The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/2054887621336174799

by tosh • 2 months ago

64 83 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

their world changing agents surely make this a non problem?

adampunk2• 2 months ago

How would you staff a support line for a product with a billion users?

Wowfunhappy• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Does Anthropic have a billion users?

poszlem• 2 months ago

Imagine if they had access to a good AI! They don't even have a bot support.

troyvit3• 2 months 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.

0gs3• 2 months 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.

skinfaxi2• 2 months ago

How much budget have they allocated to support?

maplethorpe2• 2 months ago

Don't have a billion users if you can't offer them support?

cycomanic• 2 months ago

It's funny how silicon valley bros always talk like making real world things is essentially impossible. I mean walmart or aldi are serving > 200 million customers a week, how do they manage that I can tell you that's much harder than customer support for an online product.

As a side note, how do you make up that billion user number? Claude has 10 million users.

sfifs2• 2 months ago

With lower margins of course. Walmart, Indian Railways, major airlines etc all support massive user bases comparable to or bigger than the paid tiers of these apps. But of course the cult of Big Shareholder value creation means the CEO that does this, especially in the US will be fired.

ungovernableCat2• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

To whom?

qaz_plm• 2 months ago

https://xcancel.com/josevalim/status/2054887621336174799

siliconpotato• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

You think a bot cross-posted this tweet to HN?

Imustaskforhelp2• 2 months 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• 2 months 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).

davidw2• 2 months ago

LLMs represent a big shift of power towards capital until such time as local ones are 'good enough'.

dormento2• 2 months ago

That's true. But keep in mind capital can be trivially used to influence policy so that local ones are eventually disallowed.

XorNot2• 2 months ago

When has that ever happened though?

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

adamors• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

AI interviews are a hard “no”. If I’m going to invest my time in an interview, the company must as well.

parliament326• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

“Unfortunately”?

Uh, that’s a good thing

ealready_value2• 2 months 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.

infecto4• 2 months 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.

infecto4• 2 months 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.

hdndjsbbs2• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

I still think/hope/pray the future will be on-device models that don't need constant retraining. That will blow up the existing business 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.

parliament326• 2 months ago

The future is already pretty much here. Note the recent stories about Chrome adding a local model, not to mention the Googlebook demo (if it works as advertised, there's a 0% chance you could get that kind of latency with a non-local model).

davidw2• 2 months ago

If it continues to be a numbers game - the more resources you throw at it, the better it is - then on-device is always going to be not as good. I guess it might be good enough for some uses?

I kind of loathe the move away from a world where we could control our own computers and run our own software on them.

doikor• 2 months 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)

AlexandrB2• 2 months ago

How do we tell the doordash/uber playbook from the moviepass playbook? Because the latter would be awful to build your business on.

parliament326• 2 months ago

Moviepass (afaik) was an attempt at the exact same playbook, it just failed.

Anthropic will also fail when the competition is.. near-equivalent-capability DeepSeek/Qwen/Llama on a $1k GPU with a break-even of 5 months of subscription costs. The value is simply not there for what they would need to charge to become profitable.

tommek4077• 2 months ago

If you would be honest, everyone understood that this is a work around that us not there to last.

jadar• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125552

frangonf• 2 months 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.

ochronus4• 2 months ago

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

quietsegfault• 2 months ago

What are the biggest problems you've seen? Is it mostly related to limits for the subscription plans?

Within my circles (mostly big enterprises), I see more and more of my friends using Claude, and spending money on it, so they must be getting some sort of value out of it. For my uses, I've also been successful with Claude Code, though someone else is paying for my tokens.

ochronus4• 2 months ago

Yes, it's related to the limits of the subscription plans. 2ish months ago the same sub started hitting limits earlier and earlier on very similar tasks/codebases. Then they said, Oh, sorry, it was a caching bug, now it's fixed. It wasn't. Then a couple more bugs. Still no fix. Recently they announced "doubling the limits" (made possible by the Grok deal) - still hitting limits super fast compared to how it used to be 2+ months ago. Moreover, the models got somewhat dumber and slower, too.

nickdothutton• 2 months ago

I really wish Anthropic would consult some monetization experts. Their recent strategy has been all over the place and they are burning early goodwill.

ochronus4• 2 months ago

I don't think they are clueless, but rather, struggling. Being an AI provider is a money burner, and they probably don't have enough fuel for the fire anymore, so they are trying things to squeeze more $$$ and limit usage at the same time.

potsandpans2• 2 months ago

I don't really expect a company run by radical effective altruists / ai doomers to have good business sense.

They had a decent product and squandered a lot of dev goodwill almost overnight.

Henchman21• 2 months ago

They asked Claude, what more can they do?!

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126438

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125552

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126281

radu_floricica• 2 months ago

Max x20 usage is so cheap, that it's pretty obviously subsidized. And the non-interactive usage is the easiest to explode. They could play games with "reasonable use" and whack a mole accounts that are obviously farming it, but their approach is ultimately more fair.

And I say this as somebody who just discovered agent orchestration and would absolutely love their limits to remain as they are.

The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle

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