Disconcerting for sure, but from a business point of view you can understand where they're at; afaiui they're still losing money on basically every query and simultaneously under huge pressure to show that they can (a) deliver this product sustainably at (b) a price point that will be affordable to basically everyone (eg, similar market penetration to smartphones).
The constraints of (b) limit them from raising the price, so that means meeting (a) by making it worse, and maybe eventually doing a price discrimination play with premium tiers that are faster and smarter for 10x the cost. But anything done now that erodes the market's trust in their delivery makes that eventual premium tier a harder sell.
Yeah. I've been enjoying programming with Claude so much I started feeling the need to upgrade to Max. Then it turns out even big companies paying API premiums are getting an intentionally degraded and inferior model. I don't want to pay for Opus if I can't trust what it says.
This could also be a marketing strategy. Make your models perform worse towards the end of a model's cycle, so that the next model appears as if more progress has been made than there actually has been.
I really wonder about this. Is it so bad that they cannot even disclose it? not even an optimistic lie in the ballpark of reality? it's not like they haven't been found cooking the truth repeatedly.
I look at the output of Kimi and the costs of running inference on it that i can replicate, and it isn't that bad, although admittedly i don't have to worry anywhere near as much about scaling it and about having to dedicate large amounts of compute to research and distillation on the back end. It's true that it's perhaps a step behind SotA vs January's Opus or current Codex, depending on what you do. But not by a lot. In fact it's leaps and bounds superior to the current subscription API experience. Together with GLM, Qwen and Minimax they are an amazing backstop just the way they are right now.
With all the layers of obfuscation it's hard to even know roughly how many i/o Opus tokens do Claude subscriptions pay for. They'll give you some flippant arguments like "people were not looking at thinking so we're not showing you anymore" with a straight face. However podcasts still insist Anthropic are "winning the AI war" (??) it really makes me wonder because in no metric I can see them as providing neither best value nor best quality, and let's not get started about consumer experience.
My intuition is that things must be really bad so they're willing to pull the kind of moves they're pulling right now. They're speedrunning people into understanding how important it is to be able to run your own generative AI infrastructure for reliability, thus becoming a very fancy but trustless throwaway solution factory.
I wonder if OpenAI will turn the screws similarly if/when their pockets start to dry up at a certain pace.
tldr: they are trying hard to change S&P500 inclusion rules so that they dont have to wait 12months after going public so they can list mega-ipo asap in force index funds to buy a portion (presumably before revenue exponential growth settles and profits start tanking due to opensource catching up). They know something that we dont.
btw if they are public and part of S&P500 then potentially they'll be a candidate for a bailout.
The constraints of (b) limit them from raising the price, so that means meeting (a) by making it worse, and maybe eventually doing a price discrimination play with premium tiers that are faster and smarter for 10x the cost. But anything done now that erodes the market's trust in their delivery makes that eventual premium tier a harder sell.