[codingdave]

> you have to ask yourself if this is a platform you can entrust your daily workflows to as a business.

No, it isn't. No LLM platform ever will be. No platform or vendor of any kind ever will be, if we are being honest. One cannot set up a business where another company becomes critical to your operations. You can certainly use platforms and vendors in your day-to-day operations, but you always need a backup / business continuity plan because you never know when a vendor will flake out on you, for any variety of reasons.

It seems like many startups learn this lesson painfully, and most people who have been around the block a few times know it well. So I'm not certain why people are disregarding it when it comes to LLMs.

[marmot1101]

That's why I internally push to use Bedrock. If AWS flakes or bans the company account I've got bigger problems. Putting more eggs in the same basket is a counterintuitive solution to the problem of someone else holding my fate in their hands, but at least it's a platform that's been around > 5 years.

[muzani]

+1. Companies like AWS are not known for this kind of treatment. Even Google does this. The norm seems to be to randomly ban and ignore emails. It's a whitelist to build customer trust, not a blacklist of bad companies

[badpun]

> No, it isn't. No LLM platform ever will be. No platform or vendor of any kind ever will be, if we are being honest. One cannot set up a business where another company becomes critical to your operations.

Most of companies in the world have done that with Windows, though.

[polack]

In Anthropics defense they make sure that no company can rely on them by being down all the time... And LLMs have become a commodity these days, so you can seamlessly just fail over to another supplier WHEN they go down.

[alpinisme]

Sure. And we aren’t only using Claude. Nor is it essential to our operations. But it’s a tool we used widely and it’s gone (for the moment), and in a way that is untypical of most “vendor did unexpected thing that hurt our workflow” stories.

[mh-]

> One cannot set up a business where another company becomes critical to your operations.

This describes a large percentage of successful businesses that exist today. Not even just in tech.

[codingdave]

Doubtful. Do they use vendors? Sure. Perhaps even in critical functions. But that is not the same thing as a specific vendor being critical. There is almost always a business continuity plan, and frequently you'll find a full risk management plan with documented risks and mitigations. How far they take those planning efforts varies greatly, but I've never seen a medium or larger business that doesn't have at least some basic risk mitigations in place.

[tacostakohashi]

This is true, although different companies manage their vendor exposure with varying levels of effectiveness.

Often, it's ideal to use several / all of the vendors for each thing, and play them off against each other. e.g., have some of your database stuff on oracle, some on mssql, or some cloud stuff on aws and some on azure, make your apps portable, and tell them both that you'll switch to the other unless you get a good deal, with that being a plausible threat because you're already using the other one and know how to make your stuff work on both, and occasionally rotate apps between vendors, or change the mix from 50/50 to 60/40 just to show you can.

Of course, the vendors will be trying to work against this and will want to do some supposedly amazing deal if you go exclusively with them for everything... which might be attractive in the short term, but opens the client up to getting screwed in the long term once they fall into all the lock-in traps and lose the very _ability_ to switch vendors.