Super Bowl Matchup: Anthropic vs OpenAI
You don’t have to be a football fan to enjoy the ads
Sure, tech stocks might have dropped a bunch this week, but the big news is that Anthropic is running its first Super Bowl ad, lampooning OpenAI’s recent decision to sell ads in ChatGPT searches. (According to the ad, “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”)
Even Sam Altman admits that it’s funny:
From what I gather, OpenAI will run some ads, too.
In the Super Bowl spirit, I have outlined today’s match-ups below. As you can see, the two big private LLM companies, although superficially similar, are actually quite different. Or at least I think that’s what you can see? Hmm….
Kidding aside, I do think there are some real differences. OpenAI gave lip service to AI regulation at the US Senate; Anthropic actually supports regulation. And Anthropic is (so far as I can tell) doing a better job of supporting its business customers.
But at the end of the day, it’s a bit of Coke vs Pepsi: two slightly different products (with their own sets of loyal fans) fighting tooth and nail for more or less the same market.
Small wonder that they are now turning to ads.
Claude is my preferred chatbot, not based on performance, but because Anthropic seems to be the least evil. As for hyping the BS, Amodei is not really that far behind Altman (as both require continued investment, and both have the same fiduciary duty to investors). In an interview about his latest blog post the other day, Amodei was bragging about how Claude has now reached "PhD level". When the interviewer asked if Claude had authored his blog post, Amodei basically said "no, it's not good enough yet". So, PhD level, but can't yet be trusted to write a blog post...
I'd like to propose a small edit to the table.
"Promised AGI Next year".