How Anthropic Got Inside OpenAI’s Head
Of all of OpenAI’s rivals, Anthropic seems to be worrying the artificial intelligence leader the most, especially its progress in key areas like automatic code writing.
OpenAI has a lot of rivals nipping at its heels. None of them has given the company’s executives the jitters quite like Anthropic has, though.
Earlier this fall, OpenAI leaders got a shock when they saw the performance of Anthropic’s artificial intelligence model for automating computer programming tasks, which had gained an edge on OpenAI’s models, according to its own internal benchmarks. AI for coding is one of OpenAI’s strong suits and one of the main reasons why millions of people subscribe to its chatbot, ChatGPT.
OpenAI leaders were already on edge after Cursor, a startup OpenAI funded last year, in July made Anthropic’s Claude model the default for Cursor’s AI coding assistant instead of OpenAI’s models, as it had previously done, according to an OpenAI employee. In a podcast in October, Cursor co-founder Aman Sanger called the latest version of Anthropic’s model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the “net best” for coding in part because of its superior understanding of what customers ask it to do.
