Nilay Patel

And now he has Croc, which is about as good as GPT-5, which is about as good as Gemini.

And that's the state of the art.

It sounds like you're saying there's actually a lot more differentiation at that frontier model level now.

And just having a whole bunch of GPUs trading away is not enough.

The idea that the models themselves are kind of all interchangeable and you've got to build other kinds of moats, whether it's the personality of the model or specific feature sets or, in the case of Grok,

porn, that to me connects very directly to, well, a bunch of researchers can just leave, right?

If the underlying models are as similar as you're saying, and it's the other moats on top, well, that to me is why you would say, well, I have enough money.

I want to go someplace where the mission matters.

And there's a lot of reasons why the missions at XAI might be different than your perceived mission at OpenAI versus your perceived mission at Anthropic.

If you've been paying attention, you've seen a huge wave of coverage about Anthropic in various publications lately.

The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Verge.

And there's a theme in all of those stories.

It really feels like Anthropic thinks Claude might be alive, in that it needs to take AI ethics and morality very seriously.

A number of those pieces, including our own, featured interviews with Amanda Askell, the resident philosopher at Anthropic who's working on safety.

It seems like Anthropic is pushing very hard to maintain its reputation as the AI safety first.

Do you think hinting that Claude is alive is like a competitive advantage for Anthropic?

Are they just doing it to hype themselves up and court talent?

I feel like Sam Altman spent weeks, months saying AGI was imminent and he stopped doing that because he has to run a consumer business that is going to make money in ads now.

And he can't run around saying that he's invented digital god the way that he was like earlier last year maybe.

Anthropic was way quieter about it.