Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by baigy 23 days ago
Congrats to Karpathy. I wonder whether this is the right time to join Anthropic. Looks like it from the outside.

But - unpopular opinion - I believe Anthropic is one open-source model away (that can code well) from a massive revenue/stock crash. We're already seeing Claude's cost escalate to astronomical levels. Most coding work is medium difficulty in the grand scheme of things. So the future is an open source model small enough to fit in your local 16GB VRAM, giving you a Claude Code like experience for zero token cost. That's going to wipe out most of Anthropic's current revenue base. It does have several cool initiatives in the pipeline, but bad things happen once your bread and butter is threatened (just ask OpenAI).
4 comments
energy123 23 days ago
I heavily weight the explosive revenue growth of Anthropic and OpenAI above speculation about what open source models may do in the future. I've heard for over 6 months that there's no moat but the revenue growth keeps proving it wrong. Opinions have to adjust to meet reality. There's some kind of moat, for now at least, that is not being appreciated in the conventional wisdom.

(If they were just burning Capex and nobody wanted to use their product or their gross margins were bad then I'd agree with you)

link
baigy 23 days ago
Your opinion also holds weight. In fact, I've been in your camp throughout, only having changed my mind in the last few weeks. I've seen legitimate instances of Anthropic costs surprising medium to large enterprises, so that's a demand shock. On the supply side, I've seen some very intense benchmarking going on at r/LocalLlama (the #1 community for opensource LLM tinkering IMO). It just feels like we're in a powder keg right now.
link
codemog 23 days ago
GLM 5.1 is almost there. These guys should be scared. The valuations these companies have is insanity.
link
ahknight 23 days ago
Not in extended sessions, I've noticed. It's good at targeted edits, but not "build a small tool that XYZ".
link
ahknight 23 days ago
Model diversity is really their weak point. OpenAI has embeddings, audio, image, video (RIP). Anthropic has ... Claude. It's a great model for a lot of things, but it's super risky to just have one thing you're good at (from a business standpoint).
link
nekooooo 23 days ago
those models are light years away from opus or sonnett right now though -- is the context problem really solvable?
link
zackangelo 23 days ago
absolutely not, take Kimi K2.6 for a spin
link