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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

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Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#351

Post by acdha »

simianwords wrote: post #315
AlexandrB wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> Take cloud for example - where did the innovation come from? It was from the top.

Definitely not. That came years later but in the late 2000s to mid-2010s it was often engineers pushing for cloud services over the executives’ preferred in-house services because it turned a bunch of helpdesk tickets and weeks to months of delays into an AWS API call. Pretty soon CTOs were backing it because those teams shipped faster.

The consultants picked it up, yes, but they push a lot of things and usually it’s only the ones which actual users want which succeed.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#352

Post by monax »

3uler wrote: post #347
AlexandrB wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

If you get a 10x speedup with an LLM it mean you are not doing anything new or interesting

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#353

Post by 3uler »

dmschulman wrote: post #336
dpe82 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a previous generation, the enabler of all our computer tech innovation was the incredible pace of compute growth due to Moore's Law, which was also "top-down" from very well-funded companies since designing and building cutting edge chips was (and still is) very, very expensive. The hype was insane, and decisions about what chip features to build were made largely on the basis of existing vendor relationships. Tho…

Eh, if this is true then IBM and Intel would still be the kings of the hill. Plenty of companies came from the bottom up out of nothing during the 90s and 2000s to build multi-billion dollar companies that are still dominate the market today. Many of those companies struggled for investment and grew over a long timeframe. The argument is something like that is not really possible anymore given the absurd upfront inve…

Intel was king of the hill until 2018.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#354

Post by powerapple »

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…

Also not all compute was necessary for the final model, a large chunk of it is trial and error research. In theory, for $1B you spent training the latest model, a competitor will be able to do it after 6 months with $100M.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#355

Post by marcosdumay »

arcticbull wrote: post #277
Printerisreal wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments, CBs and investment banks. "They" do it and work together to print more.

In a centrally banked economy, retail and commercial banks create money when you take out loans. The government doesn't create money except during QE which only happened twice in the US, 2009-2014 and 2020-2021. That's why I was curious what you meant by "they." The Fed has been actively destroying money for the last 4 years.

The government creates money every time it spends more than it taxes. AFAIK, the US has been doing that nonstop since the turn of the century.

That new money is different from the new money the central bank creates to push interest rates down. That later one the US has been destroying. But both do many of the same things (but not all).

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#356

Post by badpun »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #260
xpe wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there are salient differences between art on a wall and a company.

At heart, not really. The whole point of all of this is to motivate humans to get off their butt and reduce entropy.

Art piece cannot do buybacks/dividends.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#357

Post by ethbr1 »

mikestorrent wrote: post #166
renegade-otter wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do seem to be hitting the top of the curve of diminishing returns. Forget AGI - they need a performance breakthrough in order to stop shoveling money into this cash furnace.

Inference performance per watt is continuing to improve, so even if we hit the peak of what LLM technology can scale to, we'll see tokens per second, per dollar, and per watt continue to improve for a long time yet. I don't think we're hitting peak of what LLMs can do, at all, yet. Raw performance for one-shot responses, maybe; but there's a ton of room to improve "frameworks of thought", which are what agents and ot…

My guess would be that it parallels other backend software revolutions.

Initially, first party proprietary solutions are in front.

Then, as the second-party ecosystem matures, they build on highest-performance proprietary solutions.

Then, as second parties monetize, they begin switching to OSS/commodity solutions to lower COGS. And with wider use, these begin to outcompete proprietary solutions on ergonomics and stability (even if not absolute performance).

While Anthropic and OpenAi are incinerating money, why not build on their platforms? As soon as they stop, scales tilt towards an apache/nginx type commoditized backend.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#358

Post by gizajob »

jayde2767 wrote: post #122
renegade-otter wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do seem to be hitting the top of the curve of diminishing returns. Forget AGI - they need a performance breakthrough in order to stop shoveling money into this cash furnace.

"cash furnace", so aptly put.

The economics will work out when the district heating is run off the local AI/cash furnace.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#359

Post by xp84 »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #80
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alphabet is "worth" 2.45 trillion on the public market, is anthropic worth a bit less than 10% of google going forward? I don't think that's entirely unreasonable...

It's both insane and not unreasonable. If Anthropic's internal version of Claude Code gets so good that they can recreate all of google's products quickly there's no moat anymore. If AI is winner take all, then the value is effectively infinite. Obviously insane, but maybe it's winner take most?

> " If Anthropic's internal version of Claude Code gets so good that they can recreate all of google's products quickly"

I know you aren't asserting this but rather just putting the argument out there, but to me at least it's interesting comparing a company that has vendor lock-in and monopoly or duopoly status in various markets vs one that doesn't.

I'd argue that Google's products themselves haven't been their moat for decades -- their moat is "default search engine status" in the tiny number of Browsers That Matter (Arguably just Chrome and Mobile Safari), being entrenched as the main display ad network, duopoly status as an OS vendor (Android), and monopoly status on OS vendor for low-end education laptops (ChromeOS). If somehow those were all suddenly eliminated, I think Google would be orders of magnitude less valuable.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#360

Post by m101 »

mandevil wrote: post #287
reissbaker wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Dario, each model line has generally been profitable: i.e. $200MM to train a model that makes $1B in profit over its lifetime. But, since each model has been more and more expensive to train, they keep needing to raise more money to train the next generation of model, and the company balance sheet looks negative: i.e. they spent more this year than last (since the training cost for model N+1 is higher),…

I mean, this is how semiconductors have worked forever. Every new generation of fab costs ~2x what the previous generation did, and you need to build a new fab ever couple of years. But (if you could keep the order book full for the fab) it would make a lot of money over its lifetime, and you still needed to borrow/raise even more to build the next generation of fab. And if you were wrong about demand .... you got in…

Except it's like second tier semi manufacturer spending 10x less on the same fab in one years time. Here it might make sense to wait a bit. There will be customers, especially considering the diminishing returns these models seem to have come across. If performance was improving I'd agree with you, but it's not.
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