Hacker News Reader

Comment by ftchd | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI is a bit more scattered brained and spread across multiple products.

Anthropic is way more focused. That helps in a way that builds upon another: their product tends to be better and the people's perception of it as well.

But "much less"? OpenAI needs a month or two of good choices, progress & announcements, and that flips. On the other hand, Deepseek could blow both out of the water unexpectedly, ending the argument about who has the superior tech.

There's also the Elon factor. Anthropic has a good relationship with Elon (to the point where he discounted the compute sold to them by quite a lot) while OpenAI/Sama is the devil to him.

View on HN

> Anthropic is way more focused. That helps in a way that builds upon another: their product tends to be better and the people's perception of it as well.

But they are still not likely to be investment-grade at IPO.

mostly because they got all those 500B hardware commitments on balance sheet.

Without them they have best coding/other(e.g. most accountants prefer claude) model on the market, with solid increasing revenue channels and loyal customer base.

> investment-grade

Does it mean something or is it a new buzzword. I am seeing this everywhere and the traditional meaning applied to bonds doesn't apply here.

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/wall-street...

Blackstone think that post-IPO Anthropic will start out with a junk credit rating.

FT seemingly covered it too if you can see it (I can’t):

https://www.ft.com/content/59383c7f-8d82-493f-bf01-d2e862a10...

I disagree with this, most normies will never use Claude code... but they WILL use ChatGPTs various modes and apps that handle a lot of things for them.

Their recent "intelligent ui" (forget what they call it), which turns the chat almost into a magazine is amazing for people when they start doing measuring or responses comeback as little graphs or diagrams showing this or that.

Claude is still not able to generate pixel images.

I agree Claude is better for the likes of you and I, but I see the opposite in non-technical people which is most people

Who says selling to "normies" is a value proposition in the first place ? if we're heading towards a K shaped economy - being mass market is a bad thing, and serving professionals and top of the curve is where there's money to be made. The only money in this market so far is in selling to megacorps and governments.

Also Google will eat them eventually in mass market part as well.

Normie consumers will probably not ever spend more than $15/mo on LLMs as they exist currently if they would spend money at all so their LTV will probably just turn into race to the bottom performance marketing

Devs and the token-consuming services they create are probably a more valuable market than the entirety of the glorified search engine use cases that the average consumer is focused on

Yes, on one hand OpenAI pursued consumers (and as meta found this is capped) and antrhopic pursued enterprise

> consumers will probably not ever spend more than $15/mo on LLMs

they will easily generate Ads and shopping recommendations revenue challenging Google's 300B/y Ads empire.

How much tokens can "normies" use? Use with regular chat or document processing is tiny compared to what coding can consume.

You can make much more money of them since they just uncritically belief whatever the AI tells them.

Noone will sell them tokens, they will be shepherded into buying stuff (like now with ads, just better).

I suppose you are too smart to be manipulated?

You can get a bunch of small-value contracts requiring a notable amount of work to deal with complaints and outstanding payments.

The alternative are fewer but a lot more high value contracts.

> You can make much more money of them since they just uncritically belief whatever the AI tells them.

Is this true? It's my experience that "normies" take everything that AI says with a huge grain of salt.

What if I asserted that the MCP economy could be worth 5x more than LLM market since tools usually end up just being a fraction of the opportunity compared to market domination.

You would probably be wrong, but I have no idea, all of this is science fiction compared to 2015.

How could anything be bigger than Super Intelligence? Which is supposed to be the next step after AGI, which we presumably already have?

I'm tired boss...

> How could anything else be bigger than Super Intelligence? Which is supposed to be the next step after AGI, which we presumably already have?

Meh. We both do and don't have AGI, because everyone before ChatGPT thought it was obvious what it meant and it turned out we all disagreed with each other about that obvious meaning. We can't even all agree about the "artificial" part, which is the most surprising part to me, let alone "general" or "intelligence".

Quantum intelligence maybe?

What is that even supposed to be?

Whatever pumps the stock price.

Not until 2028, AGI/SI still brings in money

If you applied some thinking for a moment and not spiraled out you probably would realize the the tools that control a market are worth less to sell themselves then to utilize them.

If only..

I’m sorry what? Google invented cloud computing and instead cornered the web economy worth much much more over the past 20 years

Maybe. The problem with the MCP economy is that it's not clear yet what shape it can take. If it takes the shape of API integration solutions, then it won't be 5x. If it takes the shape of an App Store, then yes.

I think arguments for either direction are valid. On one hand, MCPs are essentially APIs used by developers. Developers will demand some form of open reusable standard, "MCP gateways" or hosts will spring up to host them, hyperscaleres will offer them, and ultimately it will be another cloud commodity.

On the other hand, some of the target users of MCPs is the consumer market rather than the developer market. An App Store model makes sense there and the provider/platform can collect the lucrative 30% cut and end consumers’ numbers makes for massive revenue opportunity. This dictates a walled garden "Agent" like Muse or Instant.

If #1 is the direction the market goes in, then more batteries-included solutions like Muse or Hermes become the next obvious step up the chain. If #2 wins, then yes having your MCP available to on a Muse App Store that Meta takes a cut of some sort would be larger.

> There's also the Elon factor. Anthropic has a good relationship with Elon (to the point where he discounted the compute sold to them by quite a lot) while OpenAI/Sama is the devil to him.

The Elon association could be a long-term negative.

It certainly didn't help the Republicans in this last election even with Elon donating half a billion dollars to them (post 2024 Elon appears to be, like AIPAC, more of a toxic association than any amount of money gained can overcome), and there are reasons to believe that flip on the political side will eventually matter on the business side of things.

Elon's Texas "home base" just flipped blue in a big way and there are likely to be high profile investigations into whatever it was he was doing with DOGE.

And perhaps most directly important to Anthropic, unless the winds change significantly in terms of the politics surrounding data centers (and I suspect if anything they will get increasingly hostile, not better), I wouldn't be surprised to see the Memphis city council get purged of pro-Colossus members, replaced by anti-data-center candidates when the next elections take place in Oct 2027.

> Deepseek could blow both out of the water unexpectedly

This is tantamount to saying that the value proposition is unknown, if a supposed trillion dollar company could get upended overnight by a startup

Where's the moat, the unassailable first mover advantage, the enterprise lock intengrations that mean nobody could realistically move you out of the way even if they had slightly better tech ? If none of these exist, investors should be scared.

It's good that we're starting to ask these questions.

DeepSeek can't come out of nowhere to match them. They don't have anywhere near enough compute for that; Liang Wenfeng said as much in his leaked comments to investors. That's the moat.

>OpenAI is a bit more scattered brained and spread across multiple products.

I wonder what came of the Jony Ive acquisition that was supposed to yield a physical product

Not sure, but in the meantime they removed the option to right click "Open in new tab" on the "New chat" button (first one in the sidebar) in chatgpt.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com