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The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/2054887621336174799
46•tosh•1h ago

Comments

jameskilton•41m ago
> At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being.

If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans) and communications team (again, staffed by humans, for humans).

As both of these are actually on par with Silicon Valley standards (between medicore and atrociously bad), Anthropic cannot and should not be trusted with anything to do with AI, because whatever they do will not benefit humanity.

alach11•37m ago
> If Anthropic actually cared about humans, they would have the best customer support (staffed by humans, for humans)

I know Anthropic support is slow from firsthand experience, but it has to be pretty difficult to scale support 10-80x per year. And even more so when you have a long-tail of very low revenue usage in the form of $20/month subscriptions.

tomashubelbauer•29m ago
There is basically no support to speak of. Scaling a zero is not hard. You can be paying 200 USD a month with barely any chance of ever hearing back. Your best chance of getting support from Anthropic is the same as with any other big tech company: have a Twitter following or know someone who works there.
ausbah•15m ago
their world changing agents surely make this a non problem?
adampunk•36m ago
How would you staff a support line for a product with a billion users?
Wowfunhappy•33m ago
I mean, the simplistic answer is that if a billion people are paying you, you should be able to hire a proportional number of support staff, because you're getting additional revenue from each customer.

I can imagine scaling may be difficult, but that should be a temporary problem.

tonyedgecombe•32m ago
Does Anthropic have a billion users?
poszlem•32m ago
Imagine if they had access to a good AI! They don't even have a bot support.
troyvit•31m ago
That's just it. If they were prioritizing humans they'd have a product with a measely million users, charge more, and offer great support. Their game isn't a good product though, their game is scale because they think that's the only way to win, and winning is the only way to survive.
brookst•24m ago
Wait, how would limiting a great tool to 0.1% of the TAM demonstrate caring for humans?

Are you picturing them running a lottery for who’s allowed to use it, or an auction?

And with the loss of scale economies, it would have to be much more expensive.

So you end up charging, what, $10,000/month and only making it available to the very wealthy?

I don’t see how this game plan is better for humans. And I’m honestly not being snarky. Have you thought through how your proposed limits would work? Am I missing something?

0gs•31m ago
it's hard, but not THAT hard, to find a few dozen people who can deal with large volumes of support tickets every day. so for a company like anthropic, you'd use a customized claude to triage and then those few dozen people spend all day actually caring about solving users' problems. a contract with fin fka intercom (lol) to offload this is a step in the wrong direction imo, but then nobody pays for support so it's hard to turn it into a revenue stream.
skinfaxi•20m ago
How much budget have they allocated to support?
maplethorpe•19m ago
Don't have a billion users if you can't offer them support?
alehlopeh•9m ago
Like, what? Since when can you control how many people want your product?
ungovernableCat•27m ago
Extremely cynical take, but they're probably being honest. They wanna serve humanity. But maybe they only consider a small part of the population to be relevant humans.
Applejinx•10m ago
To whom?
qaz_plm•41m ago
https://xcancel.com/josevalim/status/2054887621336174799
siliconpotato•40m ago
Find it surprising that there are people still under the delusion that they have an audience of humans on twitter worth speaking to
skrebbel•39m ago
You think a bot cross-posted this tweet to HN?
Imustaskforhelp•24m ago
Jose valim is the creator of elixir for reference. He definitely includes a fan following within the elixir community. So its not much about twitter as much as the guy.

I mean even on top of my head, I still remember when jose commented back to me and it was a highlight for a few days as I told my friend about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234633

> I have a fun anecdote. About 5-6 years ago, Elixir completely disappeared from the top 100 after spending some time in the top 50. People reached out to me and then I reached out to TIOBE to understand why and the reason given was "bad presence on Amazon".

> After further investigation, the root cause seemed to be that we finally had enough published Elixir books. At the time, if you searched for "xyz programming" on Amazon and only found a few results, Amazon would pad those results with non-relevant entries. However, because Elixir reached about 20-30 books, we were no longer padded, so we suddenly got worse rankings than every other language with only a handful of books. This happened on every Amazon domain they searched on, so it compounded and effectively kicked us out of the top 100 altogether. This all happened at a time Elixir language activity had already reached top 25 on GitHub PRs/stars.

So although my comment has gotten a little offtopic but people have literally written books about elixir (the language he created).

My point is, people like to listen to jose and he's a really chill guy from what I know of him and elixir feels like a great language :-D

DiabloD3•20m ago
That doesn't actually answer the original poster's commentary, however.

Humans have left Twitter, its all propaganda and spam bots just spamming and propagandizing each other.

José Valim needs to move to either Bluesky (if he prefers to stay within the corporate ecosystem) or Mastodon (which is where the entirety of the FOSS universe went).

skinfaxi•18m ago
Humans are still on twitter. Maybe the people José Valim wants to reach are on twitter and not those other platforms.
Imustaskforhelp•5m ago
> José Valim needs to move to either Bluesky (if he prefers to stay within the corporate ecosystem) or Mastodon (which is where the entirety of the FOSS universe went).

