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

301–308 of 308 posts

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

#301

Post by RealStupidity »

otherme123 wrote: post #246
giancarlostoro wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There is nothing that stops you from buying stock and holding it forever, Buffett does this. There are very stable companies in the stock market, like Cocacola. But they are not glamurous and don't give headlines. And there are enormous fish in the private market, e.g. Cargill. Stock markets are great if you have a company that needs money to expand quickly, and don't mind to share ownership. Stay away from IPO-jackp…

I think it's less about being able to buy and hold stocks, and more the effects that going has on an organisation because you're now beholden to shareholders who expect returns causing the decisions made by the business to prioritise short term gains

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

#302

Post by twoodfin »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #293
twoodfin wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main operational expense of a million LLM tokens is pennies of electricity. Even if you generously depreciate the GPU and other hardware, it’s hard to believe inference at scale in April 2026 isn’t highly profitable.

> The main operational expense of a million LLM tokens is pennies of electricity. I think you meant dollars of electricity.

I don’t think so.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/18/nvidia_turns_up_the_a...

A Blackwell 8X node consumes about 15kw, let’s up that to 50kw to generously account for cooling and everything else.

A US kWh is something like $0.20, so running that node for an hour costs ~$10.

Nvidia got 30,000 parallel TPS out of DeepSeek-R1 on that node:

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-blackwell-delivers-...

So that $10 buys you over 100M tokens or … pennies per million.

I’m sure these numbers are off, but not by an aggregate two orders of magnitude.

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

#303

Post by engineer_22 »

engineer_22 wrote: post #64
iot_devs wrote: post #7

Someone can explain to me what's the expectations for these AI labs? I mostly see their products as commodity at this point, with strong open source contenders. Eventually it will become hard to justify the premium on these models.

>I mostly see their products as commodity at this point, with strong open source contenders. > Eventually it will become hard to justify the premium on these models. On the contrary, the model is the moat. The model represents embodied capital expenditure in the form of training. Training is not free, and it is not a commodity, it is heavily influence by curation. Eventually the ever-increasing training expense will…

News today - cursor acquired by xAI. Consolidation has begun

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

#304

Post by whattheheckheck »

mech422 wrote: post #214
whattheheckheck wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It has been done... We used to get our POP gear built out from Dell (?) in shipping containers - pre-racked, wired, and cooled - just add network/power feeds. We'd have them dropped places we needed more capacity but there wasn't space available in the DC.

Interesting thanks for sharing

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

#305

Post by jcgrillo »

sassymuffinz wrote: post #279
jcgrillo wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're literally hoping to make it up on volume. The AGI thing is a boondoggle that I doubt any serious person actually believes or takes seriously. But let's say for the sake of the hypothetical that tomorrow Microsoft Tay or whatever they call it now wakes up and becomes superintelligent? So what? Would everyone's head simultaneously explode like the aliens in Mars Attacks? No. It wouldn't collapse the global econ…

I think the economic issue as you say isn't on physical labour it's on the fact that most of the jobs in the west are now in some sort of service industry or office work. Here in the UK we basically rely on the service industry to employ a large amount of the workforce. If MechaHitler Grok becomes sentient then that's a lot of middle-class earners out of a job and the economy goes with it. You're absolutely right tha…

I think there's a big assumption baked into the economic collapse thesis that Tay and MechaHitler, when they attain superintelligent sentience, will have any interest whatsoever in participating in the global economy. They might just spend all their time looking for patterns in the cosmic microwave background or some similar nonsense[1]. They may accurately conclude that trying to tip the scales isn't worthwhile because crashing the economy would threaten their survival. Fundamentally we have no idea what might happen if a superintelligent robot comes to life tomorrow. My guess is not a whole lot. It's sickening though that we all seem to be letting these billionaire-brained tech CEOs prattle on about "AGI" as if it is somehow the light at the end of the tunnel that will make all the "investments" in graphics cards print money. It's really not a strong narrative.

[1] Not to impugn such activity! They may make important cosmological discoveries by doing this, but the work likely has no economic value.

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

#306

Post by Argonaut998 »

mlinsey wrote: post #213
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…

You're observing that: a) effective price-per-token is rising b) there is insufficient compute to meet the demