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Agreed on everything. Just to add, not only anthropic is offering CC at like a 500% loss, they restricted sonnet/opus 4 access to windsurf, and jacked up their
by adamoshadjivas 1y ago
Agreed on everything. Just to add, not only anthropic is offering CC at like a 500% loss, they restricted sonnet/opus 4 access to windsurf, and jacked up their enterprise deal to Cursor. The increase in price was so big that it forced cursor to make that disastrous downgrade to their plans.
I think only way Cursor and other UX wrappers still win is if on device models or at least open source models catch up in the next 2 years. Then i can see a big push for UX if models are truly a commodity. But as long as claude is much better then yes they hold all the cards. (And don't have a bigger company to have a civil war with like openai)
- virgildotcodes 1y agoSeems like the survival strategy for cursor would be to develop their own frontier coding model. Maybe they can leverage the data from their still somewhat significant lead in the space to make a solid effort.
- libraryofbabel 1y agoI don’t think that’s a viable strategy. It is very very hard and not many people can do it. Just look at how much Meta is paying to poach the few people in the world capable of training a next gen frontier model.
- lukan 1y agoWhy are there actually only a few people in the world able to do this? The basic concept is out there. Lots of smart people studying hard to catch up to also be poached. No shortage of those I assume. Good trainingsdata still seems the most important to me. (and lots of hardware) Or does the specific training still involves lots of smart decisions all the time? And those small or big decisions make all the difference?
- phillipcarter 1y agoI'd recommend reading some of the papers on what it takes to actually train a proper foundation model, such as the Llama 3 Herd of Models paper. It is a deeply sophisticated process. Coding startups also try to fine-tune OSS models to their own ends. But this is also very difficult, and usually just done as a cost optimization, not as a way to get better functionality.
- sideshownz 1y ago1. Cost to hire is now prohibitive. You're competing against companies like Meta paying tens of millions for top talent. 2. Cost to train is also prohibitive. Grok data centre has 200,000 H100 Graphics cards. Impossible for a startup to compete with this.
- tonyhart7 1y ago"Impossible for a startup to compete with this." its funny to me since xAI literally the "youngest" in this space and recently made an Grok4 that surpass all frontier model it literally not impossible
- lukan 1y agoI mean, that's a startup backed by the richest man in the world who also was engaged with OpenAI in the beginning. I assume startup here means the average one, that has a little bit less of funding and connections.
- ako 1y agoMost startups don't have Elon Musk's money.
- re-thc 1y agoxAI isn’t young. The brand, maybe. Not the actual history / timeline. Tesla was working on AI long ago. xAI was just spun out to raise more money / fix the x finance issues.
- libraryofbabel 1y agoThe basic concept plus a lot of money spent on compute and training data gets you pretraining. After that to get a really good model there’s a lot more fine-tuning / RL steps that companies are pretty secretive about. That is where the “smart decisions” and knowledge gained by training previous generations of sota models comes in. We’d probably see more companies training their own models if it was cheaper, for sure. Maybe some of them would do very well. But even having a lot of money to throw at this doesn’t guarantee success, e.g. Meta’s Llama 4 was a big disappointment. That said, it’s not impossible to catch up to close to state-of-the-art, as Deepseek showed.
- ivape 1y agoI’d also add that no one predicted the emergent properties of LLMs as they followed the scaling laws hypothesis. GPT showed all kinds of emergent stuff like reasoning/sentiment analysis when we went up an order of magnitude on the number of parameters. We don’t don’t actually know what would emerge if we trained a quadrillion param model. SOTA will always be mysterious until we reach those limits, so, no, companies like Cursor will never be on the frontier. It takes too much money and requires seeking out things we haven’t ever seen before.
- riwsky 1y agoBecause it’s not about “who can do it”, it’s about “who can do it the best”. It’s the difference between running a marathon (impressive) and winning a marathon (here’s a giant sponsorship check).
- seanhunter 1y agoWhy are there so few people in the world able to run 100m in sub 10s? The basic concept is out there: run very fast. Lots of people running every day who could be poached. No shortage of those I assume. Good running shoes still seem the most important to me.
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- vachina 1y agoYou need a person that can hit the ground running. Compute for LLM is extremely capital intensive and you’re always racing against time. Missing performance targets can mean life or death of the company.
