Anthropic should double down on the strategy of being the better code generator. No I don't need an AI agent to call the restaurant for me. Win the developers over and the rest will follow.
> Win the developers over and the rest will follow.
Will they really? Anecdotal evidence, but nobody I know in real life knows about Claude (other than it's an ordinary first name). And they all use or at least know about ChatGPT. None of them are software engineers of course. But the corporate deciders aren't software engineers either.
If they ever do Apple and Google will offer it as a service built into your phone .
For example, you could say ok Google call that restaurant me and My girlfriend had our first date at 5 years ago, set up something nice so I can propose. And I guess Google Gemini ( or whatever it's called at this point), Will hire a band, some photographers, and maybe even a therapist just in case it doesn't work out.
All of this will be done seamlessly.
But I don't imagine any normal person will pay 20 or $30 a month for a standalone service doing this. As is it's going to be really hard to compete against GitHub Copilot they effectively block others from scrapping GitHub.
But why hire a therapist when Gemini is there to talk to?
Re: Github Copilot: IME it's already behind. I finally gave Cursor a try after seeing it brought up so often, and its suggestions and refactors are leagues ahead of what Copilot can do.
It is behind, but I think that's intentional. They can simply wait and see which of the competing VSCode AI forks/extensions gains the most traction and then acquire them or just imitate and improve. Very little reason to push the boundaries for them right now.
Because the most important part of therapy for a lot of things is the human connection, not so much the knowledge. Therapy is important, the US system is just stupid
Consumers don't have to consciously choose Claude, just like most people don't know about Linux. But if they use an Android phone or ever use any web services they are using Linux.
Every single business I know that pays for LLMs (on the order of tens of thousands of individual ChatGPT subscriptions) pay for whatever the top model is in their general cloud of choice with next to no elasticity. e.g. a company already committed to Azure will use the Azure OpenAI models and a customer already commited to AWS will use Claude.
Most people I know in real life have certainly heard of ChatGPT but don't pay for it.
I think someone enthusiastic enough to pay for the subscription is more likely to be willing to try a rival service, but that's not most people.
Usually when these services are ready to grow they offer a month or more free to try, at least that's what Google has been doing with their Gemini bundle.
I'm actually baffled by the number of people I've met who pay for such services, when I can't tell the difference between the models available within one service, or between one service or the other (at least not consistently).
I do use them everyday, but there's no way I'd pay $20/month for something like that as long as I can easily jump from one to the other. There's no guarantee that my premium account on $X is or will remain better than a free account on $Y, so committing to anything seems pointless.
I do wonder though: several services started adding "memories" (chunks of information retained from previous interactions), making future interactions more relevant. Some users are very careful about what they feed recommendation algorithms to ensure they keep enjoying the content they get (another behavior I'm was surprised by), so maybe they also value this personalization enough to focus on one specific LLM service.
The amount of free chats you get per day is way too limiting for anyone who uses LLMs as an important tool in their day job.
20 USD a month to make me between 1.5x and 4x more productive in one of the main tasks of my job really is a bargain, considering that 20 USD is very small fraction of my salary.
If I didn't pay, I'd be forced to wait, or create many accounts and constantly switch between them, or be constantly copy-pasting code from one service to the other.
And when it comes to coding, I've found Claude 3.5 Sonnet better than ChatGPT.
Yesterday I needed to take an unstructured document with about 1,200 timestamps and substract 1 second 550ms from each of those.
I could have written code for it, but Claude output a perfectly valid HTML page I could locally paste my document in, which gave me the accurate output I needed.
This is knowledge work.
Today I had another document, about the length of a small book, where H3 and H4 titles were mistakenly provided in the wrong language. I needed those 159 titles to be changed while preserving the rest of the document, with a very specific maximum word count per title. Claude did this with a single natural language prompt. (though I had to tell it to "go on" every couple hundred lines)
This is also knowledge work. Knowledge work is not generating new knowledge, just like manual work isn't about generating new hands.
OP and the people who reply to you are perfect examples of engineers being clueless about how the rest of the world operates. I know engineers who don’t know Claude, and I know many, many regular folk who pay for ChatGPT (basically anyone who’s smart and has money pays for it). And yet the engineers think they understand the world when in reality they just understand how they themselves work best.
