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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

anthropic.com

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Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#531

Post by barchar »

mothballed wrote: post #469
jjmarr wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your marginal utility of money increases with more, it's a rational decision to go to a casino and gamble.

The casino is an extremely rational savings model if you expected to constantly be robbed and want to convert small (and thus not worth robbing) income streams into occasionally large sums of money to be spent rapidly. I.e. say you are a north korean worker in China/Russia and you occasionally get small change to spend on cigarettes, you could gamble it every 'paycheck' and eventually buy a phone to escape with the w…

It can also be a way to evade capital controls. You know you'll lose, but otoh you also know you'll probably not lose _everything_ and you buy in with RMB and cash out in HKD.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#532

Post by unethical_ban »

not_the_fda wrote: post #312
ijidak wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kill us off or else let us starve while they watch the world burn from their killer AI drone protected estates.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#533

Post by mlyle »

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…

They've gotta hope they get to cheap AGI, though.

Any stall in progress either on chips or smartness/FLOP means there's a lot of surplus previous generation gear that can hang and commoditize it all out to open models.

Just like how the "dot com bust" brought about an ISP renaissance on all the surplus, cheap-but-slightly-off-leading-edge gear.

IMO that's the opportunity for a vibrant AI ecosystem.

Of course, if they get to cheap AGI, we're cooked: both from vendors having so much control and the destabilization that will come to labor markets, etc.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#534

Post by nmfisher »

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…

Were there many competitors to YouTube though? I remember Vimeo (still around) and Google Video (replaced by YouTube), but not much else.

Between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Facebook, xai, Microsoft, Mistral, Alibaba, DeepSeek, z.ai, Falcon, and many others, AI feels a lot more competitive.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#535

Post by slashdave »

xpe wrote: post #480
slashdave wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only searching for reasons why you are right is a fishing expedition. Not to be mean, but aren't you being a little hypercritical here, bringing up your bespoke example of YouTube?

I think you mean hypocritical. To answer: no, and even if it was a “yes” it wouldn’t affect the argument I was making. I’ll explain. I was wondering how long it would take for this kind of meta-critique would pop up. Meta critiques are interesting: some people use them as zingers, hoping to dismantle someone else’s entire position. But they almost never accomplish that because they are at a different level of argumen…

Oh, I see. Next time I make a mistake, I'll just skip the apology, and claim "I was inconsistent in applying a principle."

Yeah, I meant hypocritical. For some reason I couldn't find the right word.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#536

Post by nielsbot »

StephenHerlihyy wrote: post #499
serf wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think you're really bending over backwards to make this company seem non viable. Having experienced Anthropic as a customer, I have a hard time thinking that their inevitable failure (something i'd bet on) will be model/capability-based, that's how bad they suck at every other customer-facing metric. You think Amazon is frustrating to deal with? Get into a CSR-chat-loop with an uncaring LLM followed up on by an un…

What's fun is that I have had Anthropic's AI support give me blatantly false information. It tried to tell me that I could get a full year's worth of Claude Max for only $200 dollars. When I asked if that was true it quickly backtracked and acknowledged it's mistake. I figure someone more litigious will eventually try to capitalize.

"Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#537

Post by mlyle »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #474
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…

That’s like being upset that you can’t dig your own suez canal. So long as there is competition it’ll be available at marginal cost. And there is plenty of innovation that can be done on the edges, and not all of machine learning is LLMs.

> So long as there is competition it’ll be available at marginal cost.

Most things are not perfect competition, so you get MR=MC not P=MC.

We're talking about massive capital costs. Another name for massive capital costs are "barriers to entry".

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#538

Post by nielsbot »

oblio wrote: post #523
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),…

> 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. Surely the Anthropic CEO will have no incentive to lie.

Not saying he's above lying, but I do believe there are potential legal ramifications from a CEO lying. (Assuming they get caught)

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#539

Post by edg5000 »

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…

How can you dismiss the value of the tech so blatantly? Have you used Opus for general questions and coding?

> no idea whether it's actually benefiting someone "on the ground"

I really don't get it. Before, we were farmers plowing by hand, and now we are using tractors.

I do totally agree with your sentiment that it's still a horrible development though! Before Claude Code, I ran everything offline, all FOSS, owned all my machines, servers etc. Now I'm a subscription user. Zero control, zero privacy. That is the downside of it all.

Actually, it's just like the mechanisation of farming! Collectivization in some countries was a nightmare for small land owners who cultivated the land (probably with animals). They went from that to a more efficient, government controlled collective farm, where they were just a farm worker, with the land reclaimed through land reform. That was an upgrade for the efficiency of farming, needing fewer humans for it. But a huge downgrade for the individual small-scale land owners.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#540

Post by nielsbot »

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.

And don't forget the furnace furnace: gas/coal to power all this.
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