Personally, I am not particularly on X so much as much as I am on bluesky, and I would really appreciate Jose joining bluesky.

But at the end of the day, I might take critique with the idea of needs

Nobody needs to do anything. It's his freedom and I just searched and Jose is literally on bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:6h6jhmuogujxac24oilywd45 but his account is inactive since last message of 11 months ago.

So I think that he's open to new platforms and old habits die hard perhaps. I don't wish to defend X because I don't particularly like it, but being honest, it is what it is.

> Humans have left Twitter, its all propaganda and spam bots just spamming and propagandizing each other.

Can't say about all but I can indeed confirm that when I tried to make a new account and post something, I was literally recommended tweets basically saying "like this tweet/follow us to get 1000 followers or buy these followers" when I had posted a video for an product.

davidw•31m ago
LLMs represent a big shift of power towards capital until such time as local ones are 'good enough'.
dormento•21m ago
That's true. But keep in mind capital can be trivially used to influence policy so that local ones are eventually disallowed.
XorNot•5m ago
When has that ever happened though?

LLMs are software there's no plausible way to stop them running locally.

adamors•20m ago
Yes, this is the main point, employees will have less and less leverage (I'm even seeing AI doing interviews now, good luck). Soon we'll be explaining to an AI why we aren't as productive as two weeks ago.
jnovek•10m ago
AI interviews are a hard “no”. If I’m going to invest my time in an interview, the company must as well.
parliament32•22m ago
It really is the doordash/uber playbook all over again eh? Sell at a massive loss, gain userbase, then gradually boil the frog by adding fees, removing features, and increasing prices. Except instead of doing this a few years down the line, they're speedrunning the tighten-the-noose phase.

Unfortunately the competition is nipping at their heels so there's a good chance this blows up in their faces.

intrasight•14m ago
There is competition. And there is no moat nor network effect. I don't think it'll blow up in their faces if they provide a product and service that people value which demonstratively they have. But it may not be so lucrative to them or their shareholders.
Aboutplants•10m ago
“Unfortunately”?

Uh, that’s a good thing

ealready_value•9m ago
As far as I can tell, it seemed very clear that was the playbook for about a year now. Its been regularly assumed they're selling plans as a major loss-leader because people can "spend" thousands of dollars a months on a plan if they were charged at API rates. I think there's good evidence that even the API rates are sold at a loss.

I think its assumed in the LLM model business that the models themselves are not a good moat, the next model by another company is just as likely to be as good as the current model. So companies like Anthropic have to tighten the noose slowly to start recovering their costs. This appears to be one of those steps.

infecto•6m ago
The simpler explanation is probably some mix of marketing and also an expected use from people paying for a plan. The money to be made is not from plans ever. It’s in everyone’s best interest for these companies to accurately oversubscribe plans. Enterprise is where the money is to be made and I don’t feel that pricing has changed much on that end.
infecto•8m ago
I think people are being too generous with these comparisons. Not defending Anthropic but at the same time they are releasing new features and adjusting cost at pretty record speed for a new industry. Uber/doordash were subsidizing cost for what felt like a decade. Anthropic and related companies are adjusting price within months.

To me the bigger takeaway is that these business are seeing massive volume in use and figuring out how to price the products accordingly.

hdndjsbbs•3m ago
They have to speedrun boiling the frog because the capital expenditure is insane. Remains to be seen just how fast you can boil a frog before the frog notices
afavour•8m ago
I still think/hope/pray the future will be on-device models. That will blow up the existing model but I think a company could still make good money with a "majority local/remote for the really challenging stuff" model.

The problem is that today's AI companies have taken on so much funding that a reasonable, not crazy profit ratio isn't enough for them.

doikor•7m ago
It was very clear from the beginning purely from how much it costs to train and run the inference.

Someone has to pay the 7 trillion (the current projections for the AI datacenter build up)

AlexandrB•3m ago
How do we tell the doordash/uber playbook from the moviepass playbook? Because the latter would be awful to build your business on.
tommek4077•15m ago
If you would be honest, everyone understood that this is a work around that us not there to last.
jadar•11m ago
What's the subtext here? I don't live under a rock, but there have been so many Anthropic kerfuffles that I have lost track.
schnitzelstoat•7m ago
Using -p (non-interactive mode) now uses API pricing, not subscription (so it's now more expensive). But if you have a subscription you get some free credits for it.
walthamstow•6m ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125552
frangonf•7m ago
> Impacting devrel is just collateral damage, which is on par for a company which believes coding is going away any time now.

This makes sense.

ochronus•5m ago
Yeah, claude code is mostly unusable at this point. It's been in a constant decline for a good 1-2 months now. It's more like a scam now.

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