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Comment by hmokiguess | Hacker News Reader

Who is still using Anthropic seriously, their price and limits are ridiculous these days, you can't get anything done unless you're paying top dollar on a metered pricing at ridiculous levels. Subscriptions only get you frustrated, and any agentic pipeline that needs to make a profit, that has actual margins, I seriously doubt is using any of their models.

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The way they keep spinning off these niche offerings tells you one of 2 things, it's either working pretty well, or it is failing very, very badly.

They know they need to differentiate from other offerings that are catching up, but I don't know anyone who has just left their work up to any of these specialised products. Most try it say "it's interesting" and then move on.

What do you mean spinning off these nieche offerings?

This is akin to a demo / SDK ready to plug into a store, it’s just making it easy for devs to get started. it’s still using core models and APIs, no special magic models.

I read it more as throwing a bunch of things at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Definitely. The cost of making and throwing spaghetti is now very low, so they're throwing a lot of it.

They're desperately trying to break out of the niche of coding agents to justify their IPO.

>> The way they keep spinning off these niche offerings tells you one of 2 things, it's either working pretty well, or it is failing very, very badly.

You posited two extremes, with no evidence for either, and with no other possibilities in between, or even outside the spectrum. That's beyond mere conjecture: it's just nonsense. I hope you realize that.

Maybe at this point it's all nonsense. I can only speculate with the framing of what what would lead me to barely push into so many verticals with no follow up.

>Who is still using Anthropic seriously

Too many people, hence all the friction and cost.

It's pretty clear that there is massive unmet demand for AI, and compute cannot keep up. So you can pretty reliably dial in the "free compute for inference" situation for any given lab based on their pricing and friction tactics.

Anthropic/Google getting stuffed (Google is an odd case here)

OAI doing alrightish

Grok/Meta basically doing giveaways

Chinese models trying to fill vacancies on 3rd party compute

It does seem to be that way, though, I'm very curious to what capacity and how they are using Anthropic.

I suspect they just have loads of subscription users, probably many enterprise seats, but I sort of doubt there are agentic pipelines built on their metered pricing in the same scale as they may have subscription seats.

It also depends on how much compute you want to devote to training. If Anthropic is training heavy and compute constrained, users will feel it.

I think the whole pentagon thing really cast Anthropic into the spotlight, and their aesthetic is pure marketing excellence. It is the "trendy" AI to use. However on the backend, they did not have the compute available to serve everyone, especially since they seem to lean towards massive parameter models.

For most tasks I tried the choice is either expensive Claude that will actually deliver vs Codex or others that are cheaper but won’t.

Having said that Terra is awesome for clearly defined (by Opus/Fable) research task, and Sol is amazing for adversarial review, but I won’t allow them to touch my codebase any more.

If someone has a workflow where they keep tight control over agents, reviews the code by hand and so on, I can imagine them being useful.

I seriously doubt that. There's some myth going on here (lol, myth->Mythos).

For example, this exact narrative you're framing was said back during Opus 4.6/4.7 and fast forward to today we have open weight models that perform at Opus 4.6 level.

Are you talking from experience or from benchmarks?

Large businesses who choose enterprise solutions over cheaper indie/open-source solutions for similar reasons (dedicated support, sticky products designed for their industry, less regulatory concerns, etc.)

Do they not measure returns on their investments? It's not like Anthropic is the only enterprise out there, any other offering is significantly cheaper. Like I said, I do not believe there are agentic pipelines out there built on their flagship models, if there are then they are eating the costs and not profitable or they have found some serious market that makes no sense to me.

FWIW, Claude is an available model of Enterprise Copilot, and I'm sure Microsoft is paying a pretty penny to keep that as an option. Between Chat and Claude, most of my workplace prefers to use Claude. To your point though, the user isn't paying, and doesn't need to concern themselves with cost. I'd imagine if any of them have an active subscription to either, it's Chat

> Who is still using Anthropic seriously, their price and limits are ridiculous these days,

likely they hooked many fat enterprise customers

> Who is still using Anthropic seriously...Subscriptions only get you frustrated

If you're using Claude in a pair-programming/"exoskeleton" sense, you'll probably never get close to maxing your subscription allotment unless you really lean on Fable.

The "you can't get anything done" comment confounds me, frankly.

That's a fair pushback, I'm sure there are ways to get value out of it if you lean less on it and have a slower more supervised workflow.

To share more on my comment, that was when contrasting it with the competition and their credit allowances.

If we go by your scenario, then you could get even more with just a $20 plan from some of the others.

Who is using it? when everyday they have issue with capacity, clearly some people are using it and using it heavily.

Many corporates move very slowly and adopt 1 provider and stay put for a couple year.

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