Comment by MisterKent

3 days ago

Wow. Didn't realize OAI was astroturfing hacker news now...

All the labs astroturf all the social media, HN is not unique and OpenAI wouldn't be the only ones. I even receive offers sometimes on my email put in my HN profile, asking me to post about their project in exchange for money.

Be skeptical of anything you read online, not just what you think is "obvious astroturf".

  • I don't think Google does, they are way too massive, disorganized, and "by the book" for something like that. Also AI isn't life or death for them.

    Besides they own 15% of Anthropic and cutting massive compute deals with them. On top of that they also have compute deals with OAI.

    Google is positioning itself to win no matter what happens, Gemini is almost looking like a side project next to their cloud business.

  • Wait what? Why don't I get emails like this too? /s

    (on a serious note, do you feel comfortable naming and shaming such companies, this is sort of a serious accusation imo and if not then how much money they are trying to give. It would be an interesting discussion and feel free to mail me if its confidential, waiting for your response and have a nice day :-D)

    • Nah, maybe one day I do a collective public post of it, for now I just try to get their company and/or name first, then forward it to HN themselves so they can ban them and keep an eye out for them.

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The HN guidelines explicitly ask you not to make these accusations.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

I probably wouldn’t say they always had the best model but for years OAI was definitely pushing the limits both on model quality and product offerings. It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.

  • > It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.

    Anthropic's stuff been useful for the last two years I'd say, especially in the beginning of Claude Code, but as soon as the Codex TUI was available, I was daily-driving both of them, literally executing the same prompts for each of them and comparing the final results, and Codex simply writes better code in 9/10 cases (but still not always).

    • I was a regular Claude Code user but Codex eventually won me over due to a few factors:

      1. Less interaction required over long horizon tasks.

      2. You actually get the amount of tokens they advertize. It's been an open secret on r/Claude that over the last several months, due to supposed "bugs" in Claude, users on the Max plan have seen over 50% of their tokens used on a single prompt. Super annoying.

      3. Really strong image generation capabilities.

      That's not to say OpenAI's current generosity will last, but for now I definitely see Codex as the stronger option between the two.

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    • Claude Code has only been around for a year and change. At least for our internal tests 2 years ago Anthropic models started to at least become semi-useful but they still were not great, they struggled with structured output. Prior to that their alignment strategy made the products highly unhelpful in an API context. The past 6 months to a year is where Anthropic has really shined, they have model parity and sometimes taking the lead and more importantly their product offering on the consumer side has crushed it.

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There are plenty of shills for all of the major labs on this website. Usually checking a history of comments of a suspicious user reveals that quite fast.