AnodicElegy

For South Park, I just wait for a full season to be out and watch it over a month, then cancel. $15 for a season isn't too bad.

From the technical report:

"Our prompt specified the targets, the design sets and their sizes, the rules for each design, the protein design and prediction tools, the scores and ranking formulas, and the novelty and diversity rules."

I think most scientists would consider LLM to be an orchestration tool in cases like this. LLMs do work great for automating this type of drug discovery workflow! You definitely don't need the latest and greatest model, either, as long as you're careful in your specification. But attributing the designs to the tool (Claude), not the scientists who came up with the workflow, is distasteful and misleading.

Quantitatively, yes, but some of the things allowed in pharmaceutical research are more horrible than anything in farming. I'm skeptical that we're any closer to replacing animal cruelty in pharmaceutical research than we are to doing so in meat production -- articles like this understate the difficulties -- but I hope I'm wrong.

Yeah, it's nuts, these are significantly more expensive than a low-end smartphone. I hope by the time my kid's a preteen there will be enough of a market for dumb phones that there will be cheaper options. I would think almost any parent would want one for their kid at some point.

From the article:

"The rating action, which has not previously been reported, shows Anthropic is close to achieving the investment-grade status that would allow the start-up to lower its borrowing costs and tap a wider pool of institutional investors including life insurance companies and pension funds.

Bankers for Anthropic and rival OpenAI have lobbied the largest rating agencies to grant the AI labs investment-grade ratings once they go public."

From the article:

"The rating action, which has not previously been reported, shows Anthropic is close to achieving the investment-grade status that would allow the start-up to lower its borrowing costs and tap a wider pool of institutional investors including life insurance companies and pension funds.

Bankers for Anthropic and rival OpenAI have lobbied the largest rating agencies to grant the AI labs investment-grade ratings once they go public."

First SpaceX, now Anthropic. I wonder what happened the last time the big rating agencies gave massive amounts of sketchy debt investment-grade ratings to avoid alienating their customers?

I'm glad I finished my Ph.D. before any of this stuff hit the market. It sounds like it would have been a substantially different experience, and I suspect I might not have finished it with as solid a grasp on my thesis subject as I have.

Her comment about the Mathematica notebook really hits home. As a scientist, not a software engineer, who uses code as a tool to speed up more critical parts of my work, I was thrilled to have the chance to learn programming skills on the job. I could justify it because the time saved by the fruits of it outran the time I spent learning it. I can't do that anymore. I'm not building software, just scripting, so even the cheapest models today can give me suitable code quicker than I could write it myself. So I can no longer justify learning new programming skills, at least on work time. I'm glad I had a few years to pick up the basics before these tools became available.

This is acknowledged in the CNBC article:

"Anthropic still hasn’t made its prospectus public, so New Constructs hasn’t seen the actual filing. However, the firm cited figures that have been reported, including from the New York Times, which reported in September that the company was on pace to generate $100 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026."

Did you read it to the end? It is insane speculative fiction. They are not even qualitatively right about one of the main narrative planks, which is that by now (mid-late 2026) there would be one clearly dominant company each in the U.S. and China, and that the latter would be nationalizing their compute.

I think it's fair to say that an open model has not yet surpassed Fable 5. But I don't think it's fair to count the period prior to Fable's public release. In which case it's only been 4 months since the release of a model that's clearly ahead of today's top open models.

Very important caveat if looking at the Artificial Analysis cost vs. intelligence graph (https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=gpt-6-luna-low%2Cclaud...):

"The site does not yet reflect tiered pricing, so provisional cost figures for Haiku 5.5 do not include the step up cost."

Frankly, it's irresponsible for them to put the points on the chart if they don't have the correct values for one of the axes yet. At least they added some asterisks since yesterday, but you still have to go to the blog post (https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/claude-haiku-5-5) to see what the asterisks mean.

This sets it up to go full acronym: SXSI!

Requires FT account.

(Requires a free FT account to access.)

The discussion manages to entirely skip over one of the elephants in the room: subscriptions. Any calculation of gross operating margin will have to blend API and subscription costs and revenue, which I imagine will be less positive than API alone.

Interesting read. Sure, there's still sex and acid, but man, we're a long way from John Phillips' San Francisco.

A summary of/commentary on the article by the Financial Times can be found here (requires free FT account): https://www.ft.com/content/87875b20-4081-4511-9afe-4ee389409...

There are different levels of articles written predominantly with AI, and this one falls into the "utterly unreadable" category.

It's stuff like this that puts Anthropic dead last on the list of model providers I am willing to support with my business.

Price/intelligence comparison with Opus 5.5 on Artificial Analysis:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=gpt-5-6-luna-low%2Ccla...

According to this, at Max it's better and cheaper than 5.5 Medium, but worse than 5.5 High. At Medium, it's better and cheaper than 5.5 Low.

I'm surprised we haven't seen a "Jehovah" yet.