Ask HN: Did Anthropic Just Win? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did Anthropic Just Win?

5 pointslnenad11 comments

Not trying to cause drama, I feel the title is a bit too much but it's 100% how I feel. I'm genuinely curious what others think. I know there are a lot of people with more knowledge and info than me so I thought here is a good place to ask.

Personally how I see it, benchmarks aside, Fable really is a tier above both Opus and Codex. Still makes mistakes, still needs supervision, but much less, and with a good feedback loop is able to achieve a lot independently. If OpenAI had something tucked away, they'd have probably already released it, right? I'm worried as this big of a difference means that we're probably going to speed towards a big price increase, at least until some competitors catch up. But if Anthropic really just built a moat and they don't slow down, the market is going to be much different, and the price of frontier model(s) will follow. Even if you want to go for open source, having enough power to run 1T param models means a non trivial investment for many companies out there.

No, I'd wager the opposite.

If Anthropic "won" they'd not 2x the price as well as potentially lock it out of monthly plans. Opus is already on the pricier side. Sonnet hasn't been updated in a long while. Haiku is even worse.

Right now, the only thing this gains is Anthropic has a better model but at 2-5x the cost. Is it worth it? That's not "winning". That's a tradeoff.

But even if 10x the price the value is there. Fable needs to loop less, spending less tokens, and is going to be much more correct so the price increase isn't a straightforward evaluation.

> the value is there

I'm not saying there's no value. Just like there's expensive tea and cheap tea. The expensive tea doesn't "win" though, which in this context is referring to defeating all the competitors like a >50% marketshare scenario.

And it's not like everyone is sitting still. Every competitor is evolving rapidly. Whether it is ability or pricing.

I'm saying it's not expensive tea if you have to drink more of the cheap tea to get the ~same effect.

That's why I'm posting this, my expectation (based on previous behavior) is that there should be a response from OpenAI. Considering it's missing I'm worried there's some secret sauce that others are missing.

> I'm saying it's not expensive tea if you have to drink more of the cheap tea to get the ~same effect.

You don't need 1000s of architects to build a building.

Just like companies don't have everyone as staff engineers.

IF as I explained this was the mid-level engineer (on price) beating every existing staff engineer by miles, then that's winning.

This is not.

> That's why I'm posting this, my expectation (based on previous behavior)

In history, it is still within the time range that OpenAI has reacted and released a new model, so no, nothing new.

It's not a valid point imho as your paying for tokens, not hours, per token value is much more important and the purpose of getting more lower value tokens does not exist (unless for a fraction of the price to get to the same result). But it's fine if you feel differently.

Yeah, I'm rooting for this otherwise we're in for a rough ride in the next couple of months.

Sure, but you're paying the higher rate just to find out if that's true for your use case.

Perhaps think of how variable hourly wages and salaries are. You might be able to employ someone at minimum wage. For higher skills you pay more.

Is that a better way to think of Anthropic's pricing structure?

I thought this was going to be about: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/nobody-needs-ai-...

On capability, yeah. On pricing, they just told most developers they're not the target anymore.

Not on image generation

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