1) OpenAI and Anthropic are killing it, and continue to do so, their coding tools are unmatched for professionals.
2) Local models don't hold a candle to SOTA models and there's nothing on the horizon that indicates that consumers will be able to run anything close to what you can get in a data center.
3) Coding is a killer product, OpenAI and Anthropic are raking in the cash. The top 3 apps are apps in the app store are AI. Everyone who knows anything is using AI, every day, across the economy.
On (2), I agree with you for local models. BUT, there are also the open source Chinese models accessible via open-router. Your argument ("don't hold a candle to SOTA models") does not hold if the comparison is between those.
On (1), I agree more with the grandparent than with your assessment. Yes, OpenAI and Anthropic are killing it for now, but the time horizon is very short. I use codex and claude daily, but it's also clear to me that open source is catching up quickly, both w.r.t. the models and the agentic harnesses.
I thought so myself, but after burning a lot of money on OpenRouter in a few days I just subscribed to Z.ai's Coding Pro plan and using the subscription is much, much friendlier with my wallet.
(1): You don't have to be an Ed Zitron disciple to infer that OpenAI and Anthropic are likely overvalued and that Nvidia is selling everyone shovels in a gold rush. AI is a game-changing technology, but a shitty chat interface does not a company make. OpenAI and Anthropic need to recoup astronomical costs used in training these models. Models that are now being distilled[1] and are quickly becoming commoditized. (And frankly, models that were trained by torrenting copyrighted data[2], anyway.) Many have been calling this out for years: the model cannot be your product. And to be clear, OpenAI/Anthropic most definitely know this: that's why they've been aquihiring like crazy, trying to find that one team that will make the thing.
(2): Token prices are significantly subsidized and anyone that does any serious work with AI can tell you this. Go use an almost-SOTA model (a big Deepseek or Qwen model) offered by many bare-metal providers and you'll see what "true" token prices should look like. The end-state here is likely some models running locally and some running in the cloud. But the current state of OpenClaw token-vomit on top of Claude is fiscally untenable (in fact, this is why Anthropic shut it down).
(3): This is typical Dropbox HN snark[3], of which I am also often guilty of. I really don't think AI coding is a killer product and this seems very myopic—engineers are an extreme minority. Imo, the closest we've seen to something revolutionary is OpenClaw, but it's janky, hard to set up, full of vulnerabilities, and you need to buy a separate computer. But there's certainly a spark there. (And that's personally the vertical I'm focusing on.)
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
[2] https://media.npr.org/assets/artslife/arts/2025/complaint.pd...
Anthropic is up to $30B annual recurring revenue. I wish I had failing business models like that.
> Token prices are significantly subsidized and anyone that does any serious work with AI can tell you this. Go use an almost-SOTA model (a big Deepseek or Qwen model) offered by many bare-metal providers and you'll see what "true" token prices should look like.
I'm not sure what think you are saying here, but if you look at the providers for both "almost-SOTA model (a big Deepseek or Qwen model)" or at the price for Claude on AWS Bedrock, Azure or on GCP you will quickly see inference is very profitable.
And profit? A company can have $300B annual revenue, and still be a failing business if it's making a loss.
Somewhere along the line we seem to have forgotten this basic fact. Eventually there will be no more rounds of funding to feed the fire.
Qwen3.5-122B-A10B is $0.26 input, $2.08 output. Where's the subsidy? It's ten times cheaper than Opus. Or did you mean that we're subsidizing their training? But then "OpenClaw token-vomit on top of Claude is fiscally untenable" makes no sense.
Yeah, I don't know where you got your costs from. Bare metal providers are significantly cheaper than Anthropic.