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

Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 308 posts

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#181

Post by neffy »

neya wrote: post #108
shubhamjain wrote: post #11

If you think you need to spend $100B, does using a third-party cloud provider still make sense? It doesn’t matter what sweet deal Amazon is pitching—in that scenario, you’d want to own your stack. Especially in a hyper-competitive field like this, where margins are going to matter a lot soon. It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner…

I remember seeing this extremely shocking graph of top AI companies on Facebook on how the money just keeps changing hands between a handful of companies. Almost seemed like a scam.

It is a similar kind of lending loop to that which went on during the late 1990's leading up to the 2000 crash. A lends to B lends to C lends to A.

There is a famous quote from the polish economist Kalecki, that "economics is the science of mistaking a stock for a flow". Essentially this form of lending continues while everybody can make interest payments, and blows up horribly as soon as somebody can´t - as I have no doubt all those concerned are fully aware.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#182

Post by giancarlostoro »

Argonaut998 wrote: post #131

Does anyone feel that the jig is almost up? Surely the returns aren’t anywhere close to what investors expect with the sheer amount of cash at this point in time. Are Anthropic and OpenAI rushing to IPO for immediate cash so they can delay the inevitable? Surely this cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay John to pay Tim must end. We are only just now getting a taste of the “true cost” of these tokens. Then there…

> Surely this cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay John to pay Tim must end.

I think a LOT of companies really never needed to be on the public market, and its a darn shame that so many go on the stock market, we have this obnoxious culture where you have to fire tons of people if you have a bad quarter just to show you're stopping the bleeding. Companies literally fire and hire x number of people every quarter to keep things going, its ridiculous and unhealthy. Private companies rarely work like this, I'm sure there's exceptions.

Every company I've worked at started off private, and those were their golden years, until some economic hurdle happened so they sold it off to a bigger fish who is on the stock market, who bought them to be more attractive to investors or what have you.

I wish there were an alternative to the stock market where you invest for the long haul, and you cannot take your money out in x number of years. I think this would make more sense. Maybe it doesn't fix the VC peeps want their money back nonsense, but if you could do it even for early stage companies, maybe it could help somewhat.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#183

Post by blmarket »

TSiege wrote: post #124
electroly wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For AI inference you don't need to geographically distribute your data centers. Latency, throughput, and routes don't matter here. When it's 10 seconds for the first token and then a 1KB/sec streamed response, whatever is fine. You can serve Australia from the US and it'll barely matter. You can find a spot far outside populated areas with cheap power, available water, and friendly leadership, then put all of your da…

latency absolutely matters? this is such a weird thing to say. for training sure, but customers absolutely want low latency

Easy solution - use hyperscalers with super expensive API charge only when latency really matters. Otherwise build your own DC. Easy to expect customers don't care latency that much over money.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#184

Post by lelanthran »

paulddraper wrote: post #171
Argonaut998 wrote: post #131

Does anyone feel that the jig is almost up? Surely the returns aren’t anywhere close to what investors expect with the sheer amount of cash at this point in time. Are Anthropic and OpenAI rushing to IPO for immediate cash so they can delay the inevitable? Surely this cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay John to pay Tim must end. We are only just now getting a taste of the “true cost” of these tokens. Then there…

Anthropic revenue is ~$30B/year.

Revenue is a meaningless measure though; what's the spend:income ratio? Excluding capital investments, what's the cost of operations?

At a very minimum, to repay the +$100b in investment within a reasonable timeframe, what's the minimum figure they have to bank post-tax each month?

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#185

Post by razvanneculai »

Personally i have felt like my Pro plan which is like 20 dollars, is like a free subscription somewhere else. I use claude to research and help me complete my code and i feel like i run out of my 5h usage limit in like 30 minutes with Sonnet...

I hope that they find a way to forward, because personally im very passionate about AI, and in my opinion if used right its the future.

Allthough one thing i cant seem to find, maybe im havent searched enough, but what is the profit of anthropic?

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#186

Post by YetAnotherNick »

Argonaut998 wrote: post #131

Does anyone feel that the jig is almost up? Surely the returns aren’t anywhere close to what investors expect with the sheer amount of cash at this point in time. Are Anthropic and OpenAI rushing to IPO for immediate cash so they can delay the inevitable? Surely this cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay John to pay Tim must end. We are only just now getting a taste of the “true cost” of these tokens. Then there…

> We are only just now getting a taste of the “true cost” of these tokens

Why do you believe that? Better metric would be price per token of open models served by third party. Last I was tracking the price for similar level model was decreasing by more than 10x year on year, and they are 10-100x cheaper than top properietery models.

Sure you can say that you can't compare them but for sure you can compare the top properietery model of 6 months back to current open models and the gap in time seems to be constant.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#187

Post by redsocksfan45 »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #177
RealityVoid wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is probably one of the worst cases they probably saw. Most likely the subscription inference cost is much lower than you expect. If you look at costs for similar open models they are much lower than what you get by buying from anthropic, so that is the real cost basis I expect. It's likely Amazon is making a fucking killing though.

While $5000 is a lot, the people who rack up close or just over a thousand "API equivalent cost" are pretty common. > Most likely the subscription inference cost is much lower than you expect. This is probably not true because they'd be screaming it off every rooftop were that the case. Same deal with the API inference. Even the "profitable on inference" claim is sourced back to hearsay of informal statements made by…

[dead]

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#188

Post by whattheheckheck »

RealityVoid wrote: post #173
IMTDb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that at that scale, the alternative is building your own data centers. You'd probably want at least 2 in the US, 2 in Europe, 2 in Asia, maybe 1 in Africa and 1 in LATAM. So 8-10, and you need at least half of them ready "on time." What does "on time" mean? You'll need to negotiate with local authorities, some friendly, some not. Data centers aren't exactly popular neighbors these days. Then negotiate…

Take the approach Geohot is suggesting. Take a shipping container, make a standard layout, cooling and compute load. Find a cheap source of electricity.. Place it and have compute.

Surely if it was that easy it'd be done?

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#189

Post by PunchyHamster »

Argonaut998 wrote: post #131

Does anyone feel that the jig is almost up? Surely the returns aren’t anywhere close to what investors expect with the sheer amount of cash at this point in time. Are Anthropic and OpenAI rushing to IPO for immediate cash so they can delay the inevitable? Surely this cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay John to pay Tim must end. We are only just now getting a taste of the “true cost” of these tokens. Then there…

> Will data centres be built fast enough and powered sufficiently to lower the cost of compute thus tokens?

...building datacenters will not lower the cost.

The cost (real, not investment hype subsidized one) will only drop with:

* more efficient models * GPU/RAM market going back to reasonable pricing.

The AI bubble pumped the second into unstustainable pricing and progress on first is going.. slowly.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#190

Post by PunchyHamster »

RealityVoid wrote: post #168
an0malous wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From the limited perspective of software development, today’s models are well-worth their per-token cost. At the current price or real price? Anthropic said a $200 subscription can cost them $5000 so the real price could be anywhere from 10-30x the current price.

No, that is probably one of the worst cases they probably saw. Most likely the subscription inference cost is much lower than you expect. If you look at costs for similar open models they are much lower than what you get by buying from anthropic, so that is the real cost basis I expect. It's likely Amazon is making a fucking killing though.

The "worst case" is probably someone just using their $200 account limits. So yeah, real cost is probably close to that
Post reply on HN