They have to focus on the distant future (where they are frankly unlikely to exist) because they are falling further and further behind in the immediate future.
Their latest desperate bid for relevance is a plugin for Claude Code that uses Codex as a second opinion. Please clap.
This a big exaggeration. Codex is probably one of the top two LLM programming tools, along with Claude Code. GPT-5.4 models are strong, unlike the initial GPT-5 ones, which were comparatively bad, and can hold up against Opus 4.6. In my experience, they are better at analytical work.
I cannot really see how they are "far behind," or how some plugin for Claude Code is a "last desperate bid." The tools are close enough to each other that I regularly use Codex one month and Claude Code the next without much disruption, just to try out any new models or features that might be available.
I do not have much visibility into the non-code applications, so maybe it is stickier there.
If/when the AI bubble pops and takes OpenAI down with it, I would not expect Anthropic to come out unscathed either.
They were years ahead. They managed to generate competitors (Anthropic is OpenAI refugees) by alienating their own employees by being so dishonest and immoral when compared to their own founding principals and even legal documents. They experienced a coup where the primary technical vision of the company was forced out in favor of someone who is comparatively a nontechnical dummy. That was the beginning of the multiple years of stagnation while they burned tens and hundreds of billions of dollars while their competitors caught up and then passed them by.
OpenAI is floundering and can't sustain their own burn rate. Their competitors are thriving. This is a market and technology that OpenAI largely created and just a few years in they are behind, losing unprecedented amounts of money, and have no clear path to catch up.
Lets be totally clear, they were 3 years ahead 3 years ago and now they are behind. They are literally standing still.
Considering how fast competitors caught up to them, I'm not convinced that OpenAI was years ahead. LLMs and transformers were known technology, it's just that OpenAI accidentally productized it before others did (ChatGPT). This is not an advantage measured in years. Google, for example, could have caught up to them pretty easily (they invented the transformer architecture), I think it mostly came down to mismanagement that they flopped so hard with Bard. The biggest cost was high quality data, Google certainly had that, and a budget for huge training runs. I really don't think OpenAI had any special sauce that made them years ahead.
One confounder here is that LLM scaling has started to hit diminished returns recently, no more GPT3 -> GPT4/o1 jumps in recent times, making it easier to catch up to the SOTA.
That schism within the OpenAI leadership was ugly. And Sam Altman does seem to be a bit snakey to me. But I have no illusions about any company in this space, including Antropic. None of these companies are moral, given what data these models are trained on.
> their competitors caught up and then passed them by
The different models are more capable in different aspects, but they are close enough together that only in a few months they leapfrog each other.
> OpenAI is floundering and can't sustain their own burn rate. Their competitors are thriving.
Google is thriving, sure, but not because of Gemini, it's because of their existing ads business. I would not say that about Anthropic, they seem to be struggling to provide enough compute (with the recent usage limit changes). Hard to know whats happening funding wise in these companies. Saying that their competitors are thriving is a stretch. And again, if the AI bubble pops, Antropic is gonna hurt along with OpenAI. Just not clear to what extent.
Their competitors caught up after about 3 years though. Gemini 2.5 was more or less awful vs even GPT 3/4. Models have more than one measure of quality so they don't cleanly totally order, but Gemini 2.5 was awful. Gemini 3.1 is better than GPT 5.3 and competitive with 5.4 and preceded it by months.
I thought so at first too but I've seen some OpenClaw "blogs" that kind of have this same sort of dramatic pronouncement style with similar heavy sign-posting. Not sure.
Apple has gone from a company with a long term vision of the future and their part in it to a quarterly financial report gradient climber. This is what happens to every company when it loses it's founder(s). They have enough money and market influence to be a problem for all of us for the next 30 years or so.
I'm saying that a functioning company that reaches a certain size can stop being good at what it does and start buying market position and market share.
For example, I don't believe Apple is more efficient at designing processors than most processor companies, I think they have had some luck in that they adopted a strategy for mobile that ended up delivering a CPU with high performance (this is roughly the same story as Intel Core 20 years ago). They are able to deliver a CPU that is at the top but not dramatically faster than their competitors not because they are so 'good at' designing processors, but because they steer a very large percentage of the total CPU R&D budget of the entire world. They can buy anyone who is innovative, and generally that means eliminating them rather than incorporating them.
One thing I think it neglects is the ability of people to adapt, and the fact that people don't adapt until forced to. For example, in many countries will provide shelters when conditions reach the point that it is necessary to do so:
Additionally, individuals and families put thought and effort into solving this for themselves. Setting up a room with a beat up old window AC and salvaged insulation, even if they they can only run during peak times to provide protection for their elderly relatives, for example. People in these countries aren't going to start suddenly dying by the millions when it gets to hot, they will adapt and overcome.
Rich industrialized countries should provide some kind of compensation, it's manifestly unjust for rich countries to keep all the benefits while poor people have to reallocate already meager resources to survive the consequences. Rich countries should provide offsetting investments in education and infrastructure. It would be a massive benefit to a poor community that depends on importing diesel to generate electricity if they were provided with wind and solar capacity, especially solar in this case. This would directly make their AC use more affordable as well as reduce additional emissions.
Why did Iran kill dozens of civilians in retaliation? They have launched missiles and drones into virtually every country they neighbor, knowing they are only going to hit residential areas. Why would they do that? Why do dozens and dozens of Arab civilians have to die from Iranian drone strikes?
Why is one side morally culpable when they kill people but the killings on the other side are always explained away or minimized?
What about Iran's supplying drones to be used against civilians in Kyiv? How many innocent Ukrainians have died from Shahed drones that both Iran and Russia know are being used entirely for terror strikes against civilians? Where is your flippant post that points out that Putin's attempt to 'free the people of Ukraine' by years of strikes intentionally against civilians using Iranian drones is ridiculous?
Perhaps you are only interested in talking about innocent people dying if it furthers your political goals, and you would like to look the other way when it does not?
It's amazing how much it's possible to foment arguments against something if you are very well funded and a regulation will cost your industry a lot of money.
Age verification is a good thing. Giving children unrestricted access to hardcore pornography is bad for them. Whatever arguments you want to make, fundamentally this is true.
Age verification is fundamentally harmful and is an attack on user privacy. Age verification is being heavily lobbied for by tech companies that are hoping to get rich off of violating your privacy.
Anonymous age verification is fundamentally impossible. It is especially a bad idea for adult content, as a person's perfectly legal sexual beliefs and fantasies can permanently destroy their lives if that information got out. Parental controls are the only ethical, secure, and privacy protecting way forward here.
You are begging the question. If age verification is required, it's not 'perfectly legal' to access weird porn without going through age verification.
There is no right, or even a debate about whether there should be a right, to consume digital streams of other people engaging in sexual acts in total anonymity without proving age. In fact being able to do this at all is something that didn't exist until about 25 years ago, before that you had to drive down to a video store and rent a DVD or tape. At that video store you would have to show an ID to get an account, and there would be a permanent record at the store of what you have rented.
I get that people want to watch people engage in acts that they themselves find embarrassing and shameful. I don't agree that this is healthy, but if it's legal then I have no standing to complain much. However, it's not legal to provide videos of hardcore sex to children, which you are insisting is necessary to allow adults to consume videos of hardcore sex acts in perfect anonymity, which wasn't even a thing that was possible until very recently. Your argument is just stupid and absurd on its face.
I have. 3 is fine, 3.1 is good. But they are terribly slow. Quality is fine but the the only thing they have going for them is flash pricing. Their response performance sucks.
Their latest desperate bid for relevance is a plugin for Claude Code that uses Codex as a second opinion. Please clap.
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