Their valuations differ by about 13%. That's close enough that I wouldn't call it "blown past".
Things change fast in this space. Anthropic had a big boost from having the premier coding model for a while, but GPT-5.5 has closed that gap at a time when a lot of Anthropic customers are looking for cheaper alternatives.
Anthropic is coming off of a recent change to their enterprise billing that substantially changed the pricing for many users. They were smart to do the fundraising before the effects of that change could fully propagate.
The acceleration rate has been extraordinary… they went from mostly unknown outside AI circles to the number one player almost overnight. If that’s not “blown past” I don’t know what is.
The branding of Claude is so much stronger than ChatGPT. Even Anthropic is such better branding than OpenAI (especially considering they're not open at all).
My wife knows about Claude because that's what I use and we pay for. She uses it also as a result. And inevitably she will talk about Claude to her friends.
If "normie" means a noncorporate knowledge worker who uses the free version, yes.
For enterprise, Anthropic is crushing it. In the manufacturing sector I anecdotally hear a 2:1 ratio of Claude to ChatGPT for teams who are settling on a platform.
At my company the grassroots advocacy from devs has certainly been for Claude Code.
Unfortunately even though we have a degree or two of seperation from most federal contracts the punitive DoD blacklisting had enough of a chilling effect on our legal team to make them drag their feet on approving any contract involving Anthropic.
So I pitched OpenAI Business with Codex so we could drop our Github Copilot Business subscription before the billing change takes effect June 1st which was approved without pushback.
I felt some responsibility for finding an immediate solution to dump Copilot since I was the one who recommended adopting Copilot in the first place, ugh... Our prices would have quadrupled based on the single month Microsoft in their beneficence allowed previewing with their tool to simulate what the post-rug pull pricing would have looked like.
Codex becoming more or less a 1:1 replacement for CC made that a no brainer given our options and the exploitative value proposition of Copilot under the new pricing model (which Microsoft evidently hoped companies like us would just accept despite being a third tier option in the dev space these days).
ChatGPT is a word now. People may use Perplexity, or Google, or Grok to ask questions online. And later they tell you "ChatGPT told me this". It's a new "I googled in Yahoo".
ChatGPT is the 5th most visited site (as well as has nearly a billion weekly active users) and none of the competitors are even close. In the consumer space, Gemini is doing well but Claude is not even in the same galaxy. OpenAI is undoubtedly the leader in consumer LLMs and by a large margin. I'm sure there are mixups, but if someone is telling you they're using chatGPT, they almost certainly mean they're using chatGPT.
The consumer market is worthless though. Consumers will never pay, so the only revenue option is ads which barely, if even at all, pay for inference costs.
Ads implemented remotely competently would be worth a lot of money and more than pay for inference. Inference is cheap, especially outside token expensive ordeals like agentic coding.
Maybe. To really make money on ads they would need to embed them directly into the chat I think. Banner ads arent worth enough I think and google is able to make so much off them largely because people are already looking to click a link when they search something. People would just ignore them with genAI.
Maybe Im projecting my distaste for being psychologically manipulated, but I dont think users would continue using a genAI that embeds ads directly into the response when they can just switch to gemini where they only see banners.
I’m pretty sure Gemini would be the leader in consumer LLMs considering it’s on every single search result. Every single google search is also usage of gemini.
Google stuffing things in the search results of existing users does not mean active participation or usage. (Not that I'm saying it's not getting used but it's just a feature of google search, and only a fraction of the kind of queries llms get anyway)
People use LLMs for a lot of things. Different kind of search is only one of them. AI mode is not stopping people from using ChatGPT because it's just a subset of consumer LLM queries.
Perhaps it's just regional, but I've been noticing more and more people saying "chat" to describe ANY ai chat interface including ChatGPT. They might have a Kleenex problem on their hands.
>Few non-programmers have heard of anthropic or claude
They ran a super bowl ad. It's all over the construction industry. Claude is still not quite the Kleenex that ChatGPT is, but there is a pretty good chance lay people have heard of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude by now.
To disagree with the person below/above me that ChatGPT is the word used generically, when someone uses Gemini or Claude or Copilot, they TELL you which one they used, because they are essentially saying "i didnt use ChatGPT by choice."
Gemini is the one most likely to be used without people knowing which one they used.
Def sounds like a bubble to me. In my own bubble, ChatGTP is so well known over the others that people will often slip and refer to other AI services collectively as ChatGTP.
e.g. "I put it in chatgtp and..." when they actual asked Gemini.
It sounds like you have no clue what you're talking about.
The people in real life who say ChatGBT or similar are either so out of the loop the technology doesn't even matter to them, or simply are just stupid.
There is no way a person who can't get "GPT" right is even worth listening to.
My sister, who isn't in tech and would be called a "normie" by people more online than myself, told me she switched to Claude a few months ago because of Anthropic's fight with the pentagon. IMO the unbubbled public certainly knows about Anthropic/Claude, especially given their Super Bowl ad and their stance on standing up to the pentagon/Trump admin.
Ironically their tussle with the US federal government is what made them a household name [1]
There's no better way to create awareness of a brand than to get it featured in the most popular reality TV show globally at the moment: "Thing Trump Did: Season 2."
Comparing $/MTokfor models makes as much sense as comparing $/ghz for CPUs. Models have different tokenizers and take varying number of "thinking" to get to a solution. A far better proxy is how much it takes to do a run, which takes all of that into account. Such metrics are much harder to gather, but once source claims $3357 for gpt-5.5 vs $4686 for opus, the opposite of your conclusion.
There is no conclusion , I only stated the only objective fact to compare with that will not change for you to me.
Everything else is subjective to your setup, use case, configuration tuning and so forth.
More importantly bean-counters and decision makers at even 150+ seat orgs are looking at pricing sheets and enterprise contracts not how it performs for some team in a specific harness today to make million dollar annual contracts. It is not common for procurement teams to do commission the level of detailed analysis or large scale pilots that will actually hold for the duration of contract.
That doesn't mean that GPT-5.5 is selling less than Claude at all, just that cost is not the primary driver if list price is not cheaper, there is reason these are published in the same format by every vendor, because the common metric is how finance likes to compare with.
Most variants of GPT-5.5 are less chatty and token-intensive than Opus 4.8/4.7, so despite the output token price being higher, it generates fewer tokens, so the net cost is lower.
Per-token pricing is totally sensible from the provider-perspective on mapping COGS to revenue, but for a consumer, different models will produce more or less tokens, meaning the cost calculation is multi-dimensional.
You can configure model to be terse/concise with output style ? There are plenty of popular projects like https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman which do it for you even.
Input/Cache/Output ratios are use case and configuration dependent . Any benefits in one model can usually be roughly to another with configuration tuning, and discussions devolve into subjective experience.
Pricing sheet is the objective way to compare cost.
Things change fast in this space. Anthropic had a big boost from having the premier coding model for a while, but GPT-5.5 has closed that gap at a time when a lot of Anthropic customers are looking for cheaper alternatives.
Anthropic is coming off of a recent change to their enterprise billing that substantially changed the pricing for many users. They were smart to do the fundraising before the effects of that change could fully propagate.