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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

This seems like Anthropic showing people how to build a thin layer around Claude. Can building a thin layer around Claude be a valuable business model? If there are good profitable UIs for Claude, wouldn't Anthropic implement them itself?

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I would indeed (like Altman promised for OpenAI; 'we're gonna steamroll you'), implement all these cases (and many more) on their side, so their 'chat' becomes a full toolkit for building, visualising, prompting etc and allow people to plugin their data/processes (maybe with a few partners for that part which they can easily replace or have multiple of).

Currently, the "Added to project" button that remains for n seconds and you have to wait for to add another file (sometimes Claude generates 4-5 files per chat) is such an annoyance that I guess they should stick to training and nothing else.

Opportunity cost. Anthropic's deal is in training Claude and whatever they choose to call their next model, not whatever weird little niche you're going after. I might not go after programming, but, say, a dnd character backstory generator would be a wrapper that's probably not interesting enough for them to build themselves to compete with yours. Or maybe it is, but your DND character backstory generator also doesn't have to use anthropic as the backend, there are others for you to choose from, so it's a bit of a standoff.

But is there any reason to use them besides a demo to investors while you actually build the business on llama? Why build a business with a permanent subscription that's the entire core to your business?

because for this hypothetical niche, Claude is better than llama. now whether or not that's actually true, I don't know, but while it would be nice to sell shovels in a gold rush, not everyone has the privilege of being able to do that. In this metaphor, some people only know how to mine for gold, and pivoting to selling shoves is an entirely different skillset that the miner doesn't posess.

I think the idea here is to build a thin layer but BYOD.

I currently work for a company where most our value add lies in the data collection, cleaning and running of proprietary algorithms. A UI like this would be a game changer for us and something that Anthropic couldn’t easily replicate due to all the IP in our data pipeline.

This...so this. There is no value capture in building a shell around Claude

Perhaps there is a lot of money you could get in short term. Enough to pay the costs and generate some profit.

Also, most people are not computer experts; if you show them something can be done using your website, they will continue to do it using your website long after others have added the same functionality.

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