And somehow instead of prosecuting the lead in all areas, they got all hubristic and sloppy and just failed to iterate on the core product, while also failing to respond quickly when Anthropic showed that coding agents are the flywheel that makes the whole company faster.
It’s like they thought they had an unassailable monopoly and speedran to the lazy incumbent position, all in a matter of months.
Codex btw is getting very competitive. It is fast and no longer far behind.
We’re talking on the level of meta, google and probably more if they keep raising money.
They really went all in with hubris and they’re gonna get punished eventually.
Token generation is the metric Jensen Huang keeps pushing to temper analysts, which also affect nvidia’s future expected cash flows of course.
If increasing the price causes that metric to drop, the whole narrative falls apart and fear will spread in the stock market.
They’re all racing very close to the edge. Some closer than others.
1) Business: LLMs become essential to every company, and you become rich by selling the best enterprise tools to everyone.
2) Consumer: LLMs cannibalize search and a good chunk of the internet, so people end up interacting with your AI assistant instead of opening any websites. You start serving ads and take Google's lunch.
3) Superhuman AGI: you beat everyone else to the punch to build a life form superior to humans, this doesn't end up in a disaster, and you then steal underpants, ???, profit.
Anthropic is clearly betting on #1. Google decided to beat everyone else to #2, and they can probably do it better and more cheaply than others because of their existing infra and the way they're plugged into people's digital lives. And OpenAI... I guess banked on #3 and this is perhaps looking less certain now?
5.4 Extra high >> Opus 4.6
I find that for human in the loop Gemini beats both.
In all seriousness, I use Codex for work and Claude at home, and I feel like nowadays they're actually pretty competitive with each other. I don't know that it's that far behind.
I agree that they clearly erroneously assumed that no one would be able to catch up with them, though. OpenAI had such a head start that that should have been by itself a moat.
Check dev spaces like twitter and discord and all anyone talks about is claude-code, openclaw, opus 4.6 etc.
The mindshare went to anthropic.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-t...
Interesting, so there are a lot of people still eager to invest in valuations of well greater than a-quarter-trillion, but OpenAI's latest raise has sucked up all the oxygen for enthusiasm of that valuation going even higher.
Which could be a "dumb money" move ("competitor number lower, already-big-number is scary") or a "smart money" move ("Anthropic is gaining position-wise, and currently is lower valued, let's bet on the one we think is better positioned") or some mix of both.
OpenAI just raised a shit-ton so clearly there is plenty of money out there who don't think there's a bubble or even a blown opportunity there. But the wider community doesn't think they have the competition in the bag, while still being willing to invest in big-AI-cos at absolutely enormous valuations.
If local hardware/models get good enough to take 80%-90% of what people use subscriptions for today... hoo boy. Big-AI is a bet I wouldn't be confident placing billions on. Unless your horizon is more "wait for IPO or next raise or positive news, then get out ASAP" than "hold for 5+ years."
The thing is, if you’re using AI responsibly today you’re already breaking down tasks to such a granular level that you don’t need the power of Opus. You can save that for deeper research tasks.
The part I am working on is to have better tools and data to search over. Curated for my needs. Similar to the Karpathy post yesterday about his wiki. I am trying something similar and even qwen 3.5 is totally fine for most of what I do.
Disclaimer: I bought memory before the crisis started. Not sure if I would build my PC as is now..
I'm inclined to think there isn't much of an association becauss investors don't seem very concerned with morality, but I know ~dozen developers that either switched to, or started using Claude in the past month or so, while not knowing anyone that uses Codex.
They want to see the CEO communicate a path to profitability. Anthropic has - purely by focusing.
OAI in contrast is all over the place and they haven’t shown they’ve learned.
Zuckerberg got punished for his metaverse nonsense and investors were correct to be skeptical and reflect that in the stock price. Altman thinks he’s a god and the rules don’t apply to him. More fool him.
The Chinese models are catching up in quality while being a fraction of the price. The market will speak, how many devices that contributed to this thread were made in the USA?
Sure you can argue the Chinese companies are heavily subsidized, but no major LLM lab is remotely close to making a profit this decade.
OpenAI is fine with those as long as they are "legal"... So pretty much they don't care at all.
I agree Anthropic is no saint but it's much, much better than OpenAI.
ChatGPT's chat quality has recently dropped hard. While Claude is pricier, it actually takes the effort to think through complex tasks.
All the while, Chinese models are providing cheaper alternatives.
cmiles8•1h ago
“We literally couldn’t find anyone in our pool of hundreds of institutional investors to take these shares“
This doesn’t bode well for an IPO. The market is smelling a stinker.
Get your popcorn ready for a mad scramble to salvage investments if indeed the shark has been jumped.
aniekann•1h ago
igtt•1h ago
I was watching a recent Jensen Huang Q&A with analysts and it was essentially “just trust me bro”. They’re all interconnected - once there’s a correction for one player, all get affected.
Can’t wait to finally get this over with so we can finally move on.
The gap between hype and reality needs to be corrected.