I've seen a number of people criticize Anthropic for releasing Claude Opus, with arguments along the lines of:

Anthropic said they weren't going to push the frontier, but this release is clearly better than GPT-4 in some ways! They're betraying their mission statement!

I think that criticism takes too narrow a view. Consider the position of investors in AI startups. If OpenAI has a monopoly on the clearly-best version of a world-changing technology, that gives them a lot of pricing power on a large market. However, if there are several groups with comparable products, investors don't know who the winner will be, and investment gets split between them. Not only that, but if they stay peers, then there will be more competition in the future, meaning less pricing power and less profitability.

The comparison isn't just "GPT-4 exists" vs "GPT-4 and Claude Opus exist" - it's [...]

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