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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

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Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#651

Post by lelanthran »

zestyping wrote: post #648
lelanthran wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> > The creation of wealth comes from trade, [...] > I'm not sure to what extent you meant this, but I don't know that I'd agree with it. At a very foundational level, all wealth comes from trade, even when there is no currency involved. When two parties voluntarily make a trade, each party gets more value out of the trade than they had before, so the sum total of value after the trade is, by definition alone, great…

Wow, that's a massive blind spot you've got there. The value comes from doing the thing . Fixing the tractor creates value. Growing and harvesting the potatoes creates value. Trading the potatoes for something you value more, yes, also creates additional value. But notice that potatoes have value to you even if you don't trade them for anything. If you choke on a grape and a helpful volunteer saves your life, they cr…

> The value comes from doing the thing. Fixing the tractor creates value. Growing and harvesting the potatoes creates value.

The value from value doesn't come by default; it's not a given.

Neither of those things create value unless they are actually used.

Fixing a tractor you neither use nor trade does not create value.

Growing potatoes you will never eat does not create value.

So, sure, labour can create value, but it's not a guarantee. Trade, OTOH, always creates value.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#652

Post by elbear »

lelanthran wrote: post #594
elbear wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who trade at a deficit just because they believe that's the only viable option. They see commerce as a zero-sum game.

> There are people who trade at a deficit just because they believe that's the only viable option. It's not a deficit if the value they assign to what they get is higher than the value they assign to what they give. If they are giving away something they value highly for something they value less highly, then it's not a voluntary trade, now is it?

Yes, but people don't always make voluntary trades. Like staying in a job they hate, because they believe they will find it difficult/impossible to find a better option.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#653

Post by lelanthran »

elbear wrote: post #652
lelanthran wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are people who trade at a deficit just because they believe that's the only viable option. It's not a deficit if the value they assign to what they get is higher than the value they assign to what they give. If they are giving away something they value highly for something they value less highly, then it's not a voluntary trade, now is it?

Yes, but people don't always make voluntary trades. Like staying in a job they hate, because they believe they will find it difficult/impossible to find a better option.

> Yes, but people don't always make voluntary trades. Like staying in a job they hate, because they believe they will find it difficult/impossible to find a better option.

That's still a value assignment: they value eating and paying rent more highly than job satisfaction.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#654

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #572
wongarsu wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all it takes is Anthropic 35x-ing their revenue once they start selling ad spots? That sounds pretty reasonable to me. Right now nobody wants to be the first to offer advertising in LLM services, but LLM conversation history provides a wealth of data for ad targeting. And in more permissive jurisdictions you can have the LLM deliver ads organically in the conversation or just shift the opinions and biases of the m…

__350x-ing__, not 35

Anthropic valuation is 10% of Google. The 35 to get equivalent multiple is correct (well actually closer to 7 as another comment thread rightfully pointed that Anthropic is apparently on track to multiply their revenue by 5 in 2025).

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#655

Post by chermi »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #625
chermi wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring energy costs(!), I'm interested in the following. Say every server generation from nvda is 25% "better at training", by whatever metric (1). Could you not theoretically wire together 1.25 + delta more of the previous generation to get the same compute? The delta accounts for latency/bandwidth from interconnects. I'm guessing delta is fairly large given my impression of how important HBM and networking are. I…

I'm not the one building out datacenters but I believe the power consumption is the reason for the devaluation. It's the same reasons we saw bitcoin miners throw all their ASICs in the bin every 6 months. At some point it becomes cheaper to buy new hardware than to keep running the old inefficient chips, when the power savings of new chips exceed the purchase price of the new hardware. These AI data centers are chewi…

The rule of thumb i heard was that over the "useful lifetime" of a chip the cost of energy+maintenance/infrastructure is about the same as the cost of the chip. IIRC the energy was some like 15-20% of the overall cost over the "useful lifetime". I'm putting it in quotes because it's kind of a cyclical definition.

That makes me wonder if it's more a performance thing than an energy cost thing. I guess you also have to factor the finite supply of reliable energy hookups for these things, so if you're constrained on total kwH consumption your only way to more TOPs is upgrade. Probably ties in with real estate/permitting difficulty too. I guess what I'm picturing is if energy availability(not cost) and real estate availability/permitting timelines weren't issues, that %20 of cost probably wouldn't look too bad. So it's probably those factors combined. Market pricing dynamics are hard :/

I didn't know the recycle time of the Asics was that fast! That's an interesting point about the first-mover. I would counter that a large part of the first move value in this case is ai engineer experience and grabbing exception talent early. But with Facebook and these guys paying for them like athletes, I'd guess that experience build up and talent retention aren't as robust. Openai lost most of it's best, but maybe that's an exceptional example..

All of that to say, yeah, first mover advantage seems dulled in this situation.

