At the HumanX conference, everyone was talking about Claude

At the HumanX AI conference in San Francisco this week, thousands of technologists flocked to the city’s Moscone Center, where discussion focused on the ways AI is changing business. Agents, which automate business and programming tasks, have begun to spread across industries – largely through enterprise- and consumer-focused chatbots.

Naturally, I wanted to know which chatbot was the most popular, and I kept hearing one name most often: Claude.

Anthropics received high praise at several sessions throughout the week, but it was also a topic of discussion with the vendors I spoke to as I walked the conference room floor. Chatbot that I haven’t heard much about? ChatGPT. One vendor I spoke to made sure to tell me that he and his team used Claude a lot, while he felt that ChatGPT and OpenAI had declined — or as the internet likes to say, “fallen.”

Recently, this does not appear to be a unique procedure. In fact, it is not clear what will address this perception, despite its novelty A $122 billion financing round And for her Next public offeringOpenAI has lost ground, or at least seems increasingly uncertain about its next move.

Part of the problem may be the perception that the company lacks focus. Last month, OpenAI abandoned a number of long-running side quests (including A.I Sora video generator And a troubled plan to get going An “exciting” version of ChatGPTInstead, we focus on business areas and programming services. In the meantime, a number of developments have occurred, incl The New Yorker’s latest piece Which questioned whether the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, was trustworthy or not, motivated some The amount of negative noise About the company. The company’s work with the Trump administration hasn’t won it any friends either, nor has its decision to introduce ads into ChatGPT.

During a HumanX discussion, Brett Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Sierra (who is also chairman of OpenAI), defended Altman when Alex Heath asked him for a New Yorker profile. “I believe Sam is one of the most outstanding leaders and CEOs in the world,” Taylor said. “If you were to look for his critics, you’ll find them, and they’ll be very vocal about it,” he said, adding: “I think Sam is great. I think he’s a great leader in AI, and I really trust his character as someone who’s worked with him.”

Disagreements and oscillations can make OpenAI appear reactive rather than strategic, as if it is simply responding to events rather than shaping them. However, when it comes to popularity and revenue, OpenAI and Anthropic are neck and neck – or at least that’s what it seems like, as some data suggests Anthropy is catching up among business users. The Wall Street Journal Recently analyzed Their financial resources, showing that the two companies were “the fastest growing companies in the history of technology.” In this sense, perhaps the “fall” for OpenAI means that it is not the undisputed champion anymore. It has competition, which is normal in most industries.

In any case, it remains clear that OpenAI is intent on doing whatever it takes to remain dominant. The company announced this week New $100 subscription tier at ChatGPT With greater access to Codex, its own coding tool. The move seems clearly designed to stimulate wider use of the tool while hopefully turning users away from Claude Code.

During a HumanX discussion with Bloomberg reporter Rachel Metz, Srinivas Narayanan, chief technology officer for B2B applications at OpenAI, pointed out how quickly the technology landscape is changing.

“We’re in this amazing moment in technology, where every month, sometimes every day, we’re all looking forward to something new,” Narayanan said. Pointing to agentive coding as an example, he added, “We knew AI was going to impact software engineering, and people have been using agentive coding over the past year, but even just in the last few months, the entire field has changed.”

Agents’ accomplishments may be of great interest to the technology community currently, since other applications of AI (creative uses, for example) have yet to be realized. However, the amount of work that companies have begun offloading to their new little robotic assistants is somewhat surprising — and as Narayanan pointed out in his remarks, it’s all happened in a relatively short period of time. In such an unpredictable environment, the future remains wide open.