Yes, the subsidized loss leader product is evolving fast. If you want stable costs, the API plan is right there. You simultaneously say they cannot afford the API pricing but also claim they are overcharging, it sounds like you just want to get mad ad Anthropic.
> If you want stable costs, the API plan is right there.
Why don't you ask Microsoft [0], Tesla [1] and Alibaba [2] on why they believe it is not only expensive, but it also a security risk for them?
Like I said, You don't get anything for defending Anthropic and they are not going to hire you into their sales team.
> You simultaneously say they cannot afford the API pricing but also claim they are overcharging, it sounds like you just want to get mad ad Anthropic.
Read it again. "Except they themselves cannot afford it"
They is "Anthropic" given that I said "themselves". Who are the ones that cannot afford to subsidize tokens forever due to the even cheaper Chinese alternatives. They all know that the answer is open weight models and why Anthropic cannot raise prices and why the above companies are ditching them for open weight models.
Agreed. The level of entitlement around how we all deserve to use a product in a category that didn't even exist 12 months ago with increasing performance at the same price forever is insane.
I also think that the people who are complaining loudest about Anthropics pricing and changes are the customers Anthropic is least interested in retaining.
From my experience people who complain loudly about the price tend to be people who are either (1) working primarily on hobby projects so are unwilling to pay much for Claude Code or (2) using astronomical amount of tokens through elaborately orchestrated multi-agent setups that only make sense when someone else is paying the bill.
Short term yes. But there is a reason why IDEs, game engine and other development tools have very high cheap or free versions for this market segment. Since these users end up having a huge influence on what companies they work at / end up working at spend their money on.
Of course LLMs are a commodity at this point but if someone is using Codex, Pi etc. at home it becomes more likely they won’t be picking Claude Code at their day job either.
C'mon, get real. The monthly subscription costs on these services are several multiples what software engineers have formerly paid for development tools.
I have worked in shops that made it difficult for me just to get a paid for RustRover or CLion license, and had to out of pocket it. The monthly sub for Claude or Codex is equivalent to the total license cost for that.
It's not entitled to expect your $200/month tooling expense to have a level of reliability and consistency.
If your employer is paying for it, fine. I am my own employer. I don't fancy becoming dependent on tooling that costs me as much as my family's whole monthly mobile plan and then having it degrade in unpredictable ways or rug pull me on quota. Or have geo-political drama as part of its release cycle.
Consumers want to pay as little as possible and companies want to charge them as much as they possibly can. That’s how markets work I don’t understand what does “entitlement” have to do with anything. If loud consumers somehow manage to coerce companies into lowering prices/offering better products that’s a massive win for almost everyone (of course usually its just noise that doesn’t change anything, however it did work on a few occasions).
The the article was talking about how Anthropic costs too much and how there are cheaper options available then yes I would agree with you. But this article has a conspiratorial and moral crusade tone which is what I'm responding to. The article says "In my opinion (which may be in the minority), it’s unethical to:
lock in your customers to a closed system for maximum market gain
put down the competition when they pose a risk to your product
make hypocritical claims on how your product increases quality when your own software sucks
artificially restrict one’s own product as a fear-mongering marketing stunt
test dynamic pricing on your users to see how much more they’ll pay for less
change the terms of your product after the sale without notifying your user base"
anthropic is not just a business operating in a market, they are "unethical" and "fear-mongering" and "hypocritical".
"And its like he claims "its not ai data centers themselves, its the construction of them" as if its an important distinction that exempts data centers from harm. It's not."
But this has nothing to do with data centers, it has to do with construction. I think getting every mad at all new construction in general is a very dangerous path to go down.
The original paper that started this meme said "data centers consume water indirectly through the water used for electricity generation" and then counted water evaporating out of Lake Mead behind the Hoover dam as water use. This made the numbers seem gigantic, people got mad at it on social media, and 1 year later here we are.
"On one hand, I actually don’t begrudge Anthropic not wanting to help its competitors; on the other hand, what should be blisteringly clear is that Anthropic does not think that anyone else other than them should even be making frontier LLMs."
I don't find this blisteringly clear at all. A company making it harder for competitors to steal their IP is perfectly normal. This is Ben Thompson's personal grudge against Anthropic showing, yet again. He can't think rationally about this company.
Ah, yes. California. Where large swathes of costal areas hover between 60ºF and 80ºF. We are talking about Nevada the weather of locality matters and where it can be supremely hot.
You posted the Texas grid, I posted the California grid. Here's the NW grid which includes Nevada. Same thing, demand peaks around 6PM when people get home and turn on their houses.
I'm not sure that follows as the biggest driver. 4 PM is nearly as high as as 6 PM. You would expect a big jump at 5 PM, but the biggest jump is from noon to 2 PM. Just looking at today's temperatures on my front porch in Reno, it was 93°F at 2 PM, it peaked at 95°F at 3:30 PM, and it didn't fall back down to 93°F until 5 PM. Some of that sustained power usage probably is people getting home, but a lot of it is A/C.
