Posted by meetpateltech 2 hours ago
Things change fast in this space. Anthropic had a big boost from having the premier coding model for a while, but GPT-5.5 has closed that gap at a time when a lot of Anthropic customers are looking for cheaper alternatives.
Anthropic is coming off of a recent change to their enterprise billing that substantially changed the pricing for many users. They were smart to do the fundraising before the effects of that change could fully propagate.
My wife knows about Claude because that's what I use and we pay for. She uses it also as a result. And inevitably she will talk about Claude to her friends.
Absolutely not, you live in a bubble. Everybody knows about ChatGPT.
Few non-programmers have heard of anthropic or claude, nor do they care. But they all know what ChatGPT is.
Their marketing has been working the high end of the “regular people” market for a good while.
There's no better way to create awareness of a brand than to get it featured in the most popular reality TV show globally at the moment: "Thing Trump Did: Season 2."
[1] Proof: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... (see the massive spike in January of this year)
GPT-5.5 is a bit more expensive than Opus ? Current list prices
| Model | Input | Output |
| GPT-5.5 | $5/MTok | $30/MTok |
| Opus 4.8/7 | $5/MTok | $25/MTok |
Per-token pricing is totally sensible from the provider-perspective on mapping COGS to revenue, but for a consumer, different models will produce more or less tokens, meaning the cost calculation is multi-dimensional.
I don't like Altman and I am still upset about his memory deal last year but he prepared for the current shortages months before anybody else. Meanwhile, Anthropic seems to lack any plans besides third party contracting. IMHO they got very lucky with xAI and Google having spare capacity and willing to rent it. But what about next year?
I mean, this is a bit like complaining that McDonalds doesn't have their own herds of cows. OpenAI actually isn't in the business of buying GPUs or running data centres, and it's pretty weird to think that's an advantage (though it comes up constantly on here, as Anthropic keeps eating OpenAI's lunch).
There are many suppliers that are desperate to fight for Anthropics business, and it has shown an agility to embrace whatever advances in the industry come along. Anthropic is now running across a million or so Google TPUv8s, for instance. If tomorrow someone else comes out with a better GPU, they can embrace it in a heartbeat.
All while OpenAI sits on their rapidly depreciating GPUs.
Or...actually they won't, because OpenAI doesn't take business advice from HN. The vast majority of OpenAI's compute is from Microsoft, Oracle and so on. They're smart enough to not become a big hardware purchaser when that isn't their business.
* NVidia GPU, Google TPU, Apple SoC, etc.
Nvidia has probably monopolized several upstream supplies to manufacture critical chip components for next 2 years, the HBMs and Optics component from LITE, as well as TSM capacity. Let alone those power components they funded themselves.
Let's say you have a genius design, but you will have it close to impossible to compete with Nvidia in getting it to volumes.
Jensen is a player, he isn't fooling around with all these Asian trips just to wine and dine
A short half-life means you are going to quickly dispose of what you have now, anyway. In fact most current datacenters can't even handle Vera Rubin, so I don't think there's short term risk here.
Everyone has critical risk on multiple parts of the supply chain. GPUs and Memory are just things OAI mitigated for.
Power - Bigger bottleneck than GPU or RAM perhaps, New Grid connected capacity is typically 10+ year timescale with lot of regulatory friction. Captive capacity is also quite constrained - now Gas turbines have 7+ year wait time.
There are plenty of hard constraints that OAI cannot easily solve either.
It is not clear that running one's own datacenter is a competitive advantage. Why do you think OpenAI can handle that?
Anthropics relativ longterm contract with xAI def shows that they can fill the capacity vs Musk not. OpenAI and Anthropic are both using a lot of capacity so its fair to say that this is an advantage.
If they stay very close competitive (which they are), your own datacenter does reduce token price.
I see most of the surge here comes FOMO AI spending which will have to be dialed down later half of the year, otherwise those companies will have to layoff to fund their AI bill, which is harmful to their business.
Anthropic grabs its bag at the peak, but feast is over.
I think Google has caught up enough to certainly be a player in the consumer ad driven market.
I also don't think only one foundation model adds up. Now that the trail is blazed a dozen companies can likely make a good enough model. The question is if there's a moat to make it winner take all
They don't seem too far off to me.
Well functioning market is supposed to have many, as in a lot, companies with similar products. To create competition.
He told me they are massively pulling back on the AI stuff.
Right now the lashback is about cost, because that's the most easily measured pain point.
Soon, we'll start seeing a deeper understanding of the quality issues. At that point, it's likely this whole experiment gets firmly put in a bin of the toolbox where it belongs.
Why? Have we figured out the limits of what agents can do?
> OpenAI is much less exposed to tokenmaxxing
I don't think this is true, from my own experience & chatting with my acquaintances.
If a task can be completed with 100k tokens but employees are considered better performers if they complete it with 500k tokens instead… that’s unsustainable and cannot possibly benefit Anthropic in the long term.
At some point, Amazon and Uber and so on and so forth are going to realize that actually, employees using 100k tokens or even 50k tokens is better than 500k and Anthropic’s revenue will fall off a cliff.
And I could be wrong about tokenmaxxing being a Claude specific problem but as far as I can tell, all of the major companies encouraging employees to maximize their token usage are Claude Code users. And the music has to stop on that at some point, whether because the companies run out of money or because they learn better ways of measuring productivity in the AI age. And if tokenmaxxing is what is driving Anthropic’s lead in revenue, it could be catastrophic to lose that, because Anthropic are spending billions of dollars per month on the infrastructure to support it.
If tokenmaxxing is evenly distributed between Anthropic and OpenAI then they’ll both hurt but equal hurt shouldn’t disadvantage either much.
Having been through an IPO before, it was good for employee liquidity, but bad for the culture and long-term success of the company.
FTX bought 8% of Anthropic for $500m in 2021.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/03/18/ftx-owne...
https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tender_offer
https://carta.com/learn/equity/liquidity-events/tender-offer...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(secondary markets are sometimes an option, depending on stock transfer restrictions)
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I also imagine that venture funding rounds have a lower ceiling than the public markets - but at these rounds I'm not so sure!
They cannot raise forever, SpaceX has done more rounds but the timing is most important.
And many more that are 50% of what they were: Snowflake, Coinbase
And many more that went back to private companies and then were sold off: Carbon Black, etc...
I'm actually too lazy to go list out all of them.
But employees, beware, of those gnarly lockup periods post IPO where all the better classed options than yours get to exit.
We got "dumped" Google and Facebook, so... Those probably made up for all the other "dumps".
We also got "dumped" TSLA, which is meme-ing in the trillions at the moment.
You can short Anthropic at IPO if you want...
Situations change.
Because when Facebook IPO'd everyone was saying the stock market was a dumping ground...
Same with Google...
Same with Pets.com and WebVan...
But you, of course, can buy on their IPO. They need every bagholder they can get :)
Companies that reached a level of maturity where going public make sense don't keep doing funding rounds to cover the rate at which they bleed money.
A lot of the money that is deployed by VCs comes from pension funds and asset managers that ultimately manage money for the average Joe.
And Saudi Aramco before they IPO'd
I suspect we'll have our first $10T company in the next 2-3 years. That's only doubling.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-specificati...