Anthropic isn't your friend.
Phase 1: $200/mo prosumer engineer tool
Phase 2: AI layoffs / "it's just AI washing"
Phase 3: $20,000/mo limited release model "too dangerous" to use
Phase 4: Accelerated layoffs / two person teams. Rehiring of certain personnel at lower costs.
Phase 5: "Our new model can decompile and rewrite any commercial software. We just wrote a new kernel after looking at Linux (bye, bye GPL!) We also decompiled the latest Zelda game, ported the engine to Rust, and made a new game with it. Source code has no value. Even compiled and obfuscated code is a breeze to clone."
Phase 6: $100k/mo model that replicates entire engineering teams, only large companies can afford it. Ordinary users can't buy. More layoffs.
Phase N: People can't afford computing anymore. Everything is thin clients and rented. It's become like the private railroad industry. End of the PC era. Like kids growing up on smartphones, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.
Anothropic used to be cool before they started gating access. Limiting Claw/OpenCode was strike one. Mythos is strike two.
Y'all should have started hating on their ethics when they started complaining about being distilled. For training they conducted on materials they did not own.
We need open weights companies now more than ever. Too bad China seems to be giving up on the idea.
"You wouldn't distill an Opus."
PunchyHamster
today at 9:42 AM
Stop thinking billion dollar publicly traded companies are "cool" just because they make widget you like.
You will be backstabbed
You will be squeezed for all they can.
And you will be betrayed.
> Phase N: People can't afford computing anymore. Everything is thin clients and rented. It's become like the private railroad industry. End of the PC era. Like kids growing up on smartphones, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.
Thankfully none of them actually makes money and just runs on investment so there is a good chance bubble will drop and the price of PC equipment will... continue to rise as US gives up Taiwan to China
dns_snek
today at 12:50 PM
> Stop thinking billion dollar publicly traded companies are "cool" just because they make widget you like.
Anthropic is a private company but nevertheless, the sentiment is accurate and applies to all kinds of corporations.
What I want to know is how did they make the only LLM that doesn't sound cringe?
I think it has something to do with mode collapse (although Claude certainly has its own "tells"), but I'm not sure.
It sounds trivial but even for Agentic, I found the writing style to be really important. When you give Claude a persona, it sounds like the thing. When you give GPT a persona, it sounds like GPT half-assedly pretending to be the thing.
---
Some other interesting points about Anthropic's models. I don't know if any of these relate to my LLM style question, but seems worth mentioning:
Claude models also use way less tokens for the same task (on ArtificialAnalysis, they are a clear outlier on this metric).
And there's a much stronger common sense, subjectively. (Not sure if we have a good way to actually measure that, though.) It takes context and common sense into account, to a much greater degree.
(Which ties in with their constitution. Understanding why things are wrong at a deeper level, rather than just surface level pattern matching.)
Opus is great but it should be bigger. You notice the difference between Sonnet and Opus, but with heavy use you notice Opus's limitations, too.
hirako2000
today at 9:44 AM
Good read on the situation.
It all boils down to a brilliant but extremely expensive technology. Both to build and to run.
We've been sold a product with heavy subsidy. The idea (from Sam) scale out and see what happens.
Those who care to read between the lines can see what's happening. A perfect storm of demand that attract VCs who can't understand they are the real customers. Once they understand that it will be too late.
Regarding open weight models: eventually we will, as humanity, benefit from the astronomical capital poured into developing a technology ahead of its time. In a few years this and even more will run on edge.
Written by open source developers, likely former openai and anthropic employees who got so much cash in the bank they don't need to worry about renting their knowledge.
What leads you to say China AI is giving up on open weights?
I've been using GLM for over 6 months and pretty happy.
PunchyHamster
today at 9:45 AM
Why would any company release open weights once the investment money stops ?
Releasing open weights have been basically a PR move, the moment those companies need to actually make money they will cut it out as that reduces their client base.
They DO NOT want you to run AI. They want you to pay them to do it
Zetaphor
today at 11:10 AM
Minimax just released a new model yesterday. You're conflating one company with a countries entire industry. There's more than just Qwen coming out of China.
jhancock
today at 10:28 AM
ok. maybe. I don't know. I'm asking how you know.
z.ai did go public on the HK exchange. They are under pressures similar to other public companies.
