[nsingh2]

This a big exaggeration. Codex is probably one of the top two LLM programming tools, along with Claude Code. GPT-5.4 models are strong, unlike the initial GPT-5 ones, which were comparatively bad, and can hold up against Opus 4.6. In my experience, they are better at analytical work.

I cannot really see how they are "far behind," or how some plugin for Claude Code is a "last desperate bid." The tools are close enough to each other that I regularly use Codex one month and Claude Code the next without much disruption, just to try out any new models or features that might be available.

I do not have much visibility into the non-code applications, so maybe it is stickier there.

If/when the AI bubble pops and takes OpenAI down with it, I would not expect Anthropic to come out unscathed either.

[ltbarcly3]

They were years ahead. They managed to generate competitors (Anthropic is OpenAI refugees) by alienating their own employees by being so dishonest and immoral when compared to their own founding principals and even legal documents. They experienced a coup where the primary technical vision of the company was forced out in favor of someone who is comparatively a nontechnical dummy. That was the beginning of the multiple years of stagnation while they burned tens and hundreds of billions of dollars while their competitors caught up and then passed them by.

OpenAI is floundering and can't sustain their own burn rate. Their competitors are thriving. This is a market and technology that OpenAI largely created and just a few years in they are behind, losing unprecedented amounts of money, and have no clear path to catch up.

Lets be totally clear, they were 3 years ahead 3 years ago and now they are behind. They are literally standing still.

[nsingh2]

> They were years ahead.

Considering how fast competitors caught up to them, I'm not convinced that OpenAI was years ahead. LLMs and transformers were known technology, it's just that OpenAI accidentally productized it before others did (ChatGPT). This is not an advantage measured in years. Google, for example, could have caught up to them pretty easily (they invented the transformer architecture), I think it mostly came down to mismanagement that they flopped so hard with Bard. The biggest cost was high quality data, Google certainly had that, and a budget for huge training runs. I really don't think OpenAI had any special sauce that made them years ahead.

One confounder here is that LLM scaling has started to hit diminished returns recently, no more GPT3 -> GPT4/o1 jumps in recent times, making it easier to catch up to the SOTA.

That schism within the OpenAI leadership was ugly. And Sam Altman does seem to be a bit snakey to me. But I have no illusions about any company in this space, including Antropic. None of these companies are moral, given what data these models are trained on.

> their competitors caught up and then passed them by

The different models are more capable in different aspects, but they are close enough together that only in a few months they leapfrog each other.

> OpenAI is floundering and can't sustain their own burn rate. Their competitors are thriving.

Google is thriving, sure, but not because of Gemini, it's because of their existing ads business. I would not say that about Anthropic, they seem to be struggling to provide enough compute (with the recent usage limit changes). Hard to know whats happening funding wise in these companies. Saying that their competitors are thriving is a stretch. And again, if the AI bubble pops, Antropic is gonna hurt along with OpenAI. Just not clear to what extent.

[ltbarcly3]

Their competitors caught up after about 3 years though. Gemini 2.5 was more or less awful vs even GPT 3/4. Models have more than one measure of quality so they don't cleanly totally order, but Gemini 2.5 was awful. Gemini 3.1 is better than GPT 5.3 and competitive with 5.4 and preceded it by months.