Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#121

Post by lightbendover » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 1:28 PM UTC

rsp1984 wrote: post #37

AI models are in a race to the bottom and everybody inside Anthropic knows it. Besides OpenAI, with billions to spend plus a partnership with MS, there's also Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon who can afford to run losses on AI for years without blinking an eye. And if that wasn't enough the Open Source world is releasing new models almost weekly now, for free. Anthropic is putting on a big show to convince gullible inv…

Truth is, and this applies to all companies regardless of size, is that you don't have to be first, best, biggest, fastest, or most well-known in order to win market share that out-paces your investment. The AI pie is going to be very, very big. To estimate this size, let's take McKinseys rough estimates of job displacement (~30% of ~60% of jobs, ~20% of work) and use that to estimate the actualized [US, apologies] GDP that can at some point be attributed to AI: it is in the 4-5 trillion range using today's figures.

To say a market that large will be owned by only 4-5 companies doesn't make sense. Let's take the PC market for example: there are roughly 6 companies that make up ~80% of the market, sure. However, let's look at a tiny participant compared to the total market (~65B): iBuyPower at rank #77 had sales of 40MM or 0.06% (small, expected) of the market with a much smaller capital investment. If look at this percent compared to 5T, we would be at 3B. While the 5B investment stated in the headline could result in a lower ranking and smaller share, the point stands that there is still a lot of money to be made on the long tail. Even if Anthropic fails, there will be other companies with similar infusions that succeed.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#122

Post by amirmalekzadeh » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 1:29 PM UTC

Impressive amounts of investments. How can they know they are "10 times more capable" before they have trained the model? Anyone has a clue on why their model will end up being that better?

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#123

Post by nickpp » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 1:29 PM UTC

seydor wrote: post #8

v4dok wrote: post #2

This is a lot of money going into compute. I will say this again. EU is sleeping on the opportunity to throw money in an opensource initiative, in a field were money matter and the field is still (kind of) level.

Sure, let's make an EU commercial LLM. Let's start by scraping all the Francophone internet. Then let's remove all the PII data and potentially PII-data. Easy-peasy. Then let's train our network so as not to spew out or make up PII data - easy peasy Then let's make it able to delete PII data that it has inadvertedly collected on request. Simultaneously it should be recording all the conversations for safety reasons.…

The moment Europe decided to regulate tech, it decided in effect to stagnate. Innovation and creativity are incompatible with regulation. Unfortunately for us, tech is where progress happens currently. Europe is being left behind. Not that it was very competitive in the first place anyway.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#124

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 1:29 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #97

omneity wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the catch, people are still adapting to GPT tech, still figuring out ways to make use of it, to include it in their workflows, etc. Social impact of ChatGPT even in its current form is only getting started, it doesn't need to progress at all to be super disruptive. For example, see the frontpage story about the $80/h writer who was replaced by ChatGPT, and that just happened recently, months after ChatGPT's fi…

But is that because of rapid breakthroughs in tech, or in marketing? GPT 3 is nearly three years old at this point, and was pretty capable at generating text. GPT 3.5 brought substantial improvements, but is also over a year old. ChatGPT is much newer, but mostly remarkable for the better interface, the extensive "safety" efforts, and for being free (as in beer) and immediately accessible without waitlist and applica…

I'd like you to look at what you just typed in reference to a product like the iPhone that turned Apple into a trillion dollar company. There were smartphones before the iPhone, but the iPhone redefined the market and all phones after that point use it as the reference.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#125

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 1:30 PM UTC

vasco wrote: post #42

preommr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I think the recent release of ChatGPT has skewed perceptions. There's no guarantee that there's going to continue to be as ground breaking shifts that have happened recently with llms and diffusion models. To continue with the popular comparison, there were a lot of apps when the iphone first launced the app store before it tapered off. If you looked at just the first year, you'd think we'd have an app for eve…

Also quality of google search after the first few years didn't meaningfully improve as a user. I'd expect the big ramp up we're in to taper off as well. Once you reach the point where you train a model on the corpus of "the whole internet", that's it, all you can do is incrementally train it. Of course there can be whole new architectures but that's harder to put your eggs in for investing.

You're forgetting that AI has not been trained on YouTube yet and that's the next big thing. Multi-modality still has a lot of gas left in it.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#126

Post by SilverBirch » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 1:30 PM UTC

Does anyone else see the "In X years time we'll have something Y times better than the competition has today" as a bit of a red flag? I saw this before in a product plan and it flagged up 2 things that really worried me. Firstly, the competition were already ahead of us, and they're obviously going to continue developing their stuff, so it's great to promise our thing will be better than their thing today but we're not competing against that, we're competing against what they'll have once time has passed. And secondly, by measuring yourself against the leading edge today you're eliding how much you're going to improve. For example, Anthropic say they'll be 10x better than leading models today in 18 months. That sounds acheivable right (no actually) but you don't even have to do that - because you aren't starting with the market leading model, so you have to catch up first and then 10x it so are they 10x or 20x or 100x in 18 months?

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#127

Post by emptysongglass » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 1:32 PM UTC

hbbio wrote: post #30

bko wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [2008] France has been given the green light by the European Commission for a $152 million government grant for a consortium building a European rival to U.S. internet search giant Google. I don't think government funding to compete with private businesses works well https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ec-...

They also funded 2 competitors to AWS, just to make sure we own cloud computing. Two is always better than one, right, by ensuring they'll compete with each other. Another bright idea was to let both projects be managed by large reputable French corporations that everybody trusts. With no software DNA. How come did both fail? Edit: One of the largest European provider today, OVH, who existed at the time and was alrea…

Scaleway is actually fantastic for what it's worth. You can get extremely cheap K8s clusters and most things a startup would need.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#128

Post by ethbr0 » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 1:33 PM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #114

bradleyjg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s needs to be some difficult barriers to entry beyond having the money to spend on training FLOPS in order for a startup to compete. I have no idea if there are or there aren’t, but that’s the big question.

I mean, this is just the beginning. Just wait till we get actual scifi robots in the next year or so. FWIW, I do find that Claude (Anthropic's GPT) is often better than GPT4 -- and very fast. Entrants can compete on price, safety, quality, etc.

And a big moat is going to be safety... and specifically configuration of safety.

Wouldn't be surprised at all if the major API-based vendors start leaning in on making their safety config proprietary.

If a business has already sunk XXXX hours into ensuring a model meets their safety criteria for public-facing use, they'd rather upgrade to a newer model from the same vendor that guarantees portability of that, versus having to reinvest and recertify.

Ergo, the AI PaaS that dominate at the beginning will likely continue to dominate.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#129

Post by seydor » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 1:33 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #51

seydor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure if it can ever be possible. i can ask chatGPT to do stylography analysis on our comments, find our other accounts and go from there. I'm pretty sure most pieces of human-generated data is identifiable at this point

This is not how it works, (unless of course you're pretending and collecting all these 'auxiliary data' on purpose) and even if it was, there's still plenty of non-PII data around

It hasn't been long that someone applied a basic, cosine similarity to HN comments to find alternate accounts. It worked quite well afaik https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#130

Post by cubefox » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 1:33 PM UTC

xena wrote: post #40

alexb_ wrote: post #35

If someone released a chatGPT/characterAI with NSFW content enabled it would eat into a big share of their users (and for characterAI, maybe take all of them). Seriously, look into what people are posting about when it comes to characterAI, and it's 80% "here's how to get around NSFW filters". Unsure why nobody is taking this very very obvious hole in AI tech.

The main reason why companies don't allow NSFW content is because of puritan payment processors that see that stuff and then go absolute sicko mode and lock people out of the traditional finance system.

It is amazing that in the year 2023, where things are possible that were science fiction until recently, we still rely on private payment processors, credit card companies, which extract fees for a service that doesn't have any technical necessity anymore. I think the reason is just inertia. They work well enough in most cases, and the fees aren't so high as to be painful, so there is little pressure to switch to something more modern.