HN sometimes talks about pathological customers who will never be happy. Boris is probably the single best rep in the community, possibly ever.
The way your tone and complaints come across reminds me of this. As a paying customer ($5k spend per month in my corporate job), I’d rather anthropic keep doing what they’re doing — innovating and shipping useful stuff at blinding speed — and not index on your feedback. I think the tradeoffs they would cost far outweigh the consequences.
You’re not getting a worthwhile sla on a subscription at this rate. What are you going to get? A few dollars? An sla isn’t useful unless it actually bites for the provider and actually compensates the customer. And it costs money - how much are you willing to spend for this insurance?
Wait, where is there a 'beta' tag to something that they are charging real money for? Why is this software any different than any other software and we should completely give away our rights as a consumer to ensure what we pay for is delivered?
I think the parent is saying that one should be aware that the whole LLM industry is still in an experimental stage and far from mature. What you want isn’t what’s being offered. I agree that there should be higher standards, but what we currently have is an arms race. The consequence is to factor that into the value proposition and maybe not rely too much on it.
SLAs should be standard for any paid service, especially on the enterprise side, but also on the consumer side. Being immature as a company does not excuse a lack of service delivery.
Not every customer, even a paying customer, demands reliability at a particular level. Market segmentation tends to address those situations: pay more, get more.
Users on $200 plan complaining, already at max level of subscription, I don't think a $200 subscription should make you feel like you are getting unfair advantage. Like restricting claude -p to API ... after I paid so much? Moderate use should not do that. I am not running it batch mode on a million inputs.
They can be held to account when they fail to deliver what they promise! But what is promised for delivery is what's in the Terms of Service (i.e. the agreement). Nothing more. If it's not in there, you can't hold them to account for it.
> It's too easy for companies to fail to provide their service as long as they never promise to provide their service.
I don't even know what this means. You can't make anyone work for free, nor dictate the terms of what kind of work someone will do without their consent. I assume you are not pro-slavery.
You didn't merely call out their failure. You said it was "too easy," implying something more, like they owe you something. It's a pretty entitled point of view.
"[W]ant[ing] companies to put some effort into avoiding ... failures" is not the same as "hold[ing] them to account". The former is "this sucks and I don't like it." The latter is "punish them or force them to do what I want!"--i.e., some sort of legal remedy.
What right as a consumer do you have that is pertinent here, other than to have the vendor adhere to the terms of the agreement you have with them?
Anthropic has many customers despite the fact that they have occasional problems. They’re not suing Anthropic because Anthropic isn’t promising in its agreement something they can’t deliver.
I think you’re reading into the agreement something that isn’t there, and that’s the cause of your confusion.
I am not reading into an agreement, I am saying there is no agreement to be found to ensure service delivery and the associated liability that would come for any SLA. Also, where is the Anthorpic SLA for Enterprise?
Does it exist?
Just because people pay for things doesn't mean they know or understand what they are paying for. Nor is there the legal precedence to actually understand where the rub lies or how that impacts business.
> Just because people pay for things doesn't mean they know or understand what they are paying for.
I believe, respectfully, that’s precisely what is happening in this thread because you keep complaining about the absence of an SLA that was never in the agreement, as though it is—or is supposed to be—there, and therefore the existence of some “rights” that would flow from that.
I am sorry you feel this way, but the reality of the situation is there is zero reason to trust anything Anthropic or Boris says. They have no legal liability or obligation to tell the truth, besides brand risk, which to people like you is mitigated for a single person to show up, post, and thats it.
You should work at these companies and understand they have good intentioned employees otherwise they’d rarely pass the cultural interviews plus background checks plus backchanneling. Have a bit more faith in the employees
Maybe... maybe... maybe... none of this builds trust when there is something that does build trust; putting revenue on the line and opening yourself to legal liability. Otherwise everything is empty and meaningless, its just PR, and nothing more.
Then you should offer to pay them for one. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you, and they could probably deliver one to you for the right price. But it will be a high price.
I feel like you aren't really understanding what a Service-level Agreement actually is in practice. It's not a piece of paper with a specific number of nines and an associated price tag. They can be and often are very complicated documents that take multiple rounds of redlining to arrive at something both parties agree to.
If zero data-retention was non-negotiable for the customer, it's totally possible that the negotiations ended there.
I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish or unearth beyond what's already been said, which certainly suffices for me.
As both an attorney and SRE, I understand what an SLA is. And you can absolutely get an SLA when you buy cloud services from many vendors, including AWS. Some vendors provide it at all price points; others include it at higher service tiers, without complex negotiations needed at all. And, yes, if it’s not on the menu, you may need to negotiate one. But you can’t conclusively say “they don’t offer one” unless you’ve actually gone to the company and asked.
It seems like you could save a lot of time and confusion by talking about the SLA that you pay for from Anthropic instead of establishing your bona fides by posting links to various unrelated companies’ SLA pages.
