> would say the flood of 20+ Claude Subscribers due to news cycle backfired

This is a good hypothesis. I suspect we are both correct.

The PR boost from Anthropic standing its ground drove signups. That, in turn, drove investors. But the users also drove utilization, which degraded quality across the board.

My hypothesis rests on Anthropic’s user mix having significantly shifted to consumers (versus enterprise) after the mix-up. Whenever we get public numbers it would be interesting to test that.

> What backfired?

I think it was psychological to a degree. For many consumers OpenAI, or at least ChatGPT was AI. The controversy was enough for folks to be introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.

I agree with OP though that this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point.

> introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.

This is true. OpenAI WAS the story of AI, now it is just 50% of it, at max. Losing the monopoly of imagination towards AGI is bad for them.

One thing I don't agree though, consumers aren't the important part of AI, they are a liability.

AI is too expensive, consumers can't pay for it. Instead they will compete with enterprise for the same tokens, with less money.

> controversy was enough for folks to be introduced to competitors

This is my suspicion. Consumers hadn’t previously heard of Anthropic and Claude. Now they had, particularly in cities.

> this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point

Also agree. Hence why I said “I don’t think” the fight is “the ultimate cause.”

Anecdotally a whole lot more people around me started using Anthropic models in the last few weeks and seem to like them more than OpenAI. For many of these people it was the second provider they ever used.

Of course this is part of what has lead to such insane demand and outages they've experienced since then.

I use both CC and Codex because one is not enough and 5x for $100 is too much.

>> followed by their Mythos stunt

"Stunt", eh?