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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

#381

Post by nr2x »

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…

100% agree. You need to catch up to OpenAI for starters and then figure out how to outpace them.

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

#382

Post by nr2x »

bob1029 wrote: post #162
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 th…

It’s not fair to compare them to crypto scams, this isn’t trying to juice retail investors for their life savings.

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

#383

Post by nr2x »

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…

The smart move could be an open-core approach. Release the models, but have the best engineering stack to run the APIs as a service.

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

#384

Post by RC_ITR »

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…

>So Anthropic is the Google-supported equivalent of OpenAI? Isn't the founder going to run into the same issues as before (commercialization at OpenAI)? How does Google not use Anthropic as either something commercial or nice marketing material for its AI offerings?

I think the unstated shift that has happened in the past few years is that we've gone from researchers thinking about Fourier transforms to efficiently encode positional data into vectors to researchers thinking about how to train a model with a 100k+ token batch size on a super-computer-like cluster of GPUs.

I can totally see why people believed the math could be done in a non-profit way, I do not see how the systems engineering could be.

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

#385

Post by Karrot_Kream »

dpflan wrote: post #110
rebolek wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may have been a disagreement, but now they're focused on profit, as everybody else. From the same article: “Anthropic has been heavily focused on research for the first year and a half of its existence, but we have been convinced of the necessity of commercialization, which we fully committed to in September [2022],” the pitch deck reads. “We’ve developed a strategy for go-to-market and initial product speciali…

This is hilarious to me, in that the disgruntled departure just did a 180… how long until the next disgruntled spin-out for higher reasons chases the dollar too…

The same thing happened back in the processor arms race days and before that in the IC days. Ex-Fairchild engineers created a lot of the most durable IC and chip companies out there. Intel's founders were ex-Fairchild.

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

#386

Post by realfeel78 »

nickpp wrote: post #106
boeingUH60 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because NSFW content has higher risks of chargeback and fraud (there's a reason their payment processors charge 20%+). Besides, companies don't want to be on the bad side of outrage; it only takes one mistake of processing a payment for child pornography and your name will be plastered everywhere as a child porn enabler. Do you really think the execs at Visa and Mastercard are puritans and not profiteering capit…

The whole US society seems more puritan while more capitalist at the same time, seen from this side of the pond. It’s a paradox I can’t really explain, any clues?

You aren't paying attention:

https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-porn-block-germany-age-v...

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

#387

Post by horsawlarway »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #375
horsawlarway wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still focused on trusting that my data is safe. And while I think that matters - I don't really think that's the trust I care most about. I care more about the trust I have to place in the response from the model. Hell - since you mentioned search... Just look at the backlash right now happening to google. They've sold out search (a while back, really) and people hate it. Ads used to be clearly delimited from…

> Hell - since you mentioned search... Just look at the backlash right now happening to google. They've sold out search (a while back, really) and people hate it. Ads used to be clearly delimited from search results, and the top results used to be organic instead of paid promos. At some point, that stopped being true. Only people in HN-like communities care about this stuff. Most people find the SEO spam in their res…

> You won't know this for any local models either.

But you will know the model hasn't changed, and you can always continue using the version you currently have.

> Most people find the SEO spam in their results more annoying.

This is the same problem. These models will degrade from research quality to mass market quality as there's incentive to change what results they surface. Whether that's intentional (paid ads) versus adversarial (SEO) doesn't matter all that much - In either case the goals will become commercial and profit motivated.

People really don't like "commercial and profit motivated" in the spaces that some of these LLMs stepping into. Just like you don't like SEO in your recipe results.

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

#388

Post by Karrot_Kream »

skybrian wrote: post #364
Analemma_ wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the reason is just inertia. It is not just inertia; it is government malice. The government loves that there are effectively only two payment processors, because this lets them exercise policy pressure without the inconvenience of a democratic mandate.

Yes, financial companies mostly regulate themselves. They have lawyers telling them what regulators are likely to approve of, and make rules based on that for themselves and their customers. If they do something sufficiently bad, regulators go after them. That’s how banks get regulated, too. That’s how most law works, actually. There’s a question of how detailed the regulations are, but mostly you don’t go to court,…

If entire classes of financial transactions can be blocked through backroom conversations between financial companies and regulators, don't you think that's bad for democracy? We have laws which allow the US to tackle money laundering issues and it's understandable that regulators would create regulations along those laws; they have a clear mandate to. It's not clear to me that other classes of transaction should be blocked based on amorphous dealings with regulators and companies.

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

#389

Post by Karrot_Kream »

xpe wrote: post #263
cubefox wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very surprised if something based on Blockchain or similar software doesn't offer a solution here. Another route would be to establish a protocol for near instantaneous bank transfers, and try to get a lot of banks on board. The immediacy of transfers seems to be the main reason why companies use credit card services, not buyer protection or actual credit.

I have no particular love of legacy systems (whether they be banks, imperialism, or Electoral Colleges), but what about your comment is plausible given the widespread recognition that blockchain technologies have been oversold, leading to widespread fraud and failure? Maybe I’m missing something, but the above comment reminds me of the blockchain naïveté of 10 years ago. I don’t mean to be dismissive; I’m suspending…

There are permissioned "blockchains" which are just private ledgers, that banks could use with permission from the US gov't. These can be anything from a centrally run DB with ACLs or something like Hyperledger with permissioned P2P access. Whether you call it a blockchain or a DB with ACLs is immaterial; it's still much cheaper, faster, and pleasant to use this system over the current system of complex intermediaries in the US. Europe seems to have solved this problem with SWIFT.

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

#390

Post by Karrot_Kream »

horsawlarway wrote: post #387
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hell - since you mentioned search... Just look at the backlash right now happening to google. They've sold out search (a while back, really) and people hate it. Ads used to be clearly delimited from search results, and the top results used to be organic instead of paid promos. At some point, that stopped being true. Only people in HN-like communities care about this stuff. Most people find the SEO spam in their res…

> You won't know this for any local models either. But you will know the model hasn't changed, and you can always continue using the version you currently have. > Most people find the SEO spam in their results more annoying. This is the same problem. These models will degrade from research quality to mass market quality as there's incentive to change what results they surface. Whether that's intentional (paid ads) ve…

> But you will know the model hasn't changed, and you can always continue using the version you currently have.

Will you? What happens when an OS update silently changes the model? Again this is one of those things only HN-types really care/rant about. I've never met a non-technical person care about regular updates beyond being slow or breaking an existing workflow. Most technical folks I know don't care either.

> This is the same problem. These models will degrade from research quality to mass market quality as there's incentive to change what results they surface. Whether that's intentional (paid ads) versus adversarial (SEO) doesn't matter all that much - In either case the goals will become commercial and profit motivated.

Not at all. Search providers have an incentive to fight adversarial actors. They don't have any incentive to fight intentional collaboration.

> People really don't like "commercial and profit motivated" in the spaces that some of these LLMs stepping into. Just like you don't like SEO in your recipe results.

I disagree. When a new, local business pops up and pays for search ads, is this "commercial and profit motivated?" How about advertising a new community space opening? I work with a couple businesses like this (not for SEO, just because I like the space they're in and know the staff) and using ads for outreach is a pretty core part of their strategy. There's no neat and clean definition of "commercial and profit motivated" out there.

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