Elevated Errors for Opus 5

Having too much demand on limited servers means that less of those servers are going to be available for redundancy.

You can also get a drift of it in their announcements - OpenAI has been far more aggressive in datacenter build-out partnerships as a more top-down allocation strategy since 2024, and Anthropic has rented out existing compute from infrastructure-heavy companies that are losing the model race in what seems like a more desperate ad-hoc compute acquisition strategy.

In all, Dario’s conservatism was in service of not going bankrupt, but any inspection of his argument that an overallocation of compute a year too early results in bankruptcy falls flat: there’s so much demand for mechanized intelligence in the world today that it’s easy to rent out compute if you have too great a supply.

[1]: recall that he was trying to court the saudis into investing $1T to build his own chips

https://qz.com/openai-investor-memo-compute-advantage-anthro...

There's less clear info about this from Anthropic's side, but given their frequent issues and lack of resets and overall less usage given to users on their subscriptions plans, it's a pretty simple conclusion to draw.

we are in the "millennial lifestyle subsidy" era for AI where companies ruthlessly undercut each other in an attempt to win marketshare, before then ratcheting up prices

This is bizarrely out of touch. It would be a courtesy but it's not a "reasonable expectation" at all.

At best you could maybe reasonably expect a prorated refund for the time of unavailability, but then Fable was still available.

Enough to offset any KV cache miss expenses is the absolute minimum.

The smart play is to refund customers something like $20-50 worth of unsubsidized credits.

Those are high margin and only the equivalent of 45 minutes of Fable usage once the KV cache reload costs are factored in.

Yet customers often need a few credits to finish a job without waiting 5 hours or days for their reset.

Keep in mind openAI already gives me free resets I can use when I want which are very useful to me. Seems a no brainer to tack those to subscriptions, actually.

It gives the user a little more flexibility, a little more control over their tools.

I wish it didn’t go down so frequently, but it does. Still, I get an enormous amount of value. I realize they probably prioritize API users over subscribers and I’m ok with that. I use the API and openrouter for the things that need to be resilient to outages.

I would be embarrassed to try to ask for a refund or free credits. They already give credits far in excess of what you pay for and you have practically the entire month to use them outside of a couple hours of downtime.

When you miss 1h of your job, do you give back a month for free?

I think Anthropic is past this point. They are trying to get to profitability. They literally don't have enough compute to serve their demand.

OpenAI on the other hand I can totally see doing this. They need to gain marketshare and gain it fast or they're screwed.

Now with that said, opensi's ultra mode is absolute trash - they should just have stolen Claude code's implementation - and there are clearly modes like max reasoning where they'll burn double the tokens to get another 10th of a percent performance to win benchmarks, which you should basically never be using. They're not making those versions at the expense of more efficient reasoning levels though and I don't mind that they exist (as long as they don't get made the default mode - openai - fix your ultra mode already).

If I needed to fall back on OpenRouter, it'd be paid per token, of course, but that'd take 4 major providers being down, in which case I suspect I'll have more critical things to worry about.

As it is, I use more than I could with a single $200 Claude Max subscription anyway, so I distribute my tasks across multiple providers.

Even without that it's cheap insurance given the cost of lost time.