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Comment by asdev | Hacker News Reader

Why is Anthropic focusing on vertical solutions? Shouldn't they just be trying to be the best horizontal platform everyone builds on top of?

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In the BERT era of language models, it was normalized that to get the best performance for a task, you probably needed targeted post-training

As models got bigger and instruction following got better, everyone jumped on the general capabilities of the model + prompting

We're approaching wall that needs to be overcome with a completely new and unheard of breakthrough, otherwise we're going to have to go back to specialized post-training (which lends itself to vertical solutions)

I think people are seeing that now with stuff like Devstral being posttrained specifically for OpenHands and massively over-performing for its size at agentic coding

Anthropic doesn’t have the universal name recognition of ChatGPT, so they’re going for an underdog strategy of building a portfolio of strong niches. Seems smart, sounds higher-margin.

> Shouldn't they just be trying to be the best horizontal platform everyone builds on top of?

there isn't money or moat in this due to commodification.

The 30/50/100gb of random numbers that is a trained LLM is basically worthless - if it has any value at all on day 1, that value depreciates at multiple percentage points per day.

Anthropic more than OpenAi are going for the integrations, verticals and MCP - I think that is the right play. "OpenAi Inside" can replace the "Intel Inside" sticker but their marketcap needs to go 1/100x

Random numbers ?? Please stop showing your ignorance here because you have some weird bias against a technology. The utter contempt and dismissiveness of folks on this site is astounding.

How do you initialise your 50bn parameter matrices? I use random numbers.

A solid revenue stream will support R&D.

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