Jacob Marks

I ended Moving from ChatGPT to Claude with "more once I've actually used it." I've used it. The answer isn't simple because chat and coding are different enough to warrant separate conclusions. I'll preface this with noting that these are my observations and not scientific conclusions. Overall Claude's setup friction was real. Claude depends on more non-Anthropic services than you'd expect and Pi-hole blocks a significant number of them silently. I ended up building an allow list and publishing it before I could use Claude reliably. ChatGPT has never required any of that. I also happened to start evaluating Claude during an outage, which didn't help first impressions. Not everyone runs Pi-hole, but enough technically-minded people do that it's worth noting. Anthropic's availability is noticeably worse than OpenAI's. The status dashboard reflects a steady stream of incidents. ChatGPT is install and forget. Claude required fighting to g...

When I hear companies like Anthropic make claims that they don’t know why AI comes to some conclusion, or they suggest that Claude somehow “resorted to blackmail” to prevent itself from being shut down as featured on 60 Minutes , it makes me feel we deserve a more honest take than we're getting. AI marketing, at least as it exists at the time of this article's writing, is filled with disingenuous assertions that create marketing leverage and product branding. It invokes fear, confusion, and hype. There's an important distinction being blurred here. We may not be able to trace why AI produces a specific response to a given prompt at any given time because of the sheer magnitude of steps but that is quite different than saying we don't know how it works. IT systems can suffer from the same problem, but thankfully they are much easier to solve because they are much smaller. Conflating the two is, at best, imprecise and at worst, deliberate. For example, it may be true that...