Unless the graph explicitly states that it includes distributed behind-the-meter solar, then any dip in demand that looks like the inverse of solar is probably grid demand being replaced with local generation on homes and factory roofs or industrial land.
People regularly use the demand being supplied by solar to argue that solar isn't delivering when people need electricity.
The yearly peak grid demand in California is moving later in the day and later in the year due to this effect.
That's the whole point. The OP was lamenting that consumers are getting less for selling their behind-the-meter solar, but if everyone has behind-the-meter solar then that solar is cheap to worthless when the sun is shining. And that's a good thing! The sun is free, all of us utilizing it during the day for free means electricity is cheap during the day. It's when the sun sets and all that solar goes offline and demand rises that electricity gets expensive again.
Ben says over and over again that he's not making the argument about the importance of democratic oversight, but he clearly is. He doesn't like Amodei and is happy to see him fail, and it comes through loud and clear in the piece.
Anthropic, like any other US company, should be free to not sell to the government if they don't want to. These other arguments about oversight are nonsense.
I don't think he ever said in the article that he is not making the argument about the importance of democratic oversight, if anything, in the conclusion, he says:
"The way to address this new reality, however, is with new laws and through strengthening accountable oversight; cheering or even demanding that an unelected executive decide how and where such powerful capabilities can be used is the road an even more despotic future."
But I think you drastically misunderstood the point of this article. Ben is pointing out the implications of Amodei's analogy of advanced AI being like nuclear weapons. The government has a monopoly on nuclear weapons and has extreme regulations and oversight on the companies that help build nuclear weapons for it. And those companies do not tell the government how or when they can use the nukes.
So if advanced AI is like nuclear weapons, why can an unelected executive tell a democratically elected government how to use it?
This analogy makes no sense. You and I can go use Claude right now. The government clearly doesn't think they are nukes. If the government wants to control this technology like a weapon then it should do that, but that's not what's happening.
That's not what is happening, yet. If this technology is at the scale of nuclear weapons, you don't think the government is going to step in and take control of it?
Potentially. Or the US government can force over control of the technology. It's impossible to predict right now the implications of this technology in 5 years, let alone 10 years.
You’re right, the analogy makes no sense. And what’s more, Dario didn’t make the analogy. This blogger took a partial quote out of context and constructed a blog post around it.
If you listen to the interview, Dario is talking about the Trump trade deal with Nvidia being allowed to sell H200 chips to China, but the USA gets some taxes. He thinks it’s a bad deal for long term national security. He likens it to “selling NK nuclear weapons and bragging that the casings are made by Boeing”.
It’s not about AI/nukes being equivalents- it’s about making a bad deal with a rival, giving them something they want / reducing your superiority, just so you can brag about having made a deal.
I'm not well-read on the history of nuclear, but is it the case that nuclear developed first in government and was then spread to private industry via gov't outreach/motivation?
Here, I think we're talking about the opposite, right? Private developed, then gov't used. It's so obvious in the first path that gov't would remain in the control, but I'm not sure how to think about what's "right" in the private-to-gov't path.
You're absolutely right and the order of operations matters. But I'm not arguing about what's right in this case. If as Dario says, that advanced AI is at the level of nuclear weapons, then governments around the world will see it as a threat to their power and sovereignty.
Govt creates something: you see that tight control from the beginning. Makes logical sense.
Private company creates something gov't sees as a threat: private companies are allowed to express opinions and make decisions irrespective of threat or not, right?
One example I'm thinking of: Apple's stand on cracking devices. Gov't wants to crack into a phone and Apple won't do it for them without right measures in place. I think Apple SHOULD be able to make that call. Whether it's right or wrong is still murky.
If Ford sells Broncos, and Pete Hegseth says “I’m Batman, we want them with RPG launchers”, Ford is not required to create Bronco’s with RPG launchers.
If Pete wants AI killer robots and AI domestic mass surveillance tools, he can go put out a RFQ like literally any other DOD DARPA project in history and get bids.
You're right in those cases. But if what Dario says is true, that advanced AI is on the scale of nuclear weapons, then that is a threat to the power and sovereignty of the government.
That’s not what Dario said. This guy Ben took a partial quote and then used it to construct a strawman. And hey look, he was successful, you bought it.
Dario criticized the Trump admin policy of allowing Nvidia to sell advanced chipsets to China as being poor for long term national security. He said our model edge is dependent on the HW edge, and likened this Trump “deal” to selling nuclear weapons to NK and bragging that the casings were made by Boeing. You can go watch the video yourself.
He was attacking the Trump trade deal as being bad, and characterizing Trump as more concerned with being able to name drop a US company and say he made a great deal, rather than actually doing what is in the best interest of the country.
Do you just believe everything you read on the internet? Or was it Ben the bloggers amazing credentials of being an Apple INTERN in the company culture group? He’s a real philosopher king I’m sure.
I thought this was a flimsy piece. Agree with your conclusion.
Also - I'm surprised the government didn't say "ok" and then use Claude (as they wished) anyways. Don't know the details and am oversimplfying, but seems like a plausible path without much recourse/oversight.
