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Comment by nlh

4 hours ago

What's remarkable to me is how deep OpenAI is going on "ChatGPT as communication partner / chatbot", as opposed to Anthropic's approach of "Claude as the best coding tool / professional AI for spreadsheets, etc.".

I know this is marketing at play and OpenAI has plenty of resources developed to advancing their frontier models, but it's starting to really come into view that OpenAI wants to replace Google and be the default app / page for everyone on earth to talk to.

OpenAI said that only ~4% of generated tokens are for programming.

ChatGPT is overwhelmingly, unambiguously, a "regular people" product.

  • I mean, yes, but also because it's not as good as Claude today. Bit of a self fulfilling prophecy and they seem to be measuring the wrong thing.

    4% of their tokens or total tokens in the market?

    • > I mean, yes, but also because it's not as good as Claude today.

      I'm not sure, sometimes GPT-5 Codex (or even the regular GPT-5 with Medium/High reasoning) can do things Sonnet 4.5 would mess up (most recently, figuring out why some wrappers around PrimeVue DataTable components wouldn't let the paginator show up and work correctly; alongside other such debugging) and vice versa, sometimes Gemini 2.5 Pro is also pretty okay (especially when it comes to multilingual stuff), there's a lot of randomness/inconsistency/nuance there but most of the SOTA models are generally quite capable. I kinda thought GPT-5 wasn't very good a while ago but then used it a bunch more and my views of it improved.

    • Their tokens, they released a report a few months ago.

      However, I can only imagine that OpenAI outputs the most intentionally produced tokens (i.e. the user intentionally went to the app/website) out of all the labs.

  • Yes, just look at the stats on OpenRouter. OpenAI has almost totally lost the programming market.

    • OpenRouter probably doesn't mean much given that you can use the OpenAI API directly with the openai library that people use for OpenRouter too.

I think there's a lot of similarity between the conversationalness of Claude and ChatGPT. They are both sycophantic. So this release focuses on the conversational style,it doesn't mean OpenAI has lost the technical market. People a reading a lot into a point-release.

I think this is because Anthropic has principles and OpenAI does not.

Anthropic seems to treat Claude like a tool, whereas OpenAI treats it more like a thinking entity.

In my opinion, the difference between the two approaches is huge. If the chatbot is a tool, the user is ultimately in control; the chatbot serves the user and the approach is to help the user provide value. It's a user-centric approach. If the chatbot is a companion on the other hand, the user is far less in control; the chatbot manipulates the user and the approach is to integrate the chatbot more and more into the user's life. The clear user-centric approach is muddied significantly.

In my view, that is kind of the fundamental difference between these two companies. It's quite significant.