Like how was your experience negotiating your SLA with Anthropic? What ballpark are you paying for the SLA with Anthropic that you have in place? How many 9s does your Anthropic SLA cover? Obviously you haven’t posted a half dozen times in this thread about how Anthropic by nature of existing offers SLAs without any knowledge of that, so some simple stuff about your SLA with Anthropic would be helpful.
I make no unqualified claims as to whether Anthropic offers an SLA. I never did. But I do know that it's unreasonable to claim they don't when you didn't even take the steps to conclusively determine it for yourself.
As I said: "I’m sure they’d love to hear from you, and they could probably deliver one to you for the right price. But it will be a high price."
Oh, well in that case, if posting URLs counts as proof of… something, there doesn’t appear to be any SLA page anywhere in their sitemap.
https://www.anthropic.com/sitemap.xml
Maybe it is just common for enterprise SaaS businesses to offer SLAs without having a page about it though. Something like that could possibly be unjustifiably burdensome as well because it’s not like they could just type “make a page about how we offer SLAs” and have it magically appear
That’s a good point. Having an SLA page is an indicator that a business offers SLAs, not having an SLA page is also an indicator that they offer SLAs, just secretly. If you think about it all of the people constantly complaining about uptime and saying stuff like “I would pay money for an SLA from Anthropic if I could” probably means that they are killing it with all those secret SLAs.
I mean obviously they have to offer them, because they exist, as otherwise you’d have to believe something crazy like “they don’t currently offer them” for reasons “that they haven’t disclosed”
Again, many companies will do things they don’t ordinarily offer for the right price. I’ve seen it happen myself (on both the buyer and seller side) on many occasions.
It goes to the extent of the company itself! Very few businesses publicize that they’re for sale or put their company’s purchase price on their website. But acquisitions happen all the time.
Anyway, I don’t appreciate your sarcasm coupled with what seems to be willful ignorance about how the world works, so I won’t be participating in this discussion with you anymore.
I don’t get it. If you wanted to convince everybody about a vast universe of secret business and your expertise in it, why would you start with telling people that weren’t able to get an SLA from Anthropic that Anthropic offers SLAs? And then admit that you don’t actually know and then double down?
Like if I wanted to convince people that In’N’Out has a secret menu (they do) I wouldn’t start by saying “They have the ingredients to make onion rings, therefore they sell onion rings” (they do not). They offer burgers with lettuce instead of a bun (“protein style”) though. That’s a fact that you can verify by going there or calling them and asking about it. I didn’t rely on my assumptions based on other fast food restaurants, I relied on my knowledge of the topic!
Edit: It seems like bad faith to admit that you’re using “probably” interchangeably with “I don’t know” and then editing in “for a billion dollars” several posts into a conversation.
I guess enjoy posting about entirely unrelated conversations in other threads though. (otterley’s post about my having previously had a short amicable exchange with dang in a different thread was deleted, but I’ll leave this part up. I think digging through people’s post histories to find unrelated grievances is icky, for lack of a better word, and wildly unhelpful for any type of discussion)
Even with the “for a billion dollars” addition, admitting “I don’t know” and “probably” are interchangeable doesn’t really change anything from a logical standpoint. Nobody argued against you not knowing, so I don’t understand the purpose of the repetition.
> why would you start with telling people that weren’t able to get an SLA
That hasn’t been established. There’s no evidence that they went to Anthropic and tried to negotiate one.
> that Anthropic offers SLAs
I didn’t. I said “they probably will for the right price.” There are two modifiers in that statement. And the price is unspecified. Their first offer could be a billion dollars. Too expensive? Negotiate down.
I would invite you to notice your interlocutor's assumptions, especially as revealed in his prior comment. Look at how he misunderstands the situation:
> If you wanted to convince everybody about a vast universe of secret business and your expertise in it...
> Like if I wanted to convince people that In’N’Out has a secret menu...
You are discussing business. He is understanding you to be attempting to "mog" him, because he cannot adopt a perspective wherein the conversation represents anything other than a vacuous social challenge or "brodown."
I looked up “mogging” and I’d think “my assumptions about stuff are valid because I’m a lawyer and don’t know what you do” would count more as mogging than “that doesn’t quite sound right, this is a conversation about something specific and not your general cleverness” but I’ve got a Benny Hill archive to get through
Those are not assumptions on your interlocutor's part. You've embarrassed yourself quite badly, I'm afraid. I know you don't understand how, but that doesn't change the fact of it.
:( you are right. This isn’t the first time I’ve lost an argument because hours into a discussion somebody introduced “what if a billion dollars” or “magic amulet” or “ブルマの母” etc
Boring corporate Ai will surely come, but hey, lets enjoy the wild west while it lasts. I am grateful to see Boris come here to address problems people face. I 100% sure nobody is making him - he has one of the coolest jobs in the world.
So that means we just eject any critical thinking when it comes to companies, especially where they is no liability or obligation for them (Boris or Anthropic) to be honest.
Don’t like Anthropic? Use a competing service. At this point the sheer volume of your commentary is not particularly complimentary to your own critical thinking skills. It’s not your job to correct the internet or to convince randoms of the rightness of your position. Of all the things in the world to be pissed at so insistently, this seems to be a pretty minor one.
