I really enjoyed using Claude but the ever changing limits, weird policies (limited to Claude Code, you can't run Openclaw, etc) made switching a very easy choice.
OpenAI simply provides more value for the money at the moment.
The limits are what did it for me. They kept boasting about Opus performance and improvements, practically begging me to try it out, and when I did, it totally obliterated my usage. I'm sure its good, but I stick to Sonnet because I've been burned bad. Never had that problem with ChatGPT, but it turns out they're just unprincipled and evil, which is a shame.
It's funny how the false choice of American politics (Red vs Blue) also makes it into its consumerist corporatist life. That Anthropic's threadbare "limits" on government usage are seen as a heroic stand is a testament to just how far the goalposts on "ethical" deployment of AI have moved to the (fascist) right. As ever, politics precedes technology. We have Reagan's internet, we will have Trump's AI. God help us.
> OpenAI, meanwhile, has been attempting to quell the backlash against its deal with the U.S. government, putting out a blog post claiming that “our tools will not be used to conduct domestic surveillance of U.S. persons,”
As a non-US person, that sounds far more concerning than no statement at all. Because if their tools weren't used for surveillance against Europeans they would have said so as a marketing message...
There’s a surge of demand for sure, but I’m not at all convinced that it’s at OpenAI’s expense. My bet is the non-swe folks caught wind the things got seriously good at a lot of boring office work, i.e. we’re seeing diffusion of AI into the wider economy.
It helps a lot that Claude is just better. Codex isn't BAD, and in some narrow technical ways might even be more capable, but I find Claude to be hands-down the best collaborator of all the AI models and it has never been close.
All this demonstrates how non-sticky all this tech really is. When your product is basically just an API call it’s trivial to just swap you out for someone else. As such it’s unclear what the prize at the end of the present race to the bottom is.
We swapped OpenAI out for Claude and it required updating about 15 lines of code. All these guys are just commodity to us. If next week there’s a better supplier of commodity AI we’ll spend an hour and swap to something else again. There’s zero loyalty here.
Okay, premise that AI really is 'intelligent' up to the point of business decisions.
So, this all then implies that 'intelligence' is then a commodity too?
Like, I'm trying to drive at that your's, mine, all of our 'intelligence' is now no longer a trait that I hold, but a thing to be used, at least as far as the economy is concerned.
We did this with muscles and memory previously. We invented writing and so those with really good memories became just like everyone else. Then we did it with muscles and the industrial revolution, and so really strong or endurant people became just like everyone else. Yes, many exceptions here, but they mostly prove the rule, I think.
Now it seems that really smart people we've made AI and so they're going to be like everyone else?
In my case, I always use Opus 4.6 in my work, but quite often I get a 504 error, and that's quite annoying. I get errors like that with Gemini too. I can't estimate if I'd get a similar number of errors with ChatGPT, since I use it very infrequently.
But imagine that at some point one of the big 3 (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) gets very high availability, while the others have very poor availability. Then people would switch to them, even if their models were a bit worse.
Now, OpenAI has been building like crazy, and contracting for future builds like crazy too. Google has very deep pockets, so they'll probably have enough compute to stay in the game. But I fear that Anthropic will not be able to match OpenAI and Google in terms of datacenter build, so it's only a matter of time (and not a lot of time) until they'll be in a pretty tight spot.
Is there any news about how Gemini fares in this debate? I suppose they're fine with total mass surveillance ("we already do that anyway") and creating kill bots but is there any official stance? I find it hard to believe Alphabet would not make US government contracts.
I've largely found codex and claude code to be about the same however, codex tends to "think" harder and for longer which depending on the task, yields better results without too much steering.
On an unrelated note, UI is such a personal preference that it's impossible, beyond core pillars that have been studied for decades, to say one is better over the other. That being said, I like OpenAI's design system much better than Anthropic. OpenAI products (cli and chat ui) "feel" nice and consumer focused whereas Anthropic's products feel utilitarian and "designed for business".
It's is a fairly ridiculous conclusion to draw that these people are leaving ChatGPT because of their stance. I doubt OpenAI's actions play much role in the influx at all.
A couple of weeks ago, to huge numbers of people, ChatGPT was AI. The biggest public perception shift that will have come from the DoD/DoW spat will be how many people know that Claude exists at all, that they are being unreasonably punished by the government for taking a principled stance will benefit.
People have been made aware of a product, made aware that it's good enough that the government wants to use it. They have then been shown a archetypical underdog against the government narrative. That makes almost a perfect storm for gaining customers.
When they actually use the thing and discover that it actually is good, They will stay, and they will tell their friends.
At this rate they should be sending Hegseth a thank you card.
I was paying both $200+/mo and I went down to only paying Anthropic $200/mo.
My experience has, for a few months, been that OpenAI's models are consistently quite noticeably better for me, and so my Codex CLI usage had been probably 5x as much as my Claude Code usage. So it's a major bummer to have cancelled, but I don't have it in me to keep giving them money.
