The cheap models are cost-competitive if you are running them in long-running agentive tasks.

But they take a lot longer to reach the same goal for complex tasks, so the difference is still very real, and the cost-savings are still very much a question of how well you manage to characterise the tasks they will do quickly and pick and choose what to use when.

I kind of agree that I think the cheap models will eat away at the moat very effectively, but if it doesn't seem more capable to you, you're not giving it complex enough tasks to see what they can do.

(FWIW, I've burned billions of tokens on each of Deepseek, Kimi, GLM5.2, GPT, Sonnet, Opus, Haiku using the same harness, and we've kept stats on cost per task)

I suppose I haven't found much success in complex tasks—it requires so much babysitting, fixing, nitpicking, and modification, I've found it rarely saves much time at all. This is hardly that surprising giving the complexity inherent in describing a task is often explored iteratively, but there's hardly a reason to burn so much money doing so if it doesn't save time.

Perhaps some domains allow a much better tradeoff between complexity of description and execution; perhaps there's a way to get it to exercise better judgement (for lack of a better term) without input from the coder. I just haven't run into this myself.

absolutely, for me the tui, ultracode agentic workflows, and streaming logic are far superior. the closest model is minimax 3.0 imo and i ended up adding a custom tui, agentic workflows, streaming logic and implementing skills to that (in typed) in order to get to an acceptable claude fallback. on their own i haven’t found one model comparable to claude, not even chatgpt.

Yeah, using deepseek feels like shit and I spend hours steering deepseek in a direction versus opus-4.7 or 4.8 where I can just kinda let it ball out on some reverse engineering problems.

I don't. Using claude code, claude.md etc with deepseek v4 is almost undistinguishable.

> Anthropic has little to no chance of producing a competitive business model in the long term.

Extraordinary thing to say about the fastest growing company in the history of capitalism. They will soon have access to public markets, essentially unlimited capital, and can build insanely large models that they don't have to make public... ever. They can just use those models to run their business, train better models, eat competitors, etc.

But maybe it's Anthropic that isn't thinking ahead enough - you clearly think you can see around corners with your proclamation. So why do you think they have "little to no chance" of surviving long term?

> Extraordinary thing to say about the fastest growing company in the history of capitalism. They will soon have access to public markets, essentially unlimited capital

There is no such thing as unlimited capital. The faster they grow the faster they burn capital. Eventually it will run out.

That's not how economies work. It's not a fixed pie that everyone shares.

We both know that both revenue and especially valuation, especially for something with as little moat as software, can vanish overnight. This is a commodity market and anthropic is serving boutique software, and the market gets more crowded every day.

So you're arguing it's the Yogi Berra "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" of business models?