Anecdata, but I have a friend at OAI who claims that on both twitter and HN there is mild coordination of OAI employees to signal boost pro-OAI and anti-competitor messaging.
well that ones obviously patently false
It sure does, readers should be informed of who says what. The speaker and their history is part of full communication, not just the words.
Naive credentialism is obviously bad, but reputation does matter.
This happens for every single company that has twitter/HN/reddit users from the same company on the same platforms, I think it's also short of impossible to stop. I don't think I haven't worked in a single company in the last decade where that hasn't happened, in a range of scales.
If you weren't already, which you should have been really, you should be suspicious about anything you come across on the internet :)
So at least anecdotally I really don’t think it’s fair to portray this as OAI doing some sort of social media psyop as if others aren’t engaged in similar behavior.
It’s also very possible that this user just has opinions and tends to think OAI is more developer friendly / that Anthropic is hostile to developers (which is common sentiment I’ve seen from many real people who are definitely not paid OAI shills or something)
HN did a massive 180 in the last month or two, and nearly every post or comment related to Anthropic is just a hate post.
The amount of anger against Anthropic on HN doesn't reflect anything I see in reality (and I work at a pretty big FAANG with Codex and Claude Code, both are great) so I do suspect that OAI is doing some guerrilla marketing here, while Anthropic isn't really marketing or doing PR at all.
> I do suspect that OAI is doing some guerrilla marketing here, while Anthropic isn't really marketing or doing PR at all.
Sure, there's probably some accounts that are more or less controlled by the big AI labs here.
But looking at how humans have been acting for the last 20 years, you'll see that you don't need to pay people to promote things. They'll do it freely, because they identify with it and they can't fathom other people not agreeing with them.
Do you really thing that the weekly posts about people dropping AWS for Hetzner are paid by the German company?
No.
People have limited time and money. Some picked Claude, others picked Codex. Claude seems to be the most popular in terms of content produced about it. So some people probably picked Codex just because they don't want to be like everyone else. Then they obviously have to talk down about Claude, because if Codex is not better, then they are not. Simple.
And from my POV that's not a good thing because HN was the place where people didn't act like this. It was pragmatism and honest debate.
Now it's becoming: my agent is better than X, my stack is better than Y...
Maybe you can get more headless use out of Codex but that's not gonna last. Investors are drying up and these companies need to get to profitability.
And then I got caught in the collateral damage a few days ago when Anthropic announced changes to their subscription plan billing, just like every other user of that tool and similar tools like Conductor and Zed. So in a month I won't be able to use my Claude sub quotas for these tools, all because some other people are ruining it for everyone by using "claude -p" to run openclaw, hermes agent and autonomous dark factories that burn billions of tokens a day.
I would have been fine with the change, except Anthropic's messaging was very slimy. They tried to spin their change as a positive change even though it was clearly not for anyone who was using a "claude -p" wrapper over Claude Code for better UX. They're within their rights to change their subscription billing, but they still couldn't be honest to their own users about it. Evidently, this kind of gaslighting and PR stunts is something they've done over and over in the last few months. It just didn't impact me until this time.
I care about AI safety and it would take a lot for me to switch from Anthropic to OAI, but I just wish they were less arrogant and cared about their users more. Right now their behavior is at best selfish (or overly consequentialist, and I don't mean that in a good way), and at worst actively hurting their AI safety efforts by pushing people to open-weight model alternatives which are way more dangerous than closed models due to people being able to remove their safeguards easily.
I feel like they were always fairly consistent (at least since OpenClaw came out) that wrapping claude -p in a non-Claude Code harness is disallowed by the subscription and requires using the API.
The lock-in to Claude Code is the price you pay for the subsidized tokens. If you don't want lock-in, that is what the API is for.
After seeing the whole internet being enshittified I'm still shocked people don't see through these very transparent tactics that every tech company has employed since 2012 or so.
GPT models are also generally more token efficient right now and that helps too — you can go a lot further on a $20 subscription with Codex than Claude Code as a result of this.
Ultimately I think many day to day tasks just need to shift away from the latest frontier models towards models that are faster, cheaper, and still perform well enough & you can phase out subsidies while keeping total cost reasonable.
Personally if I don't need a frontier model I use a local LLM. Or one of the Chinese ones through OpenRouter.
I was wondering what the Dow jones stock index thing was...
It took me a minute, but I am guessing this means department of war? It feels strange to see terminology evolve like this over my lifetime.
At first I thought this might've been a 'freedom fries' thing, but I guess it's pretty official now.
Expect grok to improve dramatically as Musk reverse-engineers the Anthropic services running on his hardware.
Starting a race to the bottom where every AI company agrees to "all lawful use" such as mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, probably increasing p(doom) by some amount.
All to stick it to Anthropic. That's not petty to you?
To me it is an order of magnitude bigger than all of the stuff you've described. I suspect some people here just work for OAI.
I know people are upset about the non-profit thing but the fact is that was pretty much the only way forward if they wanted to have LLMs have the impact that they are having today. It's very much a question if they'll ever turn a profit. But overall I'm grateful OpenAI had the vision to get this ball rolling when companies like Google have been sitting on this for nearly a decade and were too afraid to invest a tiny portion of their billions to bring this to fruition because they were afraid of either cannibalization of their search business or offending a vocal minority of internet people.
If you or anyone had any evidence to support GP’s claim I’d love a reference to it.