I'd love to get off Anthropic too, despite the admirable stance they took, the whole deal made me extra uncomfortable that they were ever a defense contractor (war contractor?) to begin with.
I left the openai platform long before this, because I expected things like this. A few called me alarmist but are now also jumping ship because of this. OpenAI has zero moral or ethical substance and people _do_ care about that. I'm extreme enough that joining openAI after a specific date works against you and your CV, not with/for you, while leaving at a specific date speaks volumes in favour of you. People are the sum of their actions, not their words and siding with / continuing to use openAI speaks volumes on who you are.
I wonder if this is actually good for Anthropic. 2.5 million new customers sounds like good news for them, except these are mostly not paying customers. It seemed like they were positioning themselves to make money by selling coding agents with a subscription fee. If that free tier mostly exists to advertise their paid tiers, then this would be kind of a drag.
We are in this fascinating stage where tokens that are nominally entirely fungible at a roughly equivalent intelligence level; yet at the same time there is huge market segmentation and differentiation in the non-tangible aspects of those tokens.
Didn’t Anthropic hire the infrastructure head from stripe and give him a CTO title? I would’ve thought that would help bring stability but if anything, things have become worse.
Many people I know initially used ChatGPT for awhile. Then after awhile they went to Gemini. Again stuck with it for awhile. And now are dabbling with Claude.
Yep there really is no switching cost it seems.
People generally want something from a model and then leave. I think people are sub-consciously forming relationships with Tech firms such that they do not care about them, and its all about what the user themselves gets. Generally there is no attachment. There's some examples of psychotic stuff but that's thankfully the exception not the norm.
That's why Apple cares deeply about its brand - it doesn't want to fall into that group of firms.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 55.2 ms ] threadOpenAI simply provides more value for the money at the moment.
As a non-US person, that sounds far more concerning than no statement at all. Because if their tools weren't used for surveillance against Europeans they would have said so as a marketing message...
https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
We swapped OpenAI out for Claude and it required updating about 15 lines of code. All these guys are just commodity to us. If next week there’s a better supplier of commodity AI we’ll spend an hour and swap to something else again. There’s zero loyalty here.
Just want to note something there:
Okay, premise that AI really is 'intelligent' up to the point of business decisions.
So, this all then implies that 'intelligence' is then a commodity too?
Like, I'm trying to drive at that your's, mine, all of our 'intelligence' is now no longer a trait that I hold, but a thing to be used, at least as far as the economy is concerned.
We did this with muscles and memory previously. We invented writing and so those with really good memories became just like everyone else. Then we did it with muscles and the industrial revolution, and so really strong or endurant people became just like everyone else. Yes, many exceptions here, but they mostly prove the rule, I think.
Now it seems that really smart people we've made AI and so they're going to be like everyone else?
In my case, I always use Opus 4.6 in my work, but quite often I get a 504 error, and that's quite annoying. I get errors like that with Gemini too. I can't estimate if I'd get a similar number of errors with ChatGPT, since I use it very infrequently.
But imagine that at some point one of the big 3 (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) gets very high availability, while the others have very poor availability. Then people would switch to them, even if their models were a bit worse.
Now, OpenAI has been building like crazy, and contracting for future builds like crazy too. Google has very deep pockets, so they'll probably have enough compute to stay in the game. But I fear that Anthropic will not be able to match OpenAI and Google in terms of datacenter build, so it's only a matter of time (and not a lot of time) until they'll be in a pretty tight spot.
On an unrelated note, UI is such a personal preference that it's impossible, beyond core pillars that have been studied for decades, to say one is better over the other. That being said, I like OpenAI's design system much better than Anthropic. OpenAI products (cli and chat ui) "feel" nice and consumer focused whereas Anthropic's products feel utilitarian and "designed for business".
A couple of weeks ago, to huge numbers of people, ChatGPT was AI. The biggest public perception shift that will have come from the DoD/DoW spat will be how many people know that Claude exists at all, that they are being unreasonably punished by the government for taking a principled stance will benefit.
People have been made aware of a product, made aware that it's good enough that the government wants to use it. They have then been shown a archetypical underdog against the government narrative. That makes almost a perfect storm for gaining customers.
When they actually use the thing and discover that it actually is good, They will stay, and they will tell their friends.
At this rate they should be sending Hegseth a thank you card.
My experience has, for a few months, been that OpenAI's models are consistently quite noticeably better for me, and so my Codex CLI usage had been probably 5x as much as my Claude Code usage. So it's a major bummer to have cancelled, but I don't have it in me to keep giving them money.
I'd love to get off Anthropic too, despite the admirable stance they took, the whole deal made me extra uncomfortable that they were ever a defense contractor (war contractor?) to begin with.
Yep there really is no switching cost it seems.
People generally want something from a model and then leave. I think people are sub-consciously forming relationships with Tech firms such that they do not care about them, and its all about what the user themselves gets. Generally there is no attachment. There's some examples of psychotic stuff but that's thankfully the exception not the norm.
That's why Apple cares deeply about its brand - it doesn't want to fall into that group of firms.