Anthropic is out with a quartet of ads that they’re planning to air for the Superbowl and they’re devastating.
The four themes are: deception, violation, trechery and betrayal but they all speak to the same thing: OpenAI launching ads. Or maybe not just OpenAI but other LLMs as well. There’s no doubt the world’s biggest advertising company — Google — is going to head in that direction as well.
But Anthropic is staking out the high ground in a way that I think will really resonate with consumers who are sick of having their data turned against them to sell them something.
The whole move puts the spotlight back on OpenAI’s business model. They plan to spend an insane amount of money on superintelligence and AI but it’s not clear how any of it will make money. The subscription model just isn’t big enough to fund the capex.
Sam Altman himself said this previously:
“I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us as a business model”
Well, we’re here and competitors have a different business model. Anthropic seems to have made the right moves by targeting business and developers rather than consumer adoption. Now they’re going after the consumer side with a model (in my opinion) that’s better.
Now the model wars are far from finished but OpenAI has lost its lead and this week’s drama around funding isn’t a good look, even if everyone is denying it.
What we really need is an IPO (preferably with a large portion of shares floated) so we can get a sense of what this thing is really worth. Now maybe that’s a bit fanciful as valuations seem so disconnected in this market.
The big problem for OpenAI is that despite near-unlimited capital, their competitors also have near-unlimited capital so the product gets commoditized and the margins disappear. So you need some kind of innovation in your business model and if that’s “advertisements” then it doesn’t end well.
