OpenAI and Anthropic: Déjà vu of Uber vs Lyft.
Hey Everyone!
I hope you all had a great xmas break! I’m still trying to get the cobwebs out of my brain. We have a post on Patreon with tips from chatgpt on how to reflect on 2024 and get the most out of 2025.
The streets are talking about Anthropics $60B valuation.
While OpenAI is the 800-pound gorilla in this market, the sad reality for Anthropic is that it will always be a "me-too" play against OpenAI. It reminds me of the Uber vs. Lyft wars: OpenAI is like Uber, the dominant player that has brand recognition with normies, constantly under attack by the press as the "bad guy," while Lyft is the hipster-normie brand—the "I wear Tom's shoes, so I'm a good person" option that tech folks like to support but anthropic investors wished they could convert their shares to OpenAI shares.
No hate, but as an investor, you don't want to back the latter; you want to side with the 800-pound gorilla.
Anthropic's fate was essentially sealed when they left OpenAI, driven by the belief that society shouldn't have access to AI models. But then they reversed course when they saw ChatGPT's success. To make matters worse, they hired many alignment folks who caused significant issues at OpenAI.
They're definitely in a tough spot. I want them to succeed, but they'll need a miracle to beat OpenAI. A marginally better model every now and then, which can be quickly replicated by OpenAI, won’t cut it. They need to win the consumer game, the enterprise AI game is a commodity business that will be dominated by Google and other major players leading to crap margins that investors hate.
Normies are what make trillion-dollar companies—not fickle tech folks with no loyalty to specific models. Normies don’t care if a model isn’t the best on some niche benchmark; they just want to know that ChatGPT works and gets the job done for their specific task.
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Cheers,
Jordan