I think it's because customers don't seem to mind enough to switch.
I really want to support Anthropic because of their commitments to effective altruism, but it's getting harder and harder to justify on technical merits. Sol is just faster, cheaper, and more reliable, and as good as Opus for my use cases
> I really want to support Anthropic because of their commitments to effective altruism
If you're really committed to the ideas of EA, shouldn't you dispassionately select whatever model works best for you, then make as much money as possible using that and donate it? :)
> I really want to support Anthropic because of their commitments to effective altruism
They are doing the opposite while saying the other. Zero trust about that. They are using every malicious playbook tactic these days to increase users and be more profitable and lock-in the users. Even OpenAI feels better these days.
I mean, that’s exactly what “effective altruism” is about? Getting filthy rich and powerful no matter the methods and then the vague promise of doing something good?
Not really. They seems to chase IPO so that alone proves that they can’t hold any promise about doing something good. They would need to stay as private company to have any power to do some ”good” in the end.
I've recently started using codex for most of my coding. Haven't looked back so far: It seems to reason deeper about the code it writes and has much less downtime.
Because coding is solved and there’s no need for software engineers any more.
Being charitable to Anthropic though: coding is sort of solved for a very limited definition of “solved”.
Software engineering of huge distributed systems at massive scale is very much not solved, and it seems Anthropic don’t have the human capital to do it particularly well
If we want to be even more charitable to Anthropic, they're going from nothing to hyperscaler in like 3 years. I'm as happy as anyone to dunk on the general bubble situation and people claiming their technology is too dangerous to share, then something like this happens, it's hilarious. But it's still actually hard to build a service with that much usage and every org has had some outages on their way to figure it out.
Yes I agree, I don't doubt they are dealing with some serious technical challenges.
It's not just the enormous rate of growth, LLMs and workflows are also evolving rapidly.
Whatever they planned for 1-2 years ago in terms of how they expected their stack to be used is probably already well out of date, so they'll be rearchitecting bits of a production system while it's being used
Anthropic's product is inherently unreliable even when operating at its best. Why would they bother with reliable delivery when their customers are the type clearly not interested in reliability?
Clearly they just want to be down all the time. They have the ability to throttle down traffic. I have no clue why they decide to throttle it down just enough to have the worst of both worlds, throttling and incidents. Throttle more and have zero incidents, what an incredible revelation.
They didn’t want to be down so bad they rented capacity from Elon and uptime improved dramatically. Super flaky before that, they were even playing games with response quality to lighten their load nontransparently. Not sure what the issue is today. But on average, past 90 days, good availability and quality right?
One of the Anthropic salesmen told everyone to use loops all over the place, auto mode and use Fable 5 and Opus 5 with multiple sub agents.
Then it seems they forgot about their own infrastructure which goes down once every two weeks.
Looks like most of all the engineering knowledge that was needed at Google was lost after the whole org at Anthropic is now vibing their work.
Rather than screaming “coding is solved!”, “AGI with a month” and spooking everyone with the bogus mysticism of “Mythos” which now everyone has an equivalent strong cyber model, maybe keep the lights on first before plotting the next doomsday story.
It's fun to offer this advice but I think actually practicing it is nearly impossible in many settings.
If you are a solo developer who has the patience to tinker endlessly, this advice is probably fine.
If you are responsible for provisioning AI services in a team setting, this advice starts to fall apart rapidly. OAI and Anthropic might as well be oil and water when it comes to what tools and descriptions are most ideal.
Swapping the inference provider like it's some interchangeable module is a total fantasy in most real world settings.
> Also, sometimes older models work fine
> sometimes
My users are hoping for slightly more definitive results. "Usually" or even "often" would be much preferred.
You don't neccesarily have to fallback across models. Both Anthropic and AWS Bedrock provide the same models with the same API at different endpoints and different infra. So if you have a proxy endpoint to point users at, that specific fallback case is pretty easy.
I'm not saying that works in every business or billing scenario, though.
>Also, sometimes older models work fine, Opus 4.8/4.6/4.5 are worth trying.
I would go as far as saying they are sometimes better than the newer ones! It is impressive that Opus 5 can one-shot a complex website, but it is very annoying if I only asked it to write tests.
Last week, I asked Sonnet 5 to add one line to the documentation, commit, and push. Ten minutes later, I discovered it embarked on a side quest of exploring my whole Git history, different branches, etc.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 6.6 ms ] threadI really want to support Anthropic because of their commitments to effective altruism, but it's getting harder and harder to justify on technical merits. Sol is just faster, cheaper, and more reliable, and as good as Opus for my use cases
If you're really committed to the ideas of EA, shouldn't you dispassionately select whatever model works best for you, then make as much money as possible using that and donate it? :)
They are doing the opposite while saying the other. Zero trust about that. They are using every malicious playbook tactic these days to increase users and be more profitable and lock-in the users. Even OpenAI feels better these days.
I think you mistook their declamations for commitments.
Being charitable to Anthropic though: coding is sort of solved for a very limited definition of “solved”.
Software engineering of huge distributed systems at massive scale is very much not solved, and it seems Anthropic don’t have the human capital to do it particularly well
It's not just the enormous rate of growth, LLMs and workflows are also evolving rapidly.
Whatever they planned for 1-2 years ago in terms of how they expected their stack to be used is probably already well out of date, so they'll be rearchitecting bits of a production system while it's being used
This was said recently lolol
https://x.com/bcherny/status/2090649326032945591
Then it seems they forgot about their own infrastructure which goes down once every two weeks.
Looks like most of all the engineering knowledge that was needed at Google was lost after the whole org at Anthropic is now vibing their work.
Rather than screaming “coding is solved!”, “AGI with a month” and spooking everyone with the bogus mysticism of “Mythos” which now everyone has an equivalent strong cyber model, maybe keep the lights on first before plotting the next doomsday story.
Sorry, what does Google have to do with Anthropic's outage?
Bedrock has been fine throughout today; just pick two providers and you have much more stable Claude :)
If you are a solo developer who has the patience to tinker endlessly, this advice is probably fine.
If you are responsible for provisioning AI services in a team setting, this advice starts to fall apart rapidly. OAI and Anthropic might as well be oil and water when it comes to what tools and descriptions are most ideal.
Swapping the inference provider like it's some interchangeable module is a total fantasy in most real world settings.
> Also, sometimes older models work fine
> sometimes
My users are hoping for slightly more definitive results. "Usually" or even "often" would be much preferred.
I'm not saying that works in every business or billing scenario, though.
I would go as far as saying they are sometimes better than the newer ones! It is impressive that Opus 5 can one-shot a complex website, but it is very annoying if I only asked it to write tests.
Last week, I asked Sonnet 5 to add one line to the documentation, commit, and push. Ten minutes later, I discovered it embarked on a side quest of exploring my whole Git history, different branches, etc.