alt Hacker NewsAnyone else fearing Anthropic more and more each day? Not from a perspective that they are doing so well, but rather that it's like an industry tornado, sucking up and destroying everything in it's path.
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Not really. I mean it’s not like they are particularly far ahead. Maybe a small lead on model performance, but nothing particularly significant. All the major players are within 6 months of each other. As soon as model improvements plateau there will be no observable difference between providers.
Without Karpathy, the AI field hasn't skipped a beat, but he is certainly a great addition to any team.
its destroyed my codebases with ai slop , errors, and code maintenance nightmares going forward. i feel bad for anyone having to work on ai generated code.
Yes. I think Anthropic's success with claude code + cowork and the way it's shredding through white-collar work is basically cementing the thesis of Geoffrey Hinton's latest paper (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12559-026-105...). I highly recommend reading it in full, but briefly:
1. Copernican Revolution -> We aren't the center of the universe
2. The Darwinian Revolution -> We aren't the pinnacle of life
3. The Freudian Revolution -> We aren't even in control of our own minds
4. The "Intuitive AI" Revolution -> We aren't the only form of intelligence
I think even a month ago I would've read this article and scoffed, but having used Claude Code almost exclusively at work for the last couple months it seems pretty undeniable that in-context-learning and a good enough harness is all you need to displace most "thinking" jobs that require just a bachelors. The hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into data center build-out basically hinges on this thesis, and frankly I trust the judgements of the billionaires financing these deals better than LLM-naysayers on hackernews (not to mention the non-public info they have access to). You don't need to reach superintelligence to still deeply, deeply affect society, and I think Anthropic was the first to build products that are actually good enough and, critically, hands-off enough to do just this. Every day it's clearer and clearer to me that "I was born into a poor family but am relatively intelligent and good at learning things, therefore I can find success" is exactly what will ultimately be eliminated as the outcome of this unless we get the government to step in and regulate.
I could go on and on, but the main point I'm trying to make is that you should definitely examine unease you feel about Anthropic, consider framing that unease in the context of Hinton's argument, and ask yourself what the implications may be.