Anthropic vs. OpenAI: The DoD Contract

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1:10ChatGPT is in some hot water. People are not very happy about this. And then Claude now is being installed more than any other app out there. It's the number one. It's reached the number one spot. There's a big shift going on. And I think it's for a lot of reasons besides just the Department of Defense deal. But I think that really turned a lot of people off to ChatGPT and they're worried about their security, their privacy. And Claude already has been on the come up because of Claude Code. Lots of people are starting to use Claude. And they may end up taking the number one spot for the most used AI company eventually.

1:47We'll have to see about that. But Jaden, why don't you tell them about what's going on here in this story? okay i actually have a contrarian take that if you are easily upset about things you will be upset about me no doubt but i'll give you my contrarian take on this and when i say contrarian um if you go to tech crunch and you want to like know the latest in ai news and their ai section every other article for the last 20 articles has covered this topic in one specific one one specific point of view which is it's like chadjupiti install surge no one has a good plan for how AI companies should work with the government.

2:23Users are ditching chat GPT for Claude. Here's how to make the switch. Tech workers urge Department of Defense to withdraw Anthropic label-less supply chain risk. Anthropic Claude reports widespread outage, presumably from, you know, so many people using it, right? Anthropic's Claude rises to number one in the App Store following Pentagon dispute. OpenAI reveals more details about its agreement with the Pentagon. Okay, it goes, the trap Anthropic built for itself. Like, I'm reading you all of these because this is like 70 % of all the AI articles being written by TechCrunch and other places are covering this all from the same angle.

2:56More and more, yada, yada. Like it goes on and on and on and on for like two weeks. This is the only thing that anyone will talk about. So what's my take on this? I'll tell you TechCrunch's take. TechCrunch's take is anthropic, good. They're standing up to the government. Open AI, bad. Sam Altman is now bad. And I love to see this in tech where basically you, it's whatever the quote is where like if you you a hero lives long enough to see himself turn into the villain i can't even remember that quote and i'm sure i'm butchering it jamie if you know it please sounds close shout it out correctly but basically chat gpt was the hero sam altman was the hero and now we've come full tech cycle where like once your company gets big enough you become the villain this is with google and microsoft and mark zuckerberg like when mark zuckerberg came out and made facebook he was like this cool indie hacker in his bedroom and now we're like mark zuckerberg is like the spy king give you all the spyware with the ads and you come full circle to a villain because your company's big enough and the news will slander you and is that a bad thing now i mean they have billions of dollars i like to see a lot of pushback on the billion dollar companies so it is it good or bad i don't know i appreciate the opposition to it in any case you would hate for them to have a billion dollars and everyone say they're amazing all the time they get like a kind of god complex right so all this to say i mean it's just the predictable cycle of what's happen and evidently uh sam altman because his company is bigger than anthropics like he's the target of this so it's really funny for me to watch this i actually don't think he's in the wrong i think sam altman played the ultimate 40 chess move because let me give you the the layout of the how the story happened anthropic and the department of defense got into a beef anthropic is the was the only company approved for classified um department of department of defense department of War.

4:43I don't know what we call it anymore. Someone said, I don't really know. So anyways, Department of Defense, Department of War, whatever we call them, they were the only ones classified to be basically integrated into their tech stack to do a lot of these classified operations. So what happened? Well, the US went and takes out Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and then it leaks that, oh my gosh, they used Anthropics Claude in that mission, which sort of could have been a great marketing. I mean, marketing, this probably sounds terrible. It could have been like a great marketing thing because on the one hand, like that mission was executed in the middle of the night before anyone knew it was happening.

5:18They captured the president. They brought him back. Not a single American died. And so if you're like Anthropic, like orchestrated it, like love it or hate it, the missionary or the love it or hate that mission, that military mission, like it was executed perfectly in a sense that like no one died. No Americans died. I'm sure the Venezuelan guards might not have done as well. but no Americans died in that mission. So you could call that a success. That could be like Anthropic being like, look how smart our AI is. Anthropic heard about this, got upset and was like, look, we don't want you guys using this in the Department of Defense.

5:52And they added a couple of stipulations, which personally I sort of agree with. I don't know if you saw these, Jamie. Do you see their like red line items that Anthropic made? No, I didn't. I'd be interested to hear though. So they were like, they were like, hey, so you can't use our AI models for mass surveillance of American citizens or for fully autonomous AI systems. Like you can't have anthropic powering like an AI bomb that goes and shoots down, that goes and shoots down like an Iranian jet without like a human having intervention, right? And like, to be honest, like I sort of agree with those things like mass surveillance of American citizens, which I fall under.

