1vuio0pswjnm7OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic
I don’t know how OpenAI screwed this up. They had the best tech, the largest installed base, the best brand recognition.
And somehow instead of prosecuting the lead in all areas, they got all hubristic and sloppy and just failed to iterate on the core product, while also failing to respond quickly when Anthropic showed that coding agents are the flywheel that makes the whole company faster.
It’s like they thought they had an unassailable monopoly and speedran to the lazy incumbent position, all in a matter of months.
Sam lost the plot for me. He took too many interviews which led me to not trust him. Last straw came with him standing by Anthropic one day then throwing them under the bus the next. He showed little awareness on why that is problematic.
I have appreciated Amodei’s brutal honesty about their intentions.
On podcasts his attitude is basically “oh yeah all of you are basically fucked our products will take everyone’s jobs in a couple years.”
Altman is a lot more coy and comes across as saying what’s politically expedient at any given point in time.
> On podcasts his attitude is basically “oh yeah all of you are basically fucked our products will take everyone’s jobs in a couple years.”
I also appreciate his honesty, and don't really understand why the others don't emulate it because there's no cost to them to be honest. At every level of society we've decided to stick our heads in the sand and pretend like this very large tsunami isn't racing toward the coast, so as someone producing this technology you can be honest (and mostly ignored by people in denial), or be cagey and mistrusted (like Sam Altman).
Coding assistants won't win this game. They sure will win the hearts of developers, but to scale you need mass adoption and products for which users want to pay substantially. OpenAI is falling behind in the small features in their chat and app offering and have failed to innovate in their expensive offerings.
Codex btw is getting very competitive. It is fast and no longer far behind.
The strategic playbook of the web era said: Get a huge userbase of normies, then figure out how to monetise them (usually via advertising). OpenAI stumbled into the userbase via ChatGPT, but it's unclear if the strategy or the economics apply to AI. Anthropic tried to compete in the consumer market, but couldn't, so focussed on coding and enterprise, and it looks like that's actually turning into a smart choice, at least right now, because it turns out people will pay subscription costs for agents that do their job for them.
But will they pay the unsubsidized cost when anthropic needs to turn a profit?
And they actually can’t increase the price much.
Token generation is the metric Jensen Huang keeps pushing to temper analysts, which also affect nvidia’s future expected cash flows of course.
If increasing the price causes that metric to drop, the whole narrative falls apart and fear will spread in the stock market.
They’re all racing very close to the edge. Some closer than others.
There are three possible paths that sort of substantiate current valuations:
1) Business: LLMs become essential to every company, and you become rich by selling the best enterprise tools to everyone.
2) Consumer: LLMs cannibalize search and a good chunk of the internet, so people end up interacting with your AI assistant instead of opening any websites. You start serving ads and take Google's lunch.
3) Superhuman AGI: you beat everyone else to the punch to build a life form superior to humans, this doesn't end up in a disaster, and you then steal underpants, ???, profit.
Anthropic is clearly betting on #1. Google decided to beat everyone else to #2, and they can probably do it better and more cheaply than others because of their existing infra and the way they're plugged into people's digital lives. And OpenAI... I guess banked on #3 and this is perhaps looking less certain now?
Agents increase the velocity of OpenAI and Anthropic; whomever has the best in-house agent moves the quickest.
Any publicly available evidence to back that up? There have been post-exit blog posts from OpenAI employees on HN before and it did sound like the only black magic they use there is that many employees work 16 hrs a day during launch of new features. I know that some current Claude Code devs are doing interviews where they claim that they use Claude Code extensively but they clearly have a conflict of interest while they are still employed at Anthropic, so it would be like asking a barber if you need a haircut.
It's clearly because they didn't hire me after I applied :)
In all seriousness, I use Codex for work and Claude at home, and I feel like nowadays they're actually pretty competitive with each other. I don't know that it's that far behind.
I agree that they clearly erroneously assumed that no one would be able to catch up with them, though. OpenAI had such a head start that that should have been by itself a moat.
Does it matter that codex is now as good as claude code?
Check dev spaces like twitter and discord and all anyone talks about is claude-code, openclaw, opus 4.6 etc.
The mindshare went to anthropic.
that's why openai bought openclaw
I mean they hired the guy who created it. It's not exactly like openclaw is a real product.
Just like OpenAI's original moat, I don't think that's particularly durable. I've already seen plenty of people swing back to preferring codex, and it'll probably swap again with the next model drop. Openclaw is potentially better integrated with ChatGPT at this point because of the explicit subscription support.
Yea. In my opinion the value provided for 20$ is better. I wonder how much of antropic value is the hype around claude code coming from every snake oil sales man promoting claude code as best to use with open claw to summarize your emails.
Anecdotally, I would actually argue tbe opposite - Anthropic is overrated, ass-kissed way too much here for mediocre coding abilities (especially for Elixir). ChatGPT most of the time one-shots complex solutions in comparison. The only reason why people shit on OpenAI so much is because of the defence deal, but, it's not like Anthropic is a saint either:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-t...
Claude Code is IMO the benchmark today. For all of the various contexts I’ve used it in it has mostly oneshot the tasks I’ve given it and is very user friendly for someone who is not a professional software engineer. To the extent it fails I can usually figure out quickly why and correct it at a high level.
Classic SV hubris. Talk to OpenAI people and they’re so convinced they’re untouchable, they don’t bother worrying about things like revenue, or product strategy. All they cared about was being the first to AGI. Well it looks like that isn’t happening soon enough. And now they have zero moat except brand recognition, which is quickly getting eroded.
