Those instructions can reference external scripts that Claude executes without loading the source. You can package them with hooks and agents in plugins. You pay tokens for the output, not the code that calls it.
Install five MCPs and you've burned a large chunk of tokens before typing a prompt. With skills, you only pay for what you use.
You can call deterministic code (pipelines, APIs, domain logic) with a non-deterministic model, triggered by plain language, without the context bloat.
In the same way Nagel knew what it was like to be a bat, Anthropic has the highest fraction of people who approximately know what it's like to be a frontier ai model.
I can name OpenAI CEO but not Anthropic CEO off the top of my head. And I actually like Anthropic's work way more than what OpenAI is doing right now.
This is a prime example of what you're saying. Creating a "foundation" for a protocol created an year ago that's not even a protocol
Has the Gavin Belson tecthics energy
Their valuations come from completely different calculus: Anthropic looks much more like a high potential early startup still going after PMF while OpenAI looks more like a series B flailing to monetize.
The cutting edge has largely moved past benchmarks, beyond a certain performance threshold that all these models have reached, nobody really cares about scores anymore, except people overfitting to them. They’re going for models that users like better, and Claude has a very loyal following.
TLDR, OpenAI has already peaked, Anthropic hasn’t, this the valuation difference.
If anyone disagrees,I would like to see their long running deep research agents built on gemini or openai.
it's an open question how many of OpenAI's users are monetizable.
There's an argument to be made that your brand being what the general public identifies with AI is a medium term liability in light of the vast capital and operating costs involved.
It may well be that Anthropic focusing on an order of magnitudes smaller, but immediately monetiazable market will play out better.
Maybe they should do less vibe coding on their checkout flow and they might have more users.
AFAICT, claude code is the biggest engineering mind share. An apple software engineer of mine says he sometimes uses $100/day of claude code tokens at work and gets sad, because that's the budget.
Also, look at costs and revenue. OpenAI is bleeding way more than Antropic.
It really should be required viewing for anyone in the industry, it has so much spot-on social commentary, it's just not "tecthical" not to be fully aware of it, even if it stings.
https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Tethics
>Meanwhile, Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) comes up with a code of ethics for tech, which he lamely calls "tethics", and urges all tech CEOs to sign a pledge to abide by the tethics code. Richard refuses to sign, he considers the pledge to be unenforceable and meaningless.
>Belson invites Richard to the inauguration of the Gavin Belson Institute for Tethics. Before Belson's speech, Richard confronts the former Hooli CEO with the fact that the tethics pledge is a stream of brazenly plagiarized banalities, much like Belson's novel Cold Ice Cream & Hot Kisses.
>Once at the podium, Belson discards his planned speech and instead confesses to his misdeeds when he was CEO of Hooli. Belson urges California's attorney general to open an investigation.
>Richard mistakenly thinks that Belson is repentant for all his past bad behavior. But, as Ron LaFlamme (Ben Feldman) explains, Belson's contrite act is just another effort to sandbag Richard. If the attorney general finds that Belson acted unethically during his tenure as Hooli CEO, the current Hooli CEO would be the one who has to pay the fine. And since Pied Piper absorbed Hooli, it would be Pied Piper that has to pay the fine.
Out of the box Claude skills can call python scripts that load modules from Pypi or even GitHub, potentially ones that include data like sqlite files or parquet tables.
Not just in Claude Code. Anywhere, including the mobile app.
MCP/Tool use, Skills, and I'm sure others that I can't think of.
This is might be because of some core direction that is more coherent than other labs.
But regardless anthropic reasoning was extremely in the intellectual water supply of the Anthropic founders, and they explicitly were not aiming at producing a human-like model.
This is like saying McDonald's is named after the McDonald's happy meal rather than the McDonald brothers.
The modern HTTP Streamable version is light-years better, but took a year and was championed by outside engineers faced with the real problem of integrating it, and I imagine was designed by a human.
OpenAI was there first, but unfortunately the models weren't quite good enough yet, so their far superior approach unfortunately didn't take off.
Would be cool (sci fi) for LLMs of different users to chat and discuss approaches to what the humans are talking about etc.
Build things and then talk about them in a way that people remember and share it with friends.
I guess some call it clever product marketing.
It's a huge asset.
The biggest unlock was tool calling that was in invented at OpenAI.