Not Windows: Operating systems. We did get more capable operating systems. The point of the quote is "this is the worst the SOTA will ever be".
If Windows XP were fully supported today I still wouldn't use it, personally, despite having respect for it in its era. The core technology of how, eg OS sandboxing, security, memory, driver etc stacks are implemented have vastly improved in newer OSes.
Of course not. But I believe your Windows example was implying fundamental tech got worse.
The original "worst" quote is implying SOTA either stays the same (we keep using the same model) or gets better.
People have been predicting that progress will halt for many years now, just like the many years of Moore's law. By all indications AI labs are not running short of ideas yet (even judging purely by externally-visible papers being published and model releases this week).
We're not even throwing all of what is possible on current hardware technology at the issue (see the recent demonstration chips fabbed specifically for LLMs, rather than general purpose, doing 14k tokens/s). It's true that we may hit a fundamental limit with current architectures, but there's no indication that current architectures are at a limit yet.
Have you hit that? I thought it was only in extreme cases when Claude felt uncomfortable, like awful heavy psychological coercion. They wanted Claude not to be forced to reply endlessly.
I don't think that's an apt metaphor. You bought one general water supply, like an API user. If they sold a "no baths" cheaper option I'd be fine with them banning baths to those customers.
Google's API does let you use any client.
The gemini/antigravity clients are a different (subscription) service. When you reverse engineer the clients and use their internal auth/apis you will typically have very different access patterns to other clients (eg: not using prompt caching), and this is likely showing up in their metrics.
This isn't unusual. A bottomless drink at a restaurant has restrictions: it's for you to drink, not to pass around to others at the table (unless they buy one too). You can't pour it into bottles to take large quantities home, etc. And it's priced accordingly: if sharing/bottling was allowed the price would have to increase.
There is a reality that when they control the client it can be significantly cheaper for them to run: the Claude code creator has mentioned that the client was carefully designed to maximise prompt caching. If you use a different client, your usage patterns can be different and it may cost them significantly more to serve you.
This isn't a sudden change, either: they were always up-front that subscriptions are for their own clients/apps, and API is for external clients. They don't document the internal client API/auth (people extracted it).
I think a more valid complaint might be "The API costs too much" if you prefer alternative clients. But all providers are quite short on compute at the moment from what I hear, and they're likely prioritising what they subsidise.
It reminds me of the net neutrality debate from a decade ago. I'm not American but I remember the discord and online hate towards Ajit Pai when they were repealing it.
On one side you had the argument that repealing net neutrality would mean you can save money on your internet bill by only paying for access to what you use. On the other, you had the argument that it would just enable companies to milk you for even more profit and throttle your connection as they see fit.
IMO we need 'net neutrality' for LLM clients. I feel like AI companies are hypocrites for talking about safety all the time, but want us to only use their LLMs in the way they intend. They're saying we're all going to be replaced by AI in 12 months, and we have to use their tools to survive, right?
Yann LeCun recently warned that the AI coming out of China is trending towards being more open than the American alternative. If it continues like this, I can see programmers being pushed towards Chinese models. Is that what the US government wants?
Use of Chinese models: If I had not got a discount for signing up for a full year of Gemini AI Pro for something like $14/month, I might have started just using a Chinese chat model for things where privacy is not an issue. Ironic that I am now paying for both Gemini AI Plus and also $20/month for Ollama Cloud (as a super easy way to experiment with many open models). I am also paying Proton $10/month to use their handy lumo+ private chat service built on Mistral models. I feel like I am spending too much money but I don’t want to feel locked into just a few vendors, and to be honest it is fun having alternatives. A year ago I used APIs for Chinese models (and Mistral in France) and the cost was really low.
Honestly, after his ~23 years of writing online I think he's fairly earned the title as an independent researcher. He added those sponsorships three days ago; perhaps wait to raise your alarm bells until he actually writes about a sponsor.
The subscription always seemed clearly advertised for client usage, not general API usage, to me. I don't know why people are surprised after hacking the auth out of the client. (note in clients they can control prompting patterns for caching etc, it can be cheaper)
Saying their prices are too high is an understandable complaint; I'm only arguing against the complaint that people were stopped from hacking the subscriptions.
LLMs are a hyper-competitive market at the moment, and we have a wealth of options, so if Anthropic is overpricing their API they'll likely be hurting themselves.
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