ttcbj
Joined 15 years ago
Joined 15 years ago
My takeaway from looking at the tool list is that they got the fundamental architecture right - try to create a very simple and general set of tools on the client-side (e.g. read file, output rich text, etc) so that the server can innovate rapidly without revving the client (and also so that if, say, the source code leaks, none of the secret sauce does).
Overall, when I see this I think they are focused on the right issues, and I think their tool list looks pretty simple/elegant/general. I picture the server team constantly thinking - we have these client-side tools/APIs, how can we use them optimally? How can we get more out of them. That is where the secret sauce lives.
I particularly valued the tool list. People in these comments are complaining about how bad the code is, but I found the client-side tools that the model actually uses to be pretty clean/general.
My takeaway was more that at a very basic level they know what they are doing - keep the client general, so that you can innovate on the server side without revving the client as much.
It will be useful for me and my wife, but it would have been transformative for my kids in the pre-driving teen years. We do so much ferrying them around, and to be able to put them in a safe car and get them where they are going would have made such a difference for us. I think it might be here in time to make a difference with my younger child.
For that use case, trust and safety are really, really important to me. That plan only works for me because I suspect the Waymo driver will be safer than I am. I think for companies developing self-driving cars, the safety reputation matters a lot. Right now Waymo is the only one I would consider, because their roll out has been so methodical and competent.
The key thing they need to recognize is that some percentage of their customers are serious businesses that want them to continue developing/maintaining the software, and that these businesses will be supportive as long as the deal is the same for everyone (you can't ask them to pay out of the goodness of their hearts, as then they feel they will be taken advantage of by people who don't pay).
When we switched to a recurring pricing model, I thought it was going to be a disaster. In fact, I got an angry call from exactly one customer (who then remained a customer despite threatening to leave). I got subtly expressed approval/relief from many more.
The book "How to Sell at Margins Higher than Your Competitors" was helpful to me, and might be helpful here as well. The key is to realize that you want to sell to people who really value your product and will pay for it. You don't want to maximize volume, you want to maximize revenue x margin.
You already have an installed base of people who value your product enough to pay for it once, you just have to create a system that enables them to sustain the technology they value in order to get ongoing support/upgrades/fixes/etc. The people who are going to complain on hacker news about recurring pricing aren't the people you want as customers anyway.
If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked. But you may as well find that out directly. If people really don't want to pay for the software, don't waste time creating it for them.
We made the switch about 20 years ago. Since that time, about 70% of our lifetime revenue has come from recurring payments. Had I not had the courage to make the switch, I would be writing now that the business has been an unsustainable mistake, but that would have been false.
But I really wish Anthropic would give the technology to a journalist that tries working with it productively. Most business people will try to work with AI productively because they have an incentive to save money/be efficient/etc.
Anyway, I am hoping someone at Anthropic will see this on HN, and relay this message to whatever team sets up these experiements. I for one would be fascinated to see the vending machine experiment done sincerely, with someone who wants to make it work.
The reality is that even most customers are smart enough to realize that driving a business they rely on out of business isn't in their interest. In fact, in a B2B context, I think that is often the case. Thanks.
I am a fan of the idea that universities need a new pricing model that is correlated to career results. Like, maybe universities are only eligible for students to receive gov't loans in proportion to the increase in W2 income of their past students, etc.
But I am not convinced that the model in this article, as described, scales. It might be a model for attracting very high-value students and thriving. But in that case it might just be about selection effects, and not about delivering a value-add in education.
I also think that the article fails to recognize that one of the main tasks of major universities is research. Quite possibly the research and education functions should be separated, but I wish the article addressed some of these issues more explicitly.
Still, $100m towards and effort is interesting. Maybe it will evolve in an even more interesting direction.
In this particular case, the press release notes "Scientifically, it's very difficult to interpret the data because the brain had suffered bleeding, seizures, swelling...". That does seem to limit how much can be generalized from this one case. A larger study of MAID patients would be more useful.
Edit: Maybe the issue is that the MAID itself would alter the brain state. That actually seems pretty plausible.