and squandered a lot of dev goodwill almost overnight.
  - ochronus 6mo ago
    I see your point, but I'd be surprised if they'd lose a significant user base in the end; the hype is just way too high
Henchman21 6mo ago
They asked Claude, what more can they do?!

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 6mo ago

Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126281

radu_floricica 6mo ago

Max x20 usage is so cheap, that it's pretty obviously subsidized. And the non-interactive usage is the easiest to explode. They could play games with "reasonable use" and whack a mole accounts that are obviously farming it, but their approach is ultimately more fair. And I say this as somebody who just discovered agent orchestration and would absolutely love their limits to remain as they are.