Item — HN Reader

What happens if OpenAI collapses at this point? Is it just too big to fail given defense contracts and Microsoft?

The Sora sunsetting marked a big shift towards enterprise focus and meeting Anthropic on the enterprise battlefield, but almost all engineers I work with or know are using Claude at this point exclusively.

Anyone seeing differently?

10 comments

> Anyone seeing differently?

There have been a stream of HN posts (I'm noticed this mainly in the past few weeks) implying some people prefer ChatGPT/Codex to Claude.

Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting, often stopping in the middle of a query. ChatGPT/Codex doesn't have this problem.

My 2 cents: Claude is more expensive, but it has something that Codex/GPT lacks that's not easy to quantify. Opus is probably a bigger model (my guess) and trained on code and technical writing (books?) of better qualify compared to GPT.

HOWEVER, it has a flaw that makes some people prefer Codex: out of the box, it's lazy: https://x.com/i/status/2044126543287300248

However, once you learn how to deal with the laziness (which can be dealt with some CLAUDE.md instructions and context docs), Claude shows a better taste for coding. It replicates patterns from the repo, writes more readable/maintainable code, follows instructions, captures implicit information.

GPT/Codex is not a bad model/agent, but it lacks something. It's amazing for code reviews, but it writes code with zero regard to your existing codebase or SOLID/DRY principles. It just likes to output code (a lot of it) that works for the task you gave it right now, with zero regard for maintenance later. And also over-uses defensive programming in a way that quickly makes the codebase unreadable for dynamic languages.

Claude is not perfect, I still have to steer it sometimes to prevent overengineering or duplicate code, but a lot less than when I try Codex (and the built-in /simplify does half of the work for me).

>>Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting, often stopping in the middle of a query.

The free version is pretty much unusable. Not a single query completes, You get only one query every 4 hours, given like 12 waking hours, you get 3 queries, none of which complete.

$20 plan gets you only a small distance from there.

Looks like the focus is entirely on Enterprise customers these days. They don't even bother with their regular users these days. CC is entirely a enterprise product.

That's crazy talk. I am on the $20 plan and I do hit the limit occasionally, but I get a few hours of usage before I do.

the rate limit is clearly stochastic. they've made their availability a skinner box and everyone is falling for it.

> Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting

Utterly not my experience. I use opus near daily for long research sessions (not all agent based). Are you throwing in 100k input tokens to every query?

skinner box

What the hell kind of queries are you running? I use Claude Pro all the time for asking questions, doing data analysis, writing side projects, and I very rarely get rate limited.

I use Claude Max 20x at work and I rarely hit 10% session utilization, which implies even using Claude to write code all day only uses 2x the Pro token limit.

Are you just telling it to try again when you get a response you don't like?

I get rate limited after about 1-2 hours having it generate, troubleshoot, and fix things running on k8s (Opus)

We have Claude Teams at work and I don't think I've had issues there.

The amount of peripheral growth around it is even larger, tons of construction, utility company upgrades etc. There are more data centers under construction than there are currently operational data centers. So there is more than doubling of capacity coming from current buildout. If you include projects in the planning phase it is something like 4-6x expected capacity increase. The utility infrastructure buildout to meet this demand is equally huge.

The warning signs are already starting to show up though, projects are being stalled, not filled out, blaming it on delays from China etc, but the funding is still present, the construction keeps going on of the next building even as the last one sits vacant and offline. The sky high purchases of property from connected individuals by site developers continue, even as pushback mounts and many places are passing anti-datacenter ordinances.

Nothing of note would happen if OpenAI collapsed. The same prompts will work with claude or gemini and the outputs will be good enough.

I've also noted that 90% of technical users I encounter are on claude or mostly-claude via cursor (switching models here-and-there).

Claude Code definitely has a head start, but there have been a few HN posts about a perceived nerfing of the intelligence and settings in the past month or so. Codex could capitalize on that weakness. They just introduced a $100 monthly 5x plan so they are at parity with the Claude Code plans. If Anthropic fiddles too much more with the settings then people will start to switch to Codex.

Codex is just better than Claude but Claude is faster and has the better UI for vscode. That’s why I use Claude as main coder with codex(5.4 with xhigh effort) as mcp reviewer etc. It is clear to me that codex is a better programmer but the UI and speed are too much of a con to use it exclusively. Claude is just clumsy

Seeing the same, Claude with every engineer. Even some non technical people moved to Claude from ChatGPT recently.

All our engineers use Claude but all the AI features in our app are built on OpenAI models

At work there’s only codex right now (no approval yet for anthropic - OpenAI access was easier/faster through Microsoft)

It was a pretty straightforward transition going from mostly using claude code, to now exclusively codex

The world would barely notice if both OpenAI and Anthropic “fail”. There is a lot of competition in this space

> too big to fail

genuine question, what do you think these words mean?

I think it's code for "the government will have to bail them out".

Seems like Sam was angling for that with some of his China vs USA rhetoric

Why would they need a bail out? Their assets can be sold off, they can be taken over or be absorbed by another American entity.

Absolutely no reason for a bail out.

It may hurt the ego of Altman and Brockman - but that's their problem.

If DoD systems are running on OpenAI infrastructure, you can't just pause them for 6 months during an acquisition. This gets far more complex than just "liquidation of assets".

Because their assets would have been vastly overvalued. The bailout is when the government buys those assets at as close to that fictional valuation as they can, and likely then sells them back at their actual worth.

> Absolutely no reason for a bail out.

There's never been any reason for a bailout. It's just handing tax money to wealthy people who have made bad decisions.

The contract with the Pentagon is a good first step. Being a government contractor is pretty fail safe.

At some point you reach a size when too many politicians and the people who own them have invested so much money that they're willing to take any size political hit in order to save themselves from personal losses when you fail.

and claude is actually meh too!