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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

#411

Post by littlestymaar »

mike_hearn wrote: post #333
anentropic wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But right now what incentive have I to buy a new laptop? I got this 16GB M1 MBA two years ago and it's literally everything I need, always feels fast, silent etc 1. the idea would be that now there is a reason to buy loads more RAM, whereas currently the market for 64GB is pretty niche 2. 64GB is a big laptop today, in a few years time that will be small. And LLaMA 65B int4 quantized should fit comfortably 4. LLMs wi…

1. You're working backwards from a desire to buy more RAM to try and find uses for it. You don't actually need more RAM to use LLMs, ChatGPT requires no local memory, is instant and is available for free today. 2. Why would anybody be satisfied with a 64GB model when GPT-4 or 5 or 6 might even be using 1TB of RAM? 3. That may not be the case. With every day that passes, it becomes more and more clear that large LLMs…

> is instant and is available for free today.

It's free for the user up to a point, but it costs OpenAI a lot of money.

Apple is a hardware vendor, so commoditization of the software while finding more market segments is definitely something that'd benefit them.

OTOH, if they let OpenAI become the unrivaled leader of AI that end up being the next Google, they end up losing on a topic they wanted to lead for long time (Apple has invested quite a lot in AI, and the existence of a Neural Engine in Apple CPUs isn't an accident)

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

#413

Post by littlestymaar »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #341
mike_hearn wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were Apple I'd be thinking about the following issues with that strategy: 1. That RAM isn't empty, it's being used by apps and the OS. Fill up 64GB of RAM with an LLM and there's nothing left for anything else. 2. 64GB probably isn't enough for competitive LLMs anyway. 3. Inferencing is extremely energy intensive, but the MacBook / Apple Silicon brand is partly about long battery life. 4. Weights are expensive t…

>One possibility is simply cost: if your device does it, you pay for the hardware, if a cloud does it, you have to pay for that hardware again via subscription. Yeah but in the cloud that cost is ammortized among everyone else using the service. If you as a consumer buy a gpu in order to run LLMs for personal use, then the vast majority of the time it will just be sitting there depreciating.

But then again, every apple silicon user has an unused neural engine sitting around in the SoC an taking a significant amount of die space, yet people don't seem to worry too much about its depreciation.

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

#414

Post by anentropic »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #395
mike_hearn wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were Apple I'd be thinking about the following issues with that strategy: 1. That RAM isn't empty, it's being used by apps and the OS. Fill up 64GB of RAM with an LLM and there's nothing left for anything else. 2. 64GB probably isn't enough for competitive LLMs anyway. 3. Inferencing is extremely energy intensive, but the MacBook / Apple Silicon brand is partly about long battery life. 4. Weights are expensive t…

How much does 64GB of RAM cost, anyway? Retail it's like $200, and I'm sure it's cheaper in terms of Apple cost. Yet we treat it as an absurd luxury because Apple makes you buy the top-end 16" Macbook and pay an extra $800 beyond that. Maybe in the future they'll treat RAM as a requirement and not a luxury good.

and we know that more will be cheaper in future

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

#415

Post by fudged71 »

anentropic wrote: post #288

If Apple would wake up to what's happening with llama.cpp etc then I don't see such a market in paying for remote access to big models via API, though it's currently the only game in town. Currently a Macbook has a Neural Engine that is sitting idle 99% of the time and only suitable for running limited models (poorly documented, opaque rules about what ops can be accelerated, a black box compiler [1] and an apparent…

Siri was launched with a server-based approach. It wouldn't be surprising if Apple's near-term LLM strategy would to put a small LLM on local chips/MacOS and a large model running in the cloud. The local model would only do basic fast operations while the cloud could provide the heavyweight intensive analysis/generation.

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

#416

Post by nickpp »

worik wrote: post #401
nickpp wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plenty of greedy people in non-capitalist systems. Totally agreed. But I am not placing any moral value on either greed or capitalism. I would think, however, that capitalists would not ignore such an obvious profit center as the sex industry. Thus my bafflement.

> But I am not placing any moral value on either greed or capitalism That is a missed opportunity * Capitalism: A system where who owns resources matters more tan who needs them is a morally bankrupt system. A system where starvation and homelessness is an acceptable outcome * Greed. Greed is bad for everybody. Concentrates scarce resources where they are not needed, that too is moral bankruptcy

Funny enough my country was starving under communism but we are living in plenty under capitalism. Since I lived under the alternative and I have seen its evilness, I will take capitalism any day - the very system that allowed and incentivized us to create those resources you are eyeing in the first place.

As for greed, I have yet to meet a person more greedy than the ones claiming to know where to direct those scarce resources they did not create, if only we’d give them the power to do so. Such high morals too, unlike those "morally bankrupt" capitalists who greedily built businesses, jobs, countless goods and services to only enslave us and enrich themselves, obviously.

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

#417

Post by phatfish »

cubefox wrote: post #187
andsoitis wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> switch to something more modern such as?

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.

There is a system called Faster Payments in the UK, which is "near instantaneous" between the UK banks which participate (most of them offering current accounts as far as i know).

But it is a permanent and final transfer, no easy charge backs like with a credit card, or fraud protection from debit cards.

You have to know which account you are paying into (sort code and account number), which is the main part of what Visa/Mastercard do. They are the layer in front of the bank account which means customers don't have to send money directly to an account.

I suppose now everyone has a smart phone it would be easier to hook up something like Faster Payments in a user friendly way with an app and a QR code/NFC reader that the merchant has. But Visa/Mastercard are entrenched obviously.

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

#418

Post by anentropic »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #403
anentropic wrote: post #288

If Apple would wake up to what's happening with llama.cpp etc then I don't see such a market in paying for remote access to big models via API, though it's currently the only game in town. Currently a Macbook has a Neural Engine that is sitting idle 99% of the time and only suitable for running limited models (poorly documented, opaque rules about what ops can be accelerated, a black box compiler [1] and an apparent…

> " If you squint a bit and look into the near future it's not so hard to imagine a future Mx chip with a more capable Neural Engine and yet more RAM, and able to run the largest GPT3 class models locally. (Ideally with better developer tools so other compilers can target the NE) " Very doubtful unless the user wants to carry around another kilogram worth of batteries to power it. The hefty processing required by the…

Most of the time I have my laptop plugged in and sit at a desk...

But anyway, there are two trends:

- processors do more with less power

- LLMs get larger, but also smaller and more efficient (via quantizing, pruning)

Once upon a time it was prohibitively expensive to decode compressed video on the fly, later CPUs (both Intel [1] and Apple [2]) added dedicated decoding hardware. Now watching hours of YouTube or Netflix are part of standard battery life benchmarks

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

[2] https://www.servethehome.com/apple-ignites-the-industry-with...

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

#419

Post by atleastoptimal »

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.

Someday it will have to happen. There is just too much demand.

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

#420

Post by pixl97 »

randomdata wrote: post #215
pixl97 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People who made money with their phone had fully adopted Blackberry devices long before the iPhone came around. It may not have been as fun or slick, but when $80/hr. was on the line you weren't exactly going to wait around until something better showed up like the average consumer could. The parent is right. The success of ChatGPT in business is that it brought awareness of the capabilities of GPT that OpenAI strugg…

Engineers rarely become billionaires, salespeople do.

You could have the best most magic product on earth and sell one of them versus the person that puts it in a pretty box and lets grandma use it easily.

This is something that many people on HN seemingly have to relearn in every big innovation that comes out.

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