alt Hacker NewsIt's very clear to me that however much you like Claude and Anthropic models, every professional user shoudl be actively cultivating a set of alternatives and fallbacks to use and seeking to ensure the overall ecosystem is as open, standardised and portable as possible.
Anthropic is highly opinionated, dogmatic and idealistic. They have made a pragmatic decision already to cut loose a whole swathe of users so they can pursue areas higher up the value chain. that was essentially the original decision they made when they went after software engineering instead of general users. The fact they are repeating this over and over by continuing to carve out sets of users and usages they don't want reinforces this as a persistent core principle rather than a single pragmatic business decision.
What this means is that at a higher level, their core principle is to sacrifice users they don't "need" rather than provide a broad, accessible service. Which means in turn, you have to accept that when your usage conflicts with their interests, you are at very high risk they will cut you out. If you already depend on Anthropic in any critical path of your daily life, this will be a significant issue.
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actively cultivating a set of alternatives
Absolutely. I have been [cyber]'d so many times even Claude jokes about it now. Claude is great but it's operators are making it unreliable for me. I have moved one of my projects elsewhere and will move the remainder tomorrow as a stop gap until I get the right hardware set up to run abliterated local models for some percentage of my needs. Their message has been received loud and clear.
For those who do not play with Local AI much. Qwen4 was announce to be released the first week of Nov. The preview for qwen4 is currently one of the best local models you can use, and is roughly opus 4.6 quality on local hardware that costs 3.5k-4k
Many people are expecting it to sit somewhere above Opus 4.8 to opus 5 (not above, but the unquanted version of their largest model is expected to perform around here)
Anyone who cares to keep their current capability should definitely be looking at localAI and using it for at least their more routine tasks , even if it is qwen4 27B quant 4 on their gaming rig.
They keep doing anti-competitive things over and over again, and the end users seems to refuse to see it. They do whatever they can to get vendor-lock in.
Fortunately it is not a one horse race. GPT 6.1 Sol is an excellent model, sure it has some weaknesses (e.g. frontend design), but it also has strengths too (e.g. computer use / control; which is great for automated E2E QA).
On software engineering I find it's generally close enough to Opus 5.5 where it's more situational and even personal preference / skills / prompting style on which is better.
Most importantly, while neither company are saints, I don't curse at OpenAI models for classifiers anywhere as much as Claude models.
Things are about to get even shittier in the near future, when shareholders get involved.
idk i think theyre less idealistic and more monopolistic.
if they think their model is the best at making things safe, then their model should be helping train at any chance, to embed the same safety into new models
They want to do one thing and do it well.
Well, arguably so does OpenAI, but their one thing is "assimilate all life forms into the Borg."
It’s not professionals that need to something- it’s absolutely critical we have some kind of credibly neutral body providing the actual models. What’s not clear at all is how to do that since it’s such an expensive activity.
For now we have a great situation with the open weights, but there is absolutely no guarantee that continues, and more the opposite- they may stop.
Anthropic is acting like any regular selfish corporation despite their PBC status. They are becoming a stain on humanity. Power will corrupt anyone, it seems. We shouldn’t let Anthropic have any more of it. Distributed power is good; concentrated power is very bad.
Anthropic tells themselves that only they can steer AI towards a positive future for humanity. But that’s nowhere near close to being true. Humans are quite genetically homogenous and good humans exist everywhere. Groups that will keep AI beneficial have popped up (and will keep popping up) everywhere, spontaneously.
The danger is actually concentration of AI power due to its corrupting influence, and that is where Anthropic needs to be kept in check. Keep AI democratic through decentralization of power. Oppose Anthropic.
What’s the best local analog to Opus 5.5? It’s such a great daily driver.
> They have made a pragmatic decision already to cut loose a whole swathe of users so they can pursue areas higher up the value chain.
This referring to cyber? Bio?
To the dismay of frontier labs, swapping models is actually very basic. What takes time is only acclimating to the capability changes since they won't all change linearly.
I don't care about my skills because employers won't request me to do anything that violates the terms of service of $CURRENT_LLM. At the same time, it's a reminder not to outsource thinking to someone's computer.
Now do OpenAI.
“you have to accept that when your usage conflicts with their interests, you are at very high risk they will cut you out.”
I thought…
we learned this Facebook.
We learned this with Google.
We learned this with Apple and the App Store.
We learned this with Twitter.
We learned this with Heroku.
Unfortunately humans as a society dont learn from history.
They learn from personal lived experiences that have occurred only recently within their lifetimes. (Ie. Mass unemployment, death, famine and war)
It's not just the anti-competitive behaviour, it's also the anti-privacy behaviours that are not muched talked about. They embedded a spyware and got caught too:
https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography
But, of course, Dario is the darling of the community and he can do no wrong.
Why, though? I have half a terabyte of VRAM in cards in a datacenter and it’s absolutely not clear that anything I’ve learned using these to program or inside an app has taught me anything significant.
I talked to my friend about all the things I do to ensure my personal assistant behaves reasonably. The prompt engineering, the fake site evals, everything. And then I have Opus 5.5 do it and it doesn’t need anything. It’s simply fully aligned to performance by default.
And what did I learn anyway. Going from one model to another changes what works. And you can simply learn everything from the Chinese model in days. The whole “building skill” thing is bogus.
I have this library of techniques, a scant few of which I’ve made available on my blog, and what is reality instead: the next model blows the need for the techniques into the dust. Back on level playing field.
It’s a false god, this cultivation. Waste of time. Use the best model you can. Once you hit the guardrails move out to the other models. Even Opus 4.8 is fine. If you legitimately want to dodge the guardrails use the -cyber models.
Then move on. The library is dust.