[cmiles8]

Sam Altman appears to represent a significant liability for OpenAI’s success from this point forward. A big portion of the driver for Anthropic’s meteoric rise over the last six months appears to be folks recognizing “it’s that AI startup not run by Sam Altman.” Anthropic has amazing tech, but its biggest asset at the moment seems to be that “it’s not OpenAI.”

Not saying that’s right or wrong, but it’s clearly a factor holding OpenAI back at this point.

[mountainriver]

I don’t know that most people care at all or even know about this. ChatGPT still far and away has the largest consumer market and brand recognition.

What Anthropic has done exceedingly well is work their way into corporations.

I have personally seen massive uptake over the last 6 months of regular people in corporations using Claude cowork. They are all genuinely amazed by what it can do for them.

OpenAI wants to be more of a Google. It’s increasingly seeming like consumer may not be as good of a play here

[sealeck]

Allegedly OpenAI's contracting model is much more vicious than Anthropic's; at work (admittedly a little IP-protective) we have unlimited Claude, but no Codex subscription because OpenAI won't give us sufficient guarantees around data retention.

We are also concerned that it may not be possible to bind OpenAI using contract terms and/or the US legal system.

[AlienRobot]

My short experience with Claude and ChatGPT via web is that:

1. the way GPT writes is simply fundamentally annoying. I pretty much had to create a project with a file that said "do not use headings, lists or emojis" to make it bearable. It feels like, as a product, this sort of thing should be a general preference the user sets before they even start talking to a chatbot.

2. Claude just loves wasting tokens doing things nobody asked for. You ask "how do I calculate the distance between 2 points?" and it's probably going to compile some C code in the background with tests to make sure it works, then generate an interactive diagram on the fly to show how the math works, and then give you a downloadable file with the code. Like, dude, I just want some text. Why are you doing all of this?

Both of these problems come from the obvious lack of any UI controls in the software. there is no way for the user to know what sorts of things the software can do, because it's not exposed via UI as a checkbox like "generate interactive diagram" or "avoid using emojis." Discoverability is burning tokens to figure out what prompts work, or looking at example prompts the developer placed in the welcome screen.

I just feel it's completely ridiculous how LLM's are essentially the culmination of a trajectory of bad UI practices masquerading as "good UX" and now they're being implemented everywhere because people think it's good UX a blank textbox where you don't even know what you're supposed to type to do something.

[bob1029]

> OpenAI wants to be more of a Google. It’s increasingly seeming like consumer may not be as good of a play here

OpenAI has openings right now for "AI Deployment Engineer"-style positions, which is a role where they embed that employee in one or more customer's businesses. E.g.:

https://openai.com/careers/ai-deployment-engineer-startups-s...

I think this is the right way to go about it. Getting AI integrated well is more of a consulting package than it is a technology/code thing. Just handing a business a model+API will not result in high-quality or long-term relationships. This AI transformation is the most invasive possible thing I can imagine for a business. You really need a human on site to help the other humans across the treacherous organizational and psychological bridges.

[cmiles8]

Even in the consumer space the cool kids stopped using ChatGPT this year. The swing in reputation and momentum these last few months has been nothing short of extraordinary. Like a political race, once a leader loses “the big mo” it’s incredibly hard to win it back. That’s the situation OpenAI faces now.

[zarzavat]

What's incredible is that Anthropic are clearly not saints but Altman makes them look like the good guys, reinforcing their marketing.

When Anthropic had the dispute with the Department of War over very meek conditions (a truly moral AI company would not be engaged in war crimes in the first place), it was a test for Altman, all he had to do was to take the same position. But because he's a psychopath he failed that very basic test.

[overgard]

I don't know, have you ever watched a video of Dario Amodei talking? I dislike them both immensely, but Dario both seems to take glee in scaring the shit out of people as a hobby with careless statements and his voice sounds like an impression of Elizabeth Holmes (the weird fake deep voice), and nothing he's said or done makes him seem more trustworthy.

[gitaarik]

Haven't seen much, but the things I've seen from Altman directly give me uncomfortable feelings, and the things I've seen of Amodei seem reasonable, even interesting at times.

[shiandow]

I have never seen a video of Dario Asmodei. Which tells me he's less of a liability than Altman. For now.