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by 59nadir 2 days ago
I've worked with a company that literally has a one-of-a-kind product that is the single product in its niche that uses a very specific and custom algorithm to run its workload 500-1000 times faster than the competition. Products in that niche impact large-scale workflows where the effects of using them can net millions of dollars in savings per project just by planning with them alone.

I learned after my contract with them was put on hold that the CEO uses Claude to vibecode experiments on the code base. Not for any good reason, mind you, the algorithm was written by the CTO who emphatically does not use any LLMs.

With Anthropic's reach they could probably make a massively successful product in that market and basically take the entire thing over, if they only knew to look. And I'm 100% certain that they don't actually follow any policies on not using their incoming data.

3 comments

This is what bugs me about the whole AI fanaticism thing coming from the top down, because what evidence is there that the AI labs aren’t going to try and eat everyone’s lunch after they’ve done whatever they need to developing the actual AI. We’ve already seen this with Gemini and OpenAI trying to eat video production and making workflows explicitly for that purpose, what makes people think that Claude isn’t going to do the same exact thing once they get bored of making models? It’ll all be under the guise of “making [lucrative niche] accessible to anyone” meanwhile they just disappeared your moat that you willingly handed them
We've also seen ample evidence that AI labs are not overly concerned with the legality of how they obtain training data. Its not a stretch to say maybe they look at some other stuff they shouldn't too.
Yeah, I really don't know what people are thinking. We specifically didn't use any LLMs in the development on the project specifically to not leak anything (though admittedly also because we just didn't think they were particularly useful at the time, even for smaller things). The same CEO is also deathly afraid of people reverse-engineering the application so I have no idea how he reconciles these two things. I would've thought it's either fine to blast the codebase out there to essentially unknown parties and also fine to deliver a binary without shitting your pants, or it's not fine to do either.
They (Anthropic) don't need to "look" at the data. Just use them to train the next model and then their competitors to ask the new model how they can improve their product :p
Goodbye tradesecret!