Comment by g-mork
2 days ago
Imagine having a finite pool of GPUs worth more than their weight in gold, and an infinite pool of users obsessed with running as many queries against those GPUs in parallel as possible, mostly to review and generate copious amounts of spam content primarily for the purposes of feeling modern, and all in return for which they offer you $20 per month. If you let them, you must incur as much credit liability as OpenAI. If you don't, you get destroyed online.
It almost makes me feel sorry for Dario despite fundamentally disliking him as a person.
Hello old friend, I've been expecting you.
First of all, custom harness parallel agent people are so far from the norm, and certainly not on the $20 plan, which doesn't even make sense because you'd hit token limit in about 90 seconds.
Second, token limits. Does Anthropic secretly have over-subscription issues? Don't know, don't care. If I'm paying a blistering monthly fee, I should be able to use up to the limit.
Now I know you've got a clear view of the typical user, but FWIW, I'm just an aging hacker using CC to build some personal projects (feeling modern ofc) but still driving, no yolo or gas town style. I've reached the point where I have a nice workflow, and CC is pretty decent, but it feels like it's putting on weight and adding things I don't want or need.
I think LLMs are an exciting new interface to computers, but I don't want to be tied to someone else's idea of a client, especially not one that's changing so rapidly. I'd like to roll my own client to interface with the model, or maybe try out some other alternatives, but that's against the TOS, because: reasons.
And no, I'm not interested in paying metered corporate rates for API access. I pay for a Max account, it's expensive, but predictable.
The issue is Anthropic is trying for force users into using their tool, but that's not going to work for something so generic as interfacing with an LLM. Some folks want emacs while others want vim, and there will never be a consensus on the best editor (it's nvim btw), because developers are opinionated and have strong preferences for how they interface with computers. I switched to CC maybe a year ago and haven't looked back, but this is a major disappointment. I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability, I just want the freedom to hack on my own client.
You're not "rolling your own client." You're using a subscription that prices in a specific usage pattern, the one mediated by their client, and trying to route around it to extract more value than you're paying for. That's not hacking, it's arbitrage, and pretending it's about editor philosophy is cope.
Anthropic sells two products: a consumer subscription with a UI, and an API with metered pricing. You want the API product at the subscription price. That's not a principled stance about interface freedom, it's just wanting something for less than it costs.
The nvim analogy doesn't land either. Nobody's stopping you from writing your own client. You just have to pay API rates for it, because that's the product that matches what you're describing. The subscription subsidises the cost per token by constraining how you use it. Remove the constraint, the economics break. This isn't complicated.
"I don't give a shit about Anthropic's credit liability," right, but they do, because it's their business. You're not entitled to a flat-rate all-you-can-eat API just because you find metered pricing aesthetically displeasing.
It seems to me the consumer subscription still has metered token limits (it's not all you can eat), so why should it matter how we use those tokens?
As my sibling mentioned, it's not all-you-can-eat, it's metered and capped. Is it the client mediating usage patterns? I don't know, but why not do it server-side and let people use it however they want? Control of course, but that's not in the interest of users.
I'm not trying to arbitrage or route around anything, I just want predictable billing to access the model. Maybe the API would be cheaper for me, I don't know. I'm just a normal user, not scheduling an agent army to blast at maximum 24/7.
You don't need to explain what Anthropic is selling, I get it, but you're off-base claiming that I'm pretending about editor philosophy as cope. I think Anthropic is where they are today because they have a good model for coding, made popular by software folks who value things like editor choice and customization. Anthropic is free to do as they wish of course, as am I, but I'm displeased with their decision here, and voicing my opinion about it.
If usage is truly constrained by the client not the server, I guess I can't argue that, but it still feels bad as an end user. As a consumer, I just want a fair deal and freedom to use what I purchase however I see fit. But that seems harder to find these days, and most businesses seem intent on maximum extraction by any means possible. I might be wrong, but this feels like business move to build a consumer moat by controlling the interface, because consumers don't want the API. It's not in my best interests, which alienates me as a customer.
Why do you fundamentally dislike him as a person?
The only thing I've seen from him that I don't like is the "SWEs will be replaced" line (which is probably true and it's more that I don't like the factuality of it).
It’s kinda obvious he’s a well spoken shark. Personally not an issue for me, you have to be at the top of a unicorn, but it isn’t something people in general like.
Interesting, are there any sources for the shark claims ? I recently saw an interview with Hassabis and him and thought: <well at least those are two actual scientist leading AI labs/devisions>, so that gave me some hope that what they discussed regarding security and eventual equal distribution of "AI" benefits had some genuine intention.