I don't disagree that Anthropic has no long term moat but they have been a LOT better than the Chinese models since the beginning.
As programmers, we're natural optimizers. And we frequently deliver solutions that aren't always the best, but just "good enough".
Guess what, the Chinese models, Mistral, Argon etc, aren't "good enough" for a lot of tasks. That's why people pay for Claude.
It's pretty slow, but comprehensive. Caught a bunch of stuff that GLM-5.3 flash (which is incredible value) missed, and gave me good solutions for some irritating issues.
It's very slow (even by frontier standards), but it's hard for me to believe that Anthropic have much of a moat.
I mean, I like talking to Claude more than basically every other model (the open models are much more entertaining though, especially their thinking) but that doesn't feel like it warrants their valuation.
If they can successfully move towards owning their compute, and optimise it massively then they might do well, but it's a risky proposition from my perspective.
> Can you share any example prompts where Chinese models aren't good enough?
Nobody is prompting any more, it's more planning, automation, guardrails and reviews. For example, if your tests report that there's a 40% slow down in a particular type of analysis, you have to review possible causes, and approve a plan involving multiple agents to find solutions that won't break 50k tests. And that solution itself is a small part of the work that gets planned in a day.
Codex and Claude are the only tools that work for me, inspite of testing almost everything out there to save costs.
Maybe this describes Anthropic people mostly
I would not assume this represents their investors
Kevin O'Leary has specifically mentioned kicking China's ass wrt AI race
There is likely a ton of xenophobia and racism motivating a lot of stupid investment within the US
I was discussing with a coworker yesterday who pays $200/month for cursor, has never tried any other harness and mostly use grok, in rare occasions opus 5.5 ("opus thinks too much"). He's always out of tokens on the 15th of the month. I told him I exclusively use DS 4.1 flash with opencode, spend like 150M tokens a day (including cache) and it oneshots all my tasks. I barely reach 20% of my $10 sub at the end of the month. He told me "bullshit"…
Go nuts with it, but we're at the SciFi dystopia test with: how do mega corporations even form? Well, this is certainly the plausible reality, they just start aggregating random income streams because their product is essentially the only thing that makes the business profitable. Without it, it can't compete.
Hopefully this sounds skeptical, but I don't see how you can have an independent business and be entirely dependent on third party for your operations.
Like a lumber mill that buys logs from a logging company? Who subcontracts to individual fallers? Who buy their chainsaws from a chainsaw company, their fuel from a petrochemical company? No business isn't entirely dependent on third parties. That's what it means to exist in a healthy economy.
A "farm-to-table" megacorp that owns everything from the source of every raw material through to the finished product is a nightmare, an entity that needs to be reigned in and broken up. Capitalism is a competitive game, but a game that can never be allowed to end.
I am rather sure that Google is heavily reliant on Microsoft and Apple to produce the operating systems used on devices that are in turn used to view Google's ads. And Microsoft is heavily reliant on hardware manufacturers (firmware is also software) to make the machines that Windows lives inside. And Apple is reliant upon a thousand and one companies that enable the innumerable mobile networks, which include many layers of non-apple software.
This isn't new though. A ton of software companies are already completely dependent on AWS or Azure or whatever.
All businesses are reliant on multiple third parties doing their thing in order for the business to be viable. A lot of companies exist at the whims of Amazon or Walmart.
If this was just OpenAI and Anthropic, this money would represent all of your salaries being soaked up and your job functions being privately consumed by two companies.
Except there's tons of competition and no moat. The math problems are just a distraction from that.