I use Claude Pro paid version every day, but not for coding. I used to be a software engineer, but no longer.
I tried OpenAI in the past, but I did not enjoy it. I do not like Sam Altman.
My use cases:
Generating a business plan, podcast content, marketing strategies, sales scripts, financial analyses, canned responses, and project plans. I also use it for general brainstorming, legal document review, and so many other things. It really feels like a super-assistant.
Claude has been spectacular about 98% of the time. Every so often it will refuse to perform an action - most recently it was helping me research LLC and trademark registrations, combined with social media handles (and some deviations) and web URL availability. It would generate spectacular reports that would have taken me hours to research, in minutes. And then Claude decided that it couldn't do that sort of thing, until it could the next day. Very strange.
I have given Gemini (free), OpenAI (free and Paid), Copilot (free), Perplexity (free) a shot, and I keep coming back to Claude. Actually, Copilot was a pretty decent experience, but felt the guardrails too often. I do like that Microsoft gives access to Dall-E image generation at no cost (or maybe it is "free" with my O365 account?). That has been helpful in creating simple logo concepts and wireframes.
I run into AI with Atlassian on the daily, but it sucks. Their Confluence AI tool is absolute garbage and needs to be put down. I've tried AI tools that Wix, Squarespace, and Mira provide. Those were all semi-decent experiences. And I just paid for X Premium so I can give Grok a shot. My friend really likes it, but I don't love the idea of having to open an ultra-distracting app to access it.
I'm hoping some day to be like the wizards on here who connect AI to all sorts of "things" in their workflows. Maybe I need to learn how to use something like Zapier? If I have to use OpenAI with Zapier, I will.
I also prefer Claude after trying the same options as you.
That said I can't yet confidently speak to exactly why I prefer Claude. Sometimes I do think the responses are better than any model on ChatGPT. Other times I am very impressed with chatGPT's responses. I haven't done a lot of testing on each with identical prompt sequences.
One thing I can say for certainty is that Claude's UI blows chatGPT's out of the water. Much more pleasant to use and I really like Projects and Artifacts. It might be this alone that has me biased towards Claude. It makes me think that UI and additional functionality is going to play a much larger role in determining the ultimate winner of the LLM wars than current discussions give it credit for.
I have been flogging the hell out of copilot for equities research and to teach me about finance topics. I just bark orders and it pumps out an analysis. This is usually so much work, even if you have a service like finviz, Fidelity or another paid service.
Thirty seconds to compare 10yrs of 10ks. Good times.
In my experience*, for coding, Sonnet is miles above any model by OpenAI, as well as Gemini. They're all far from perfect, but Sonnet actually "gets" what you're asking, and tries to help when it fails, while the others wander around and often produce dismal code.
* Said experience is mostly via OpenRouter, so it may not reflect the absolute latest developments of the models. But there at least, the difference is huge.
I also don't understand the idea of voice mode, or agent controller computer. Maybe it is cool to see as a tech demo, but all I really want is good quality, at reasonable price for the LLM service
I think voice mode makes significantly more sense when you consider people commuting by car by themselves every day.
Personally I don't (and I'd never talk to an LLM on public transit or in the office), but almost every time I do drive somewhere, I find myself wishing for a smarter voice-controlled assistant that would allow me to achieve some goal or just look up some trivia without ever having to look at a screen (phone or otherwise).
This is the direction I am building my personal LLM based scripts. I don’t really know any python but Claude has written python scripts that e.g. write a document iteratively using LLMs. Next step will be to use voice and autogpt to do things that I would rather dictate to someone. E.g. find email from x => write reply => edit => send
Much more directed/almost micro managing but it’s still quicker than me clicking around (in theory).
Edit:
I’m interested to explore how much better voice is as an input (vs writing as an input)
To me, reading outputs is much more effective than listening to outputs.
More seriously: I think there are a ton of potential applications. I'm not sure that developers that use AI tools are more likely to build other AI products - maybe.
No they should not do this. They are trying to create generalized artificial intelligence not a specific one. Let the cursor, zed, codeium or some smaller company focus on that.