> The large gap between OpenAI’s $852-billion valuation and Anthropic’s $380 billion has investors rushing to grab equity in the latter before it rises, according to Augment co-founder Adam Crawley.
Interesting, so there are a lot of people still eager to invest in valuations of well greater than a-quarter-trillion, but OpenAI's latest raise has sucked up all the oxygen for enthusiasm of that valuation going even higher.
Which could be a "dumb money" move ("competitor number lower, already-big-number is scary") or a "smart money" move ("Anthropic is gaining position-wise, and currently is lower valued, let's bet on the one we think is better positioned") or some mix of both.
OpenAI just raised a shit-ton so clearly there is plenty of money out there who don't think there's a bubble or even a blown opportunity there. But the wider community doesn't think they have the competition in the bag, while still being willing to invest in big-AI-cos at absolutely enormous valuations.
If local hardware/models get good enough to take 80%-90% of what people use subscriptions for today... hoo boy. Big-AI is a bet I wouldn't be confident placing billions on. Unless your horizon is more "wait for IPO or next raise or positive news, then get out ASAP" than "hold for 5+ years."
Vibe coding requires the sota models to work at all, but someone who knows what they are doing and uses the AI more responsibly can absolutely use the cheaper Chinese models for coding, and they’re often faster too. If I was one of the big players my entire focus would be on lobbying for regulation and outright banning of local models.
Yeah, Qwen3 coder for Claude Code and 3.5 for OpenClaw replaced my full-stack use of Opus 4.6 already; it's fine for basic web apps, k8s/docker infra setup, optimizing AI models etc. with only slightly higher error rate than Opus. Upcoming 3.6 together with Gemma4 might make it even better (still to test). OpenAI's memory spot market play might have been directed at local inference as well.
Look for Deepseek 4 when it drops, I’m curious how good it will be.
The thing is, if you’re using AI responsibly today you’re already breaking down tasks to such a granular level that you don’t need the power of Opus. You can save that for deeper research tasks.
Based on the current DeepSeek website I suspect it's not going to be great as their current model (V3.4? V4-mini?) often forgets or changes facts explicitly mentioned in the conversation which R1 never did. It's better than R1 at math or coding, but nearly unusable for deep conversation. I suspect they pushed MLA or linear attention too much, or quantize a lot more than before.
I am playing around with this at home right now. I think a lot of the latest improvements came with the harness, instead of AI.
The part I am working on is to have better tools and data to search over. Curated for my needs. Similar to the Karpathy post yesterday about his wiki. I am trying something similar and even qwen 3.5 is totally fine for most of what I do.
Disclaimer: I bought memory before the crisis started. Not sure if I would build my PC as is now..
Did OpenAI really “raise” that much? The startup world is not my area of expertise but I remember reading language in the announcements that implied those dollar amounts where more of a conditional promise of money in the future instead of a check today.
Yeah if they sold 1/800th of the company for a billion dollars then they are valued at 800b even if they only have a billion dollars. It’s advantageous for investors to both buy in as cheaply as possible but also have future investors to buy in as expensive as possible to prop up a, perhaps inaccurate, valuation.
It's raised in the sense that some people made a pinky promise to give them cash. But those people also don't have the money and have to raise it from other places. It's largely SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft and Nvidia, all of whom don't have big piggybanks full of hundreds of billions. They ask for loans based on the promise of making cash to pay for it, and that cash is based on people wanting to use OpenAI. So it's kind of a big financial circle jerk. (Debt, SPVs, loans from Nvidia (at high interest rates), etc)
This isn't right
> It's largely SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft and Nvidia, all of whom don't have big piggybanks full of hundreds of billions.
Actually SoftBank, Microsoft and Nvidia literally have free cash sitting there.
NVIDIA for example had over $60B in audited, reported free cash flow in 2025[1]
> loans from Nvidia (at high interest rates),
Is this just something you are making up?
"NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the new NVIDIA systems are deployed. The first phase is targeted to come online in the second half of 2026 using the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform."[2]
The closes there is to waht you are saying is reporting that NVIDIA has discussed guaranteeing some of the loans OpenAI is taking to build data centers:
"Nvidia is discussing guaranteeing some of the loans that OpenAI is planning to take out in order to build its own data centers, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter."[3]
This of course is the opposite of NVIDIA loaning OpenAI money - if they did this they would be liable for OpenAI's debts.
[1] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...
[2] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/openai-and-nvidia-announc...
Both of these valuations are absolutely absurd. I guess Anthropic looks good in comparison, but I don't want to hold that bag.
The Chinese models are catching up in quality while being a fraction of the price. The market will speak, how many devices that contributed to this thread were made in the USA?
Sure you can argue the Chinese companies are heavily subsidized, but no major LLM lab is remotely close to making a profit this decade.
let me know when they scrap the data centers, id love to get some good deals on hvac equiptment. these companies cannot possibly make enough money when you can run something on your own computer that works mostly as good
Anthropic is not meaningfully better. Their stance is “the good guys have to make money to be in the fight with the bad guys” and so they do all the things their perceived bad guys do. I don’t know how they can do any different, but we just trust them to be good? What is the difference?
I just appreciate the honesty of Amodei telling us pretty much straight up we’re all fucked because the AIs are taking all the jobs in a couple years or less.
He's just another con-man. Fear of missing out is an amazing motivator for investors. The more he shouts doom, the more people with very deep pockets throw money at him. It's all evil.