Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic raises $13B Series F

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 661 posts

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#311

Post by simianwords »

IshKebab wrote: post #109
ACCount37 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had a dime for every time I see this kind of hot take, I'd be able to buy an H200 with that. A man looks at economics. Understands nothing. Thinks it must be all fake and made up. He must be so smart for seeing it through!

It is all fake and made up, and the numbers are detached from the real world, but it's not like the market doesn't know that. Btw there's a decentish board game called Modern Art based around the pricing of art with no intrinsic value.

>It is all fake and made up, and the numbers are detached from the real world, but it's not like the market doesn't know that.

How? The market is the one that made the decision to invest. They are not playing musical chairs.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#312

Post by not_the_fda »

ijidak wrote: post #203
code4tee wrote: post #65

Impressive round but it seems unlikely this game can go on much longer before something implodes. Given the amount of cash you need to set of fire to stay relevant it’s becoming nearly impossible for all but a few players to stay competitive, but those players have yet to demonstrate a viable business model. With all these models converging, the big players aren’t demonstrating a real technical innovation moat. Every…

I think we underestimate the insane amount of idle cash the rich have. We know that the top 1% owns something like 80% of all resources, so they don't need that money. They can afford to burn a good chunk of global wealth so that they can have even more global wealth. Even at the current rates of insanity, the wealthy have spent a tiny fraction of their wealth on AI. Bezos could put up this $13 billion himself and re…

"This is a technology that could replace a sizable fraction of humamkind as a labor input."

And if it does? What happens when a sizable fraction of humamkind is hungry and can't find work? It usually doesn't turn out so well for the rich.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#313

Post by seydor »

didip wrote: post #298

Everyone is so pessimistic about bubble bursting and money are simply catches on fire in this AI race… However, I remembered when Youtube was young. It was burning money every month on bandwidth. After selling out to Google, it took another decade to turned profit. But it did. And it achieved its end game. As the winner, it took all of the video hosting market. And Google reaped the entirety of that win. This AI race…

and yet it's still only ~10% of google's revenue.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#314

Post by mritchie712 »

rsanek wrote: post #159
code4tee wrote: post #65

Impressive round but it seems unlikely this game can go on much longer before something implodes. Given the amount of cash you need to set of fire to stay relevant it’s becoming nearly impossible for all but a few players to stay competitive, but those players have yet to demonstrate a viable business model. With all these models converging, the big players aren’t demonstrating a real technical innovation moat. Every…

I was convinced of this line of thinking for a while too but lately I'm not so sure. In software in particular, I think it's actually quite relevant what you can do in-house with a SOTA model (especially in the tool calling / fine tuning phase) that you just don't get with the same model via API. Think Cursor vs. Claude Code -- you can use the same model in Cursor, but the experience with CC is far and away better. I…

CC being better than Cursor didn't make sense to me until I realized Anthropic trains[0] it's models to use it's own built-in tools[1].

0 - https://x.com/thisritchie/status/1944038132665454841

1- https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/tool-use...

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#315

Post by simianwords »

AlexandrB wrote: post #309
llamasushi wrote: post #22

The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models. What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the w…

The whole LLM era is horrible. All the innovation is coming "top-down" from very well funded companies - many of them tech incumbents, so you know the monetization is going to be awful. Since the models are expensive to run it's all subscription priced and has to run in the cloud where the user has no control. The hype is insane, and so usage is being pushed by C-suite folks who have no idea whether it's actually ben…

This is very pessimistic take. Where else do you think the innovation would come from? Take cloud for example - where did the innovation come from? It was from the top. I have no idea how you came to the conclusion that this implies monetization is going to be awful.

How do you know models are expensive to run? They have gone down in price repeatedly in the last 2 years. Why do you assume it has to run in the cloud when open source models can perform well?

> The hype is insane, and so usage is being pushed by C-suite folks who have no idea whether it's actually benefiting someone "on the ground" and decisions around which AI to use are often being made on the basis of existing vendor relationships

There are hundreds of millions of chatgpt users weekly. They didn't need a C suite to push the usage.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#316

Post by robotresearcher »

ijidak wrote: post #180
willvarfar wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As humans don't actually work like LLMs do, we can surmise that there are far more efficient ways to get to AGI. We just need to find them.

Can you elaborate? The technology to build a human brain would cost billions in today’s dollars. Are you thinking moreso about energy efficiency?

We make hundreds of millions of brains a year for the cost of their parent’s food and shelter.

That’s the known minimum cost. We have a lot of room to get costs down if we can figure out how.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#317

Post by serf »

fredoliveira wrote: post #119
me551ah wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And distillation makes the compute moat irrelevant. You could spend trillions to train a model, but some companies is going to get enough data from your model and distill it's own at a much cheaper upfront cost. This would allow them to offer them for cheaper inference cost too, totally defeating the point of spending crazy money on training.

A couple of counter-arguments: Labs can just step up the way they track signs of prompts meant for model distillation. Distillation requires a fairly large number of prompt/response tuples, and I am quite certain that all of the main labs have the capability to detect and impede that type of use if they put their backs into it. Distillation doesn't make the compute moat irrelevant. You can get good results from disti…

>Labs can just step up the way they track signs of prompts meant for model distillation. Distillation requires a fairly large number of prompt/response tuples, and I am quite certain that all of the main labs have the capability to detect and impede that type of use if they put their backs into it.

....while degrading their service for paying customers.

This is the same problem as law-enforcement-agency forwarding threats and training LLMs to avoid user-harm -- it's great if it works as intended, but more often than not it throws a lot more prompt cancellations at actual users by mistake, refuses queries erroneously -- and just ruins user experience.

i'm not convinced any of the groups can avoid distillation without ruining customer experience.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#318

Post by SilverElfin »

llamasushi wrote: post #22

The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models. What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the w…

The other problem is that big companies can take a loss and starve out any competition. They already make a ton of money from various monopolies. And they do not have the distraction of needing to find funding continuously. They can just keep selling these services at a loss until they’re the only ones left. That’s leaving aside the advantages they have elsewhere - like all the data only they can access for training. For example, it is unfair that Google can use YouTube data, but no one else can. How can that be fair competition? And they can also survive copyright lawsuits with their money. And so on.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#319

Post by lotsofpulp »

rich_sasha wrote: post #283
llamasushi wrote: post #22

The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models. What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the w…

It's the SV playbook: invent a field, make it indispensable, monopolise it and profit. It still amazes me that Uber, a taxi company, is worth however many billions. I guess for the bet to work out, it kinda needs to end in AGI for the costs to be worth it. LLMs are amazing but I'm not sure they justify the astronomical training capex, other than as a stepping stone.

Why would a global taxi/delivery broker not be worth billions? Their most recent 10-Q says they broker 36 million rides or deliveries per day. Even profiting $1 on each of those would result in a company worth billions.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#320

Post by jcranmer »

Razengan wrote: post #221
llamasushi wrote: post #22

The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models. What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the w…

Barely 50 years ago computers used to cost a million dollars and were less powerful than your phone's SIM card. > GPT-4 training was what, $100M? GPT-5/Opus-4 class probably $1B+? Your brain? Basically free *(not counting time + food) Disruption in this space will come from whomever can replicate analog neurons in a better way. Maybe one day you'll be able to Matrix information directly into your brain and know kung-…

> Barely 50 years ago computers used to cost a million dollars and were less powerful than your phone's SIM card.

Fifty years ago, we were starting to see the very beginning of workstations (not quite the personal computer of modern days), something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto, which cost ~$100k in inflation-adjusted money.

Post reply on HN