OpenAI won a lot of good favor for the generous Codex subscription and the efficiency of their models, but now that many people have switched over from Claude, they think they can leverage their position to peddle a stream of unnecessary products, and crack down on the generous limits[1] that brought everyone to Codex in the first place.
Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.
AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.
People jumped ship from OpenAI because of their involvement with the US Government / military / Department of War / what have you. That spike was enough that Anthropic was starting to noticeably struggle, which is why they had to rent compute from X AI to get their compute back up to normal, I honestly think if they didn't hit this wall they might have IPO'd much sooner, before they bought extra compute from X AI they downscaled how much compute you can use, but it was poorly done because people got used to much higher limits, they should have explored more strategic options, their changes also broke my workflow several times over. As a result of anthropic trying to deal with the bleeding some users left for OpenAI because it was "unlimited" for some time, then they added limits too.
johnfahey · · focus · HN ↗
Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.
AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.
[1] <a href="https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713
giancarlostoro · · focus · HN ↗