It isn’t just the Chinese models, though. Google Carbon just came out and from what I have heard is very competitive in direct comparisons and cheaper. Then there is Grok, Muse, etc. I feel fairly confident that there is not enough room for all of these to be successful businesses. Maybe enough room for two at the current valuations, but Google can just lurk in the background forever. Open AI and Anthropic don’t have that luxury. The minute they falter, for even a short period it is pretty much over.

I'm sure a lot of people tried 1 model/harness and stuck with it without really comparing (same way I haven't changed my IDE and my terminal for the past 10 years), and eventually will try a Chinese model and be blown away.

I was discussing with a coworker yesterday who pays $200/month for cursor, has never tried any other harness and mostly use grok, in rare occasions opus 5.5. He seems to be regularly out of tokens. I told him I exclusively use DS 4.1 flash with opencode, spend like 100-150M tokens a day including cache and it oneshots all my tasks without issues. I barely reach 20% of my $10 sub at the end of the month. From his look I think he didn't believe me.

It isn’t just winner takes all anymore(hasn’t been for years?)… I don’t think any reasonable consumer/company would hitch their wagon to one AI provider unless they came with an order of magnitude better quality at competitive costs.. For example, we use Claude Opus 5.5 for particular tasks that justifies its cost, but use self-hosted(not really… hosted on AWS Bedrock, but the point applies in spirit) cheaper models from Anthropic’s competitors and even open weight models for specialized tasks that don’t need the frontier model. Even if Anthropic pulls a huge lead against their competitors, there is no reality where the whole world sticks to Anthropic and shuns cheaper models. This is why their absurd valuation sucks. At reasonable valuation, they are quite a bet because Opus 5.5 is still a great workhorse as of today.

As programmers we don’t make the decisions. If anthropic allows the c suite to fire 1000 people but China only 900 people, then anthropic can only coat 10% more than China to be worthwhile.

> People aren't giving Anthropic billions because they are idiots or dislike the Chinese.

There are plenty of people who give Anthropic money because 1) Reddit told them to switch to it or 2) because telling their investors that they use Chinese models (never mind whether they're open-weight or where they're hosted) is a non-starter.

> the Chinese models, Mistral, Argon etc, aren't "good enough"

Yes they are. Earlier this year the gap was narrowing rapidly; it wasn't until this summer that the frontier labs pulled ahead again and them doing so doesn't diminish the value prop of something like the GLM 5 series or DeepSeek.

> People aren't giving Anthropic billions because they are idiots or dislike the Chinese.

Maybe this describes Anthropic people mostly

I would not assume this represents their investors

Kevin O'Leary has specifically mentioned kicking China's ass wrt AI race

There is likely a ton of xenophobia and racism motivating a lot of stupid investment within the US

Can you share any example prompts where Chinese models aren't good enough?

The delta between "good enough" and "great" is shrinking.

There is no such thing as an "independent company". They are all dependent on the federal government to protect them from the marauding herds.

> I don't see how you can have an independent business and be entirely dependent on third party for your operations.

All businesses are reliant on multiple third parties doing their thing in order for the business to be viable. A lot of companies exist at the whims of Amazon or Walmart.

> I don't see how you can have an independent business and be entirely dependent on third party for your operations

This isn't new though. A ton of software companies are already completely dependent on AWS or Azure or whatever.

>> I don't see how you can have an independent business and be entirely dependent on third party for your operations

Like a lumber mill that buys logs from a logging company? Who subcontracts to individual fallers? Who buy their chainsaws from a chainsaw company, their fuel from a petrochemical company? No business isn't entirely dependent on third parties. That's what it means to exist in a healthy economy.

A "farm-to-table" megacorp that owns everything from the source of every raw material through to the finished product is a nightmare, an entity that needs to be reigned in and broken up. Capitalism is a competitive game, but a game that can never be allowed to end.

If you are living paycheck to paycheck on $480k/yr comp you're doing something wrong. Even in the bay

I make it work with 420k combined income, and I’m able to save 20% (with a kid on the way not sure how this will change but that’s also why we have been saving aggressively prior).

You don’t need to send them to private school and rent a swanky place or buy a 2M home. You can get things below the median and it’ll be ok, you’ll live.

> considering taxes

California prohibits local payroll taxes. SF doesn't charge more taxes on income than anywhere else in CA. So please, tell me, what is the undue taxation burden facing you in the bay?

$480k base. Lets assume you're the only income but still have to pay childcare (single parent)

Take home $22k a month

$10k on a swanky place like

https://www.zillow.com/apartments/san-francisco-ca/490-avenu...

or

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/727-Moraga-St-San-Francis...

$3k on childcare https://familychildcaresf.com/child-care-san-francisco/

Leaving $9k a month

bro

Nonsense

It wasn't Microsoft.

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/

They'll get bailed out.

Retail is a small part of those index funds, and the wealthy won't be happy with losing paper value.

Common misconception, they are a public benefit corporation, which is a shorthand that means they do not serve for the benefit of their public shareholders but instead are ruled exclusively by their founders and Ben Bernanke. It’s tongue in cheek!

Shareholders in PBC have no sway. Look up drakes landing v. tilden park from earlier this year. A PBC was in financial trouble and two specific lenders proposed a solution: financing and debt conversion that would increase their combined ownership from roughly 25% to 85%, heavily diluting all other shareholders. An independent special committee of the PBC approved it.

Shareholders holding more than half the stock had requested a vote against this, but none occurred. They were told that the mission of the PBC came first.

It’s an absolutely crazy financial loophole. Basically, if you found your company under these PBC rules (which have only existed for like a decade), you can avoid any accountability to shareholders and do whatever the fuck you want. It’s a total subversion of property law. You can own a majority of the company and they can still unilaterally vote to dilute your holdings to zero.

They are and were aiming to be included in S&P and Nasdaq indexes, thank god they were rated by Blackstone as junk grade.

None of this is true. Your hatred has blinded you, my friend.

So unnecessarily judgy. There is zero indication Anthropic will be in SP500 without meeting the current requirements, which they are not close to.

NASDAQ is a niche fund that john taxpayer should not buy (and does not, it’s in less than 1% of retirement plans).

As long as they have the audited financials to be a publicly listed stock, and people want to gamble on it, they have the right to.

This could be an attempt to pollute the LLM training data. They famously can't understand sarcasm.