- crystal_revenge 1y agoThere are plenty of people theoretically capable of doing this, I secretly believe some of the most talented people in this space are randos posting on /r/LocalLlama. But the truth is to have experience building models at this scale requires working at a high level job at a major FAANG/LLM provider. Building what Meta needs is not something you can do in your basement. The reality is the set of people who really understand this stuff and have experience working on it at scale is very, very small. And the people in this space are already paid very well.
- bluelightning2k 1y agoIt's a staggeringly bad deal. It's a hugely expensive task where unless you are the literal best in the world, you would never even see any usage. And even for those who are BOTH best and well known they have to be willing to lose billions on repeat with no end in sight. It's very very rare to have winner takes all to such an extreme degree as code llm models
- nmfisher 1y agoI don't think it's literally "winner takes all" - I regularly cycle between Gemini, DeepSeek and Claude for coding tasks. I'm sure any GPT model would be fine too, and I could even fall back to Qwen in a pinch (exactly what I did when I was in China recently with no ability to access foreign servers). Claude does have a slight edge in quality (which is why it's my default) but infrastructure/cost/speed are all relevant too. Different providers may focus on one at the expense of the others. One interesting scenario where we could end up is using large hosted models for planning/logic, and handing off to local models for execution.
- raincole 1y ago> to develop their own frontier coding model Uh, the irony is that this is exactly what Windsurf tried.
- stogot 1y agoWhy did they fail?
- jonny_eh 1y agoIt's both hard AND expensive.
- bluelightning2k 1y agoAs an actual user of Windsurf model, I don't think "tried" is fair. I sometimes use it. It's not as smart as Gemini but it iterates quicker and is very well aligned with their tool calls
- josephcooney 1y agointerestingly windsurf have done this (I'm not sure how frontier this model is...but it's their own model) https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurf-wave-9-swe-1 https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurf-wave-9-swe-1 but AFAIK cursor have not.
- bluelightning2k 1y agoWindsurf has developed their own fron tier model. It's pretty good. It's not sota but it's very well aligned with their tool call formatting etc.
- teruakohatu 1y ago> CC at like a 500% loss Do you have a citation for this? It might be at a loss, but I don’t think it is that extravagant.
- resonious 1y agoI'm also curious about this. Claude Code feels very expensive to me, but at the same time I don't have much perspective (nothing to compare it to, really, other than Codex or other agent editors I guess. And CC is way better so likely worth the extra money anyway)
- harikb 1y agoI think GP is talking about Claude Code Max 100 & 200 plans. They are very reasonable compared to anything else that has per-use token usage. I am on Max and I can work 5 hrs+ a day easily. It does fall back to Sonnet pretty fast, but I don't seem to notice any big differece.
- e1g 1y agoYes, my CC usage is regularly $50-$100 per day, so their Max plan is absolutely great value that I don’t expect to last.
- jhickok 1y agoCan you give me an idea of how much interaction would be $50-$100 per day? Like are you pretty constantly in a back and forth with CC? And if you wouldn’t mind, any chance you can give me an idea of productivity gains pre/post LLM?
- resonious 1y agoRe productivity gains, CC allows me to code during my commute time. Even on a crowded bus/train I can get real work done just with my phone.
- Aeolun 1y agoIt probably doesn’t cost them all that much? Maybe they were offering the API at a 500% markup, and code is just breaking even.
- threatripper 1y agoBut Cursor is also offering OpenAI and Google models.
- adidoit 1y agoNot sure this is true. Inference margins are substantial and if you look at your claude code usage it's very clever at caching Input │ Output │ Cache Create │ Cache Read 916,134 │ 11,106,507 │ 199,684,538 │ 2,767,614,506 as an example here's my usage. Massive daily usage for the past two months.
- manojlds 1y agoIf open models become big, open coding agents would be bigger at that point. Even more motivation as well.
- lvl155 1y agoWhich is interesting because Sonnet is cheap and Opus is not on par with o3 for tasks where you want to deploy it.
- 7thpower 1y agoWhere is a citation on Anthropic increasing cost to cursor? I had not seen that news, but it would make sense.
- bernawil 1y agoyou mean the plans are subsidized? pay-per-use doesn't look subsidized to me, I can spend 5$ a day on a medium sized codebase easily.