Comment by kristianp

19 days ago

This is gold for Anthropic's profitability. The Claude Code addicts can double their spend to plow through tokens because they need to finish something by a deadline. OpenAI will have a similar product within a week but will only charge 3x the normal rate.

This angle might also be NVidias reason for buying Groq. People will pay a premium for faster tokens.

I switched back to 4.5 Sonnet or Opus yesterday since 4.6 was so slow and often “over thinking” or “over analyzing” the problem space. Tasks which accurately took under an minute in Sonnet 4.5 were still running after 5 minutes in 4.6 (yeah I had them race for a few tasks)

Someone of this could be system overload I suppose.

Honestly, Open AI isn't worth it. I cancelled my Open AI plan (and hopefully will delete my account soon once I export all my data out) because of philosophy differences. They shared they are evaluating a model where they can get a % of your business in exchange for letting you use code generated by their AI models. That and the possible advertising angle. But, that's not even the worst, I asked ChatGPT to fairly evaluate the risky model where one for profit corporation holds your entire intimate personal details and uses it for advertising, it staunchly defended OpenAI. That was the nail in the coffin for me.

Contrast to this - Anthropic actually asks you if you want their AI to remember details about you and they have lot of toggles around privacy. I don't care if they make money from extra tokens as long as they don't go the Open AI route.

  • > They shared they are evaluating a model where they can get a % of your business in exchange for letting you use code generated by their AI models.

    That's a gross mischaracterization of what the CFO said. She basically just said the pricing space is huge, and they've even explored things like royalty models.

    I'm guessing you just saw a headline and read nothing into it.

    • Isn't it what "evaluating a model where they can get a % of your business in exchange for letting you use code generated by their AI models" precisely mean?

      If they find that this business model is most profitable for OpenAI, and that they can somehow release models better than any competitor, wouldn't they say they want royalties ? That's what Unity (the game engine) does so it wouldn't be unseen.

    • > I'm guessing you just saw a headline and read nothing into it.

      https://openai.com/index/a-business-that-scales-with-the-val...

      "As intelligence moves into scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge. Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created. That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path."

      "Intelligence will follow the same path."

      This is from their official press release. Also, when you talk about "royalty models", what exactly do you think it means?

Gold for Anthropic but kinda shit for everyone else no? Now they have a profit motive for slowing down the normal service.

This is the Deliveroo playbook of offering a ‘premium’ service that is really just the original service with the original slowed down.

Same with speedy boarding for airlines. Now almost everyone pays for it so you don’t even get a benefit.

  • > Now they have a profit motive for slowing down the normal service.

    Sure. But for now, this is a competitive space. The competitors offer models at a decent quality*speed/price ratio and prevent Anthopic from going too far downhill.

    Actually, as I think about it... I don't enjoy any other model as much as Opus 4.5 and 4.6. For me, this is no longer a competitive space. Anthropic are in full right to charge premium prices for their premium product.

  • The difference being that Airlines and food delivery did make a profit, just figured they had to do these tricks to earn some more. Mature businesses resort to lowering quality, fake scarcity.

    Here the scarcity is real, and profits are nowhere to be seen

    These schemes will soon fall apart entirely when an open weight model can run on Groq/Cerebras/SambaNova at even higher speeds and be just fine for all tasks. Arguably already the case, but not many know yet.