How so? Opus and Sonnet are frontier models which cannot easily be replicated. Compute has real physical constraints which require appropriate procurement at this scale. At least those two points seem like pretty strong moats against the majority of companies.
You don't need to "replicate" Opus and Sonnet, you just need to match their overall performance at lower cost. That's been absolutely doable so far, with a steadily decreasing lag time.
You're right and the your reasoning is great. Anthropic should fold and give up their $30 billion ARR just announced in the OP. Shut it all down, no moat here.
We must live on opposite sides of US cause I’ve never heard anyone say that it is possible (except few politicans who thought it may be a good way to win an election but also knew that it was not possible and gave up once they got elected)
The Pentagon e.g. would be a legitimate target for Iran and if in their operations against the US they know that your neighborhood is a military target then they can and should warn you and allow you to leave. I doubt that the US military stores rockets in your basement but if they are then that would be a concern. That said if you were in range of Iran's rockets I don't think they'd worry much about e.g. firing cluster munitions on Washington DC like they do on Tel Aviv or Israeli cities.
I also don’t think vast majority of SWEs ever had the skill to read and truly comprehend other people’s code and then work dilligently to “fix” it. People will such skills, in my experience, are often highly compensated contractors. every codebase which has survived the test of time has numerous “absolutely do not touch this code, everything will break and no one knows why” part(s) of the codebase…
20% is one of those cool lies SWEs have been able to push through (like “our jobs are oh so very special we can’t really estimate it, we’ll create an entire sub-industries with our industry to make sure everyone knows we can’t estimate”).
SWEs spend 20% of the time writing code for exactly the same reason brick-layers spend 20% of their time laying bricks
- A lot of research. Libraries documentation, best practice, sample solutions, code history,... That could be easily 60% of the time. Even when you're familiar with the project, you're always checking other parts of the codebase and your notes.
- Communication. Most projects involve a team and there's a dependency graph between your work. There may be also a project manager dictating things and support that wants your input on some cases.
- Thinking. Code is just the written version of a solution. The latter needs to exists first. So you spend a lot of time wrangling with the problem and trying to balance tradeoffs. It also involves a lot of the other points.
Coding is a breeze compared to the others. And if you have setup a good environment, it's even enjoyable.
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