Who knows, maybe apple is playing the long game and betting on just that.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#656

Post by zestyping »

lelanthran wrote: post #651
zestyping wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's a massive blind spot you've got there. The value comes from doing the thing . Fixing the tractor creates value. Growing and harvesting the potatoes creates value. Trading the potatoes for something you value more, yes, also creates additional value. But notice that potatoes have value to you even if you don't trade them for anything. If you choke on a grape and a helpful volunteer saves your life, they cr…

> The value comes from doing the thing. Fixing the tractor creates value. Growing and harvesting the potatoes creates value. The value from value doesn't come by default; it's not a given. Neither of those things create value unless they are actually used. Fixing a tractor you neither use nor trade does not create value. Growing potatoes you will never eat does not create value. So, sure, labour can create value, but…

Also wrong. You can always destroy value by making a mistake. Trading and then realizing you made a mistake, just like investing labour and then realizing you made a mistake, does not create value. Trading is not special in this regard.

Value can be created either way: through labour or trade.

Regardless, your statement that all wealth is created by trade is false.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#657

Post by [deleted] »

lelanthran wrote: post #651
zestyping wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's a massive blind spot you've got there. The value comes from doing the thing . Fixing the tractor creates value. Growing and harvesting the potatoes creates value. Trading the potatoes for something you value more, yes, also creates additional value. But notice that potatoes have value to you even if you don't trade them for anything. If you choke on a grape and a helpful volunteer saves your life, they cr…

> The value comes from doing the thing. Fixing the tractor creates value. Growing and harvesting the potatoes creates value. The value from value doesn't come by default; it's not a given. Neither of those things create value unless they are actually used. Fixing a tractor you neither use nor trade does not create value. Growing potatoes you will never eat does not create value. So, sure, labour can create value, but…

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#658

Post by hakfoo »

noosphr wrote: post #477
JohnMakin wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should probably change this to "was appearance of incredible pace of compute growth due to Moore's Law," because even my basic CS classes from 15 years ago were teaching that it was drastically slowing down, and isn't really a "law" more than an observational trend that lasted a few decades. There are limits to how small you can make transistors and we're not too far from it, at least not what would continue to yield…

The corollary to Moores law, that computers get twice as fast every 18 months, died by 2010. People who didn't live through the 80s, 90s and early 00s, where you'd get a computer ten times as fast every 5 years, can't imagine what it was like back then. Today the only way to scale compute is to throw more power at it or settle for the 5% per year real single core performance improvement.

We sort of had two phases of development:

- Running up single-core performance through increasingly sophisticated core design and clock speed (which is now at the 5% per year point mentioned)

- Going wider by throwing more SMT, more cores, and larger caches at the problem.

Assuming here that x86 was the last major architecture that was going for high single-thread performance at all costs, the first phase lasted us a good 30 years-- from the 4004 to the flameout of Netburst.

We could consider the second phase starting when they started delivering the P4 with Hyperthreading, and its true-dual-core predecessors shortly thereafter, so we're now about 20 years into that era.

Do we have another 10 left in it?

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#659

Post by filoleg »

rich_sasha wrote: post #606
filoleg wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cannot speak for the rest, but the whole “Amazon didn’t turn a profit for years” (as an argument about their profitability now coming solely through quasi-monololy routes) is incredibly misleading and bordering on disingenuous. Since before AWS was even a thing, Amazon was already turning up great revenue and could’ve easily just stopped expanding and investing into the company growth, and they would be profitable ea…

Ok, we can debate on Uber, but your take on Amazon is very similar to today's LLM providers. They too are making good revenue on their product, but put so much cash into growth that they at least appear to be running at a loss.

Yup, fully agreed with your take on Amazon being similar to today's LLM providers.

Today's LLM providers have the same choice as Amazon had back then. They could just stop advancing/expanding, and instead try harnessing that profit. They choose not to, they instead bet on fast expansion/advancement, and it makes total sense to me (especially as the competition rn between all those LLM providers seems to be very heated, as opposed to what Amazon dealt with at the time).

Uber is different, though. There was no point at which they could just call it a day and go "alright, we are fully self-sufficient, and we can just start collecting profits from our services as soon as tomorrow." Expansion or not, unless I am missing something, Uber wasn't in a position where they were profitable (and just chose to forego profits in favor of spending the money on expanding). To be clear, they indeed spent money on expanding, I am just questioning the part about their expansion being done using the funds that could've otherwise made the difference between them being profitable and not.

Re: Anthropic raises $13B Series F

#660

Post by worldsayshi »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #452
worldsayshi wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we're still sort of on the fence if it's even that useful? Like sure it saves me a bit of time here and there but will scaling up really solve the reliability issues that is the real bottleneck.

I feel like it's pretty settled that they are a little bit useful, as a faster search engine, or being able to automatically sort my emails. But the value is nowhere near justifying the investment.

Yeah, I think they are both highly over hyped and quite undervalued in terms of how they can be used effectively.
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