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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Another indicator that AI is a bubble. Anthropic just released Claude Opus 4.7, and users are reporting significantly higher token burn rates (and therefore costs) for what appears to be a minor improvement over Opus 4.6. Discussion on Orange Reddit is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816960 and a tracker of the increased token burn rate is here: https://tokens.billchambers.me/leaderboard

The token tracker is based on user reporting, but has been fluctuating between 37% and 45%.

Even if AGI is actually possible with LLMs (or at all, but I'm not trying to start a discussion on metaphysics here), it looks like the capital needed to achieve it is drying up before it can be reached. Anthropic's move here (combined with them handicapping Opus 4.6 a few weeks ago) seems to clearly be an attempt to achieve profitability. The free/subsidized rate train for end users has pulled into the station, and now you have to pay more for the same (or worse) capabilities you were enjoying before.

I normally don't care much for the median Hacker News commenter (if me calling it Orange Reddit didn't already give that away), but I do find them to be a useful barometer for general sentiment in the tech industry. And a few months ago I would have said roughly 60% of HN users were AI believers/enthusiasts, 20% neutral or unsure, and 20% anti/negative. Anthropic's antics over the last few months (and Sam Altman's antics for his entire life) seem to have soured their views significantly, and I see this as a big sign of a sea change in sentiment about AI in the tech industry.

At least for me personally, I just hope this leads to less retarded mandates from my higher-ups about using AI X times a month etc. (we're literally tracked on usage and it can affect our raises/bonuses).

For everyone here, nut perhaps especially the AGI believers, have your feelings changed at all over the last few months?

I don't really see what this is supposed to prove one way or the other. You are still stuck in the timescale framing of the most fervent AI bros. Opus 4.6 came out in February, 2 months ago. So what if Opus 4.7 is not a revolutionary upgrade? If AI were truly stagnant, we won't really find out until someone posts in 2028 that Opus 6.7 is only a marginal upgrade over Opus 4.7.

I think you misunderstand my argument. I'm not arguing that AGI is impossible based on this (though I don't believe it's possible). I'm arguing that this is a strong sign that VC money is drying up before they could ever conceivably achieve AGI (even if it is possible).

Anthropic raised $30 billion two months ago, their problem isn’t lack of money. All the VC money in the world won’t solve a bad engineering culture.

Sure, but they're on track to burn $11 billion this year in expenses, and more in the future, so that's not going to last too long

$11 billion this year in expenses

...and $14 billion in revenue assuming zero growth. Or closer to $35B if their 10x/yr trajectory continues.

If that were the end of the story it wouldn't be an issue. It's that it evidently uses significantly more computing power than the performance improvement would suggest, raising the spectre of rapidly diminishing returns.

It seems to me this also has financial implications. If you are paying per token, and the model's benchmark performance increases slightly, but its token cost to reach those higher benchmarks increases tremendously, suddenly you're paying a lot more to do, at best, slightly more.

If Anthropic is making margin on the token cost, then this is an improvement from their financial point of view, right?

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