I know that China models are increasingly being trained and run using Huawei chips instead of Nvidia. I know China has a surplus of electricity from renewables (wind, solar, hydro).
cyanydeez
today at 10:14 AM
open weights is a way to nerf your opponent and is meaningless to your business if you need to retrain a model because your trailing
So, it makes a lot of sense to get people a "demo" and claim the paid product is better.
i think a lot of people have no idea how capable local models are atm.
Two years ago a lot of people thought GPT-4o was usable for software development. I didn’t really find that to be the case in general but certainly it could do a lot of useful things. And now Qwen3.5-8B is just as capable and runs fine on an M2 MacBook Air.
cyanydeez
today at 3:05 PM
QWEN3.5 coder next runs to ~84k context before it poops out on AMD395+ w/128GB. Most of what it's good at is boilerplate find/replace/copy/paste; but being able to scaffold things out and touch up 20-30% of the code is pretty sweet.
Zetaphor
today at 11:09 AM
People keep repeating this without any real thought behind it because of the high profile resignations on the Qwen team. Meanwhile the Minimax team just released a new open weights version of their 229B model yesterday. So much for that narrative.
The AI landscape in China is larger than just Qwen and Alibaba.
andriy_koval
today at 4:28 PM
> Meanwhile the Minimax team just released a new open weights version of their 229B model yesterday.
its under new license prohibiting any commercial use.
The statement was that China was giving up on open weights, they didn't say anything about licensing. Licensing on these models has always been hit or miss depending on which lab and which release.
andriy_koval
today at 6:50 PM
but context of the statement is discussion about corps do grab and rent strategy. My understanding is that referenced Chinese model can't be argument in this context, and there is no recent 200B+ params Chinese models with friendly license.
That license is more like business source license vs open source license.
dns_snek
today at 12:57 PM
Of course, but for how long? Do you think that companies will keep giving away valuable assets for free forever, or do you think that in the near future there's going to be an open weights model that's so good that people keep using it indefinitely instead of going back to frontier model providers?
The first one is just incredibly naive, the second might be true for some people, for some tasks, but it's not going to capture the majority who're chasing the latest and greatest to "keep up".
bachmeier
today at 4:34 PM
> Do you think that companies will keep giving away valuable assets for free forever
If China is forced to choose between giving the entire AI market to the US or releasing free models, they'll be releasing free models as long as it's necessary.
Throaway199999
today at 1:30 PM
the asset's value is in being released, so yes
What does that mean?
Throaway199999
today at 5:55 PM
Every time you release the models you even the playing field out for the competition, which ruins a lot of the advantage your bigger competitors had. It also lets smaller players work on the latest tech and then you can make deals with them.
marcus_cemes
today at 9:29 AM
> We need open weights companies now more than ever.
If you're objective it to democratize AI, sure. But for those fed up with it and the devastating effects it's having on students, for example, can opt to actively avoid paying for products with AI (I say this as someone who uses it every day, guilty). At some point large companies will see that they're bleeding money for something that most people don't seem to want, and cancel those $100k/mo deals. I've already experienced one AI-developer-turned company crash and burn.
Personally, I don't think this LLM-based AI generation will have any significant positive impacts. Time, energy (CO2) and money would have been far better spent elsewhere.
There's plenty of valuable use cases for being able to give natural language instructions to a tool and have it act on that input. I do however agree that the current hype and valuations far exceed the real value being offered.
Like with the dot com bubble there will be a crash and then whatever shakes out of that will be the companies and products who invested in understanding the actual strengths and weaknesses of the tech, instead of just trying to slap an "AI" sticker on everything.
magic_hamster
today at 9:39 AM
> End of the PC era, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.
This one seems too far fetched. Training models is widespread. There will always be open weight models in some form, and if we assume there will be some advancements in architecture, I bet you could also run them on much leaner devices. Even today you can run models on Raspberry Pis. I don't see a reason this will stop being a thing, there will be plenty of ways to tinker.
However, keep in mind the masses don't care about tinkering and never have. People want a ChatGPT experience, not a pytorch experience. In essence this is true for all tech products, not just AI.
slashdave
today at 4:53 PM
When did Hacker News become a fountain of dystopian science fiction?
Throaway199999
today at 5:56 PM
from its inception lol
simianwords
today at 9:22 AM
[flagged]
PunchyHamster
today at 9:46 AM
New theory: every post to HN will be about LLM or other AI. Or written by one. Usually both
New theory of HN: every post on LLMs will attract the "what is wrong with AI? I don't get it [even though I've posted to HN every day for weeks/months on LLM/AI topics]. Please enlighten me" types