6:28I'm like, yeah, I don't, that doesn't sound good to me. I don't like the idea of that. And also like fully autonomous AI that just runs around shooting people Terminator style. Like, yeah, I don't really like that idea, right? The problem with it, though, I don't think necessarily is the red line items. The problem is that they had a government contract and they were the only authorized classified AI system. And then after the fact, they came up with like terms of service red line items, which are the ones I like. Sure. But like, what if they made one that I didn't like? What if they said, actually, this can't be used in any battle planning that's going to result in a human casualty?

7:04because I mean, you could make a moral ethical case for that as well, right? Well, it's like, okay, well, then our whole like military got nerfed. And the funny thing I think about this, which is like crazy to think about is with the US and Israel doing their whole Iran bombing invasion thing, like no comment on that whole situation. But with that whole situation, they literally had this public beef with Anthropic evidently because they needed an AI model to power a mission. So it's like we're not even going to go invade or launch an attack on a country unless we are 100 % guaranteed that like we have our AI model locked in.

7:39So to me, that is pretty crazy. That's the point the US government is at before they can do any sort of military campaign. They have to make sure they have their AI models locked in, which was kind of crazy if you think about it. Yeah, it's kind of a mind blowing thought and really pretty scary if you think about it. But yeah, I mean, like, I don't know. I see where Claude's coming from, especially when it comes to mass surveillance. And I think back in the day, Apple kind of shut down the government too when it came to surveillance. And they had all the encryption stuff. And I think, honestly, they gained a lot more trust in their product because of that whole situation.

8:22I kind of feel like the same thing is going to happen with Anthropic. you know, Anthropic, I think, let's say you're coding a banking app. Am I going to trust Anthropic with that? Or am I going to use, you know, OpenAI now, who is, I would assume, is agreeing to the mass surveillance idea. I don't know the exact details, of course, but I personally would put more trust in Anthropic if I was making like a banking app, for example. Yeah, and I think it's fair. I think a lot of people will have like a lot of different use cases and opinions on like what AI model they use now, which I think is good.

9:01I think it's good to have a lot of healthy competition in the market for a lot of those use cases. I will say it feels like Sam Altman pulled the ultimate heist, though, in this whole deal, because Anthropic had this beef with the government. The government said, no, you just have to like let us basically have unrestricted access. Don't put guardrails on us. Anthropic said, nope. The government said, OK, we're designating you a supply chain risk. everyone that works with the government has to pull anthropic out of their stuff within six months and like you lose your 200 million dollar contract with the government with the department of defense or whatever so anthropic is like okay and this whole time google and open ai are both like we support anthropic's decision like anthropic has a good is like doing a good thing so anthropic gets the boot and immediately after they announced that anthropic got the boot that same night sam altman goes and tweets and is like we have just come to an agreement with the department of defense to take I mean, basically to take over the contract.

9:54So, I mean, Sam Altman's like, yeah, we agree with you, Anthropic. And then as soon as Anthropic gets kicked out, he's like, and we'll take that$200 million. Thank you very much. So anyways, I believe Sam Altman paid the ultimate or yeah, had the ultimate heist here for a$200 million deal. Now, in his whole thing, when he announced his$200 million deal, because I'm sure if he's listening, he feels like I'm very unfairly representing him. Okay, I'm being a little bit sarcastic, obviously, guys. Relax. Sam, relax, okay? Don't send me a cease and desist. But so yeah, obviously, I mean, a little sarcastic.

10:29In his response, he actually said, we reached an agreement with the military. We also have had them agree to the fact that they won't do mass surveillance and autonomous AI drone, blah, blah, blah. And so now we're going to power them. The skeptical part of me, and I'm a very big conspiracy theorist, so forgive me if you believe everything Sam Altman says. A skeptical part of me says that this is all like, I mean, basically Sam Altman could be lying and maybe that's part of the rules, but no one's actually ever going to verify it. And I mean, like, like very well, if he really wanted$200 million so bad, he could just say that they're going to do that and not do that.

11:06So that's a skeptical part of me thinks that that is a reality that exists because the government lies to us all the time. Let's be real. The realistic part of me says, or the not realistic, but like another side of the coin could be that maybe he truly does have that terms and truly they are going to abide by them. The government just didn't like Anthropic making rules while they were already in there, like adding new terms of service. And if OpenAI comes in with those, that's fine. They're just not allowed to add any more. And so that's probably part of the deal. So one of those two things I think are likely to be a reality.

11:37Either way, the fallout in PR and publicity has been, like Jamie mentioned, that ChatGPT installs or uninstalls are up 300%. What does uninstalls up 300 % mean? Does that mean that of all the installs of chat GPT, like, I don't know, a huge chunk of them are uninstalling? No, that means that if 1000 people uninstall every day, that number is up 300%. And so if it was a small number, like, it's really easy to be like, this is surging 300%. It could be a very small subset of people is all I'm saying, I don't actually think it's going to make any material impact on OpenAI, especially if they got an extra$200 million from the deal.

12:18There's no way whatever amount of people are unsubscribing, which I think is probably relatively small, is going to impact their bottom line. At the same time, Anthropic, it says it's surging to the number one in the app store. I also don't think that that's going to make a huge impact on Anthropic's revenue. There's a small subset of people that probably care a lot about this. probably a lot of it is concentrated in maybe Silicon Valley, New York, and California is where I hear the loudest voices on this issue. And I think that there's like a small amount of people that are moving. I don't think it's going to move the markets.

12:49And I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm just being realistic. I don't like for all of TechCrunch's 20 articles on this topic, I don't actually think that all of them are super accurate that this is the end of OpenAI and this is the new rebirth of Anthropic. However, I do think it's great for the market, but yada yada. I like lots of competition. I'm just trying to be realistic there. So if I popped anyone's bubble at TechCrunch, I am sorry. Realistically, I don't think it's actually going to make a big impact on the industry. Yeah, I do have a couple of stats here for you. ChatGPT also, despite all this, has reached officially 900 million weekly active users.

13:24So that's an insane number. Like you said, if that goes down to 899 million weekly active users, probably not going to affect the company too much. But I will say, you know, Anthropic is now number one in the App Store, which is, I would say, fairly significant. And then there's also a chart that I found. I'll put it up on the screen if you're watching this. But the installs have actually gone up quite a bit for Claude. So if you look here, starting, you know, Claude was at about 50 ,000 downloads per day. $50 ,000 per day. But then starting on February 27th, it jumped up to over$150 ,000 per day.

14:12So that's$100 ,000 per day jump from previous. And then it looks like to me that ChatGPT is holding pretty steady. It did take a dip from around$150 ,000 per day down to$100 ,000 per day after the news. But they're holding pretty steady. But I would say it is significant that Claude has now jumped up to be about on the same level as chat gpt so their growth may be maybe uh you know increasing more so than chat gpt but again 900 million active users that's uh that's a pretty significant amount of the world's population so and i will also mention on like in regards to this chart is my uh is yeah is that that is a u.s based chart so and a global chart i mean this is kind of a US based kind of beef, the US government versus the company.

15:04So I don't think it's going to like spill over to India or like a lot of other countries that probably don't really care about US politics as much. That being said, going from 100 ,000 and 150 ,000 to 100 ,000 for chat GPT. I mean, so that's like down 50 ,000 in a day of their 900 million weekly. And by the way, to have 900 million weekly active users, you would have to have way more installs, because a lot of people have the app and they may be use it once a month or maybe once every two months or they download it at once and whatever, right? So as far as app installs go, like I'm gonna say like half of app installs aren't using it.

15:43Maybe that's generous. Every week, no, like maybe 75 % of people that have the app on their phone don't use it every week. So they wouldn't be included in weekly active users. So yeah, anyways, all I'm saying is like a dip in it is and a jump for anthropic of 50 000 people it's 25 of those are going to use it every week it's just these numbers are not that big in the grand scheme of things if the trend continues forever then it will be a big deal my bet if i was going to bet on poly market which i'm not a betting man but if i was it would be that this doesn't make a big impact on the overall industry anything that's going to happen it's hard for any news really to make that big of an impact but who knows right i I mean, like even like Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, like we all hate the, we all hate how much data they collect on us, yada, yada.

16:29And yet everyone is glued to Instagram. So like, does any of that stuff make a long-term impact on the industry if you like the tool? Not really. And Anthropic doesn't even have image generation, guys. Come on. This is not gonna, it's not gonna be a realistic long-term thing. But I do like to see the trend. It's kind of fun, but yeah. End of the day, I don't think it'll make a huge impact. All right, guys, we've talked way too much about this. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. We appreciate you all. Hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day. Leave us a review on the show if you enjoyed it.

16:59If you have personal beef with my own opinions, send me a message on LinkedIn. I'm happy to chat about them, and I'll catch you guys all in the next episode. From Geico Subconscious News, I'm Tammy Racing Thoughts, broadcasting from your brain. Tonight's top worry. If something happens to your apartment and you need to, like, stay in a hotel and pay for it, that would be crazy, right? Art Palpitations has more. That would be crazy, Tammy, but you got surprisingly affordable renter's insurance through Geico, so it could be covered, giving you peace of mind. Aw, I love a story that ends well. Next up, love stories.

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