Comment by JumpCrisscross
17 hours ago
It’s pretty wild how badly Altman siding with Hegseth has backfired. (And how competently Dario has played his hand.)
I don’t think that’s the ultimate cause of the turnaround in fortunes. But it strikes me, at least from the investor and potentially urban-consumer perspectives, as a pivotal moment in both companies’ fortunes.
What backfired?
Ant's recent rise has little to none to do with retail subscribers, it is Claude Code with Opus 4.5+, followed by their Mythos stunt
I would say the flood of $20 Claude Subscribers due to news cycle backfired on them, now everyone is getting worse outputs and exposed their shortage on compute, which they can't fix anytime soon.
Pretty much everyone I know has both cc and codex now, just because how unreliable cc has become.
> would say the flood of 20+ Claude Subscribers due to news cycle backfired
This is a good hypothesis. I suspect we are both correct.
The PR boost from Anthropic standing its ground drove signups. That, in turn, drove investors. But the users also drove utilization, which degraded quality across the board.
My hypothesis rests on Anthropic’s user mix having significantly shifted to consumers (versus enterprise) after the mix-up. Whenever we get public numbers it would be interesting to test that.
> What backfired?
I think it was psychological to a degree. For many consumers OpenAI, or at least ChatGPT was AI. The controversy was enough for folks to be introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.
I agree with OP though that this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point.
> introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.
This is true. OpenAI WAS the story of AI, now it is just 50% of it, at max. Losing the monopoly of imagination towards AGI is bad for them.
One thing I don't agree though, consumers aren't the important part of AI, they are a liability.
AI is too expensive, consumers can't pay for it. Instead they will compete with enterprise for the same tokens, with less money.
> controversy was enough for folks to be introduced to competitors
This is my suspicion. Consumers hadn’t previously heard of Anthropic and Claude. Now they had, particularly in cities.
> this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point
Also agree. Hence why I said “I don’t think” the fight is “the ultimate cause.”
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I use both CC and Codex because one is not enough and 5x for $100 is too much.
>> followed by their Mythos stunt
"Stunt", eh?
Alphabet makes $30 billion profit per quarter.
> Alphabet makes $30 billion profit per quarter
Sure. Neither OpenAI or Anthropic do. Amazon and Google have followed institutional investors bidding up Anthropic over OpenAI in private markets, all of which—I suspect—followed user-pattern shifts following the fiasco. (Well, fiascos. Altman is a host unto himself.)
Which means they can allow themselves to blast money left and right? Its still a big investment.
they can't allow themselves NOT to blast money left and right
Yes
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It was enough for me to dig much deeper into OpenAI, where before we almost exclusively used them for services with any form of SLA.
You're saying it was a turning point for you to get more embedded with them? Way to be killer robot positive, I guess...
Good call out because I was a little unclear.
Opposite of what you said. The "dig" was not retrenching to more use, but rather I evaluated what I saw them doing and have migrated our company to much better options.
Is the simpler explanation that Alpha was already an investor and Anthropic has been making strides in their business model?
> Is the simpler explanation that Alpha was already an investor
Individually, yes. Anthropic surging in private markets the weekend after the supply-chain risk designation, and raising from not only Google but also Amazon in such short clip (following credibly reports of it turning down $800+ billion valuation cheques from financial investors), all while OpenAI gets pilloried in the press and struggles to hold its $800bn valuation in private markets, collectively—to me—paints a bigger picture.
Please share how OpenAI is struggling in the private markets.
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Actually I have the opposite take. This is largely a play to procure compute capacity (and I suspect, distribution via Google Cloud), and I think Dario wildly underestimated the amount of demand they would see.
I always wondered why Anthropic was not out there feverishly scrambling to procure compute like the other big players. While Altman was being laughed at as a "podcasting bro asking for trillions in investment" Dario was on Dwarkesh expounding on how tricky it is to predict the demand for capacity. Now Dario has to give equity to a competitor to get compute. (OpenAI does this too, of course, but I suspect the terms are much better.)
At this point, it's pretty clear that compute is the only moat in this business. Even as an outsider, the extreme demand curves and compute crunch were painfully obvious, so this seems like a serious strategic error on Dario's part.
"(And how competently Dario has played his hand.)"
lol hes barely done anything, but sometimes that is all that's necessary when a bozo opponent is hell-bent on screwing things up. He didn't get fired the first time for no reason.
> hes barely done anything, but sometimes that is all that's necessary when a bozo opponent is hell-bent on screwing things up
An former chess instructor told me most games are won not by brilliant maneuver, but by not screwing up. Repeatedly making the boring play is a winning strategy far more often than any mastermind play.
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> your TDS
Wat?
DESPERATELY trying to insinuate that the only possible reason to acknowledge that many people find distasteful the association between OpenAI and the desire for autonomous killbots MUST be that people are being unfair to Trump because of mental illness.
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He thinks you insulted his daddy somehow and is having a temper tantrum about it.
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Hegseth represents existing military priorities. The original comment presents the issue as if it's isolated to a single administrator.
It wouldn't call it TDS but it does project a severe political blind spot.