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

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

#161

Post by crop_rotation »

0xDEF wrote: post #34
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.

Devil's advocate: Why should EU tax payers fund open source initiatives and not proprietary European initiatives that will help Europe compete against American and Chinese tech giants?

They should fund something. A proprietary European initiative is definitely better. The open source alternative should be EU's last resort. But as it stands the EU is nowhere to be found. I am not sure how impactful LLMs will be on a scale of autocomplete to industrial revolution, but the EU needs to notice it and plan for something.

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

#162

Post by bob1029 »

SilverBirch wrote: post #126

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 n…

The only reality in which Anthropic will take on OpenAI (et. al.), would be if someone involved possess some sacred knowledge regarding how to build an AGI system that is radically off the path that the current market is charging down (i.e. ever-larger GPU farms and transformer-style models).

I suspect this is not the case. The same hustlers who brought you crypto scams didn't just disappear into the ether. All of that energy has to eventually go somewhere.

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

#163

Post by iandanforth »

potamic wrote: post #58
dpflan wrote: post #44

"Dario Amodei, the former VP of research at OpenAI, launched Anthropic in 2021 as a public benefit corporation, taking with him a number of OpenAI employees, including OpenAI’s former policy lead Jack Clark. Amodei split from OpenAI after a disagreement over the company’s direction, namely the startup’s increasingly commercial focus." So Anthropic is the Google-supported equivalent of OpenAI? Isn't the founder going…

What does a policy lead do and how are they relevant to an early stage startup? I would be more interested in seeing which researchers and engineers join.

Jack is pretty well known in the community since he runs not only the Import AI newsletter, but also has been a partner in the AI Index report. He also has a media background so is generally well connected even beyond his influential reach. Also, though not relevant to your question, he's a really nice guy :)

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

#164

Post by CoastalCoder »

simonster wrote: post #153
seydor wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can already run gpt4xalpaca on my PC, a model that is not-bad-at-all and is completely uncensored (i.e. does things that chatGPT can't do). I think it's true that LLMs are racing to the bottom and will be even more once they can fit as a peripheral to every computer. whoever is investing in this to monopolize has not thought it through

Imagine you're a tech company that pays software engineers $200K/year. There is a free open-source coding model that can double their productivity, but a commercial solution yields a 2.1x productivity improvement for $5000 annually per developer. Which do you pick?

Not sure if parent had a certain answer in mind, but my answer is OSS because (1) I can try it out whenever I want, and (2) I don't have the vexing experience of convincing the employer to purchase it.

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

#165

Post by wokwokwok »

seydor wrote: post #73
naillo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counter argument is that it's a growing market where any early entrants will be lifted with the tide and can probably yield enough profit from spillover hype for investors to make their investments back.

I can already run gpt4xalpaca on my PC, a model that is not-bad-at-all and is completely uncensored (i.e. does things that chatGPT can't do). I think it's true that LLMs are racing to the bottom and will be even more once they can fit as a peripheral to every computer. whoever is investing in this to monopolize has not thought it through

It’s astonishing to me that people seem to believe the llama models are “just as good” as the large models these companies are building, and most people are only using the 7B model, because that’s all their hardware can support.

…I mean, “not-bad-at-all” depends on your context. For doing mean real work (ie. not porn or spam) these tiny models suck.

Yup, even the refined ones with the “good training data”. They’re toys. Llama is a toy. The 7B model, specifically.

…and even if it weren’t, these companies can just take any open source model and host it on their APIs. You’ll notice that isn’t happening. That’s because most of the open models are orders of magnitude less useful than the closed source ones.

So, what do want, as an investor?

To be part of some gimp-like open source AI? Or spend millions and bet you can sell it B2B for crazy license fees?

…because, I’m telling you right now; these open source models, do not cut it for B2B use cases, even if you ignore the license issues.

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

#166

Post by dmix »

lightbendover wrote: post #121
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] G…

The AI (LLM) market as a whole is very immature, trying to guess today what it will look like in a decade based on the investments/behaviour of the first couple movers is pretty foolish. Even predicting for a specific submarket (ie, consumer LLM products like ChatGPT) is hard enough. Who knows what other categories could develop and be dominated by companies who narrow in on them and once the R&D progress starts flatlining like it always does.

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

#167

Post by huijzer »

lightbendover wrote: post #121
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] G…

Although a large total addressable market (TAM) is very alluring, know that most markets are dominated by a few players. For example, sugary beverages (Coca Cola), office software (Microsoft), or luxury sports cars (Ferrari). Exceptions are markets where companies cannot find a moat such as air travel or farming. In those markets, profit margins are tin.

At this point in time, it’s hard to tell whether moats will arise around large language models. Peter Tiels thinks so or he wouldn’t have invested (see his Competition is For Losers presentation).

What is unlikely is that semi-good companies will thrive. Maybe for a few years but at some point the smaller players will be pushed out of the market or need to find a specific niche. Just look at cars to see this. Around 1900 there were hundreds of car brands.

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

#168

Post by carlmr »

RandomLensman wrote: post #145
lightbendover wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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] G…

It is not clear if (i) a lot of the surplus will be captured by the AI providers and (ii) that the impact will be anywhere as big as people now guess/want it to be. Making a bet on the future is fine, of course.

My question would also be what kind of insight McKinsey can provide here. What, if anything, do they know about AI that we don't know?

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

#169

Post by ttul »

comboy wrote: post #156
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.

What's with the NSFW need? I'd understand if this is some image generator, but here? Is it some sexting, "romance", or is NSFW about something else altogether?

Anything that drives the dopamine cycle is of interest to humans. Sex in all its forms is pretty motivating.

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

#170

Post by HlessClaudesman »

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…

Ahh the old Lyft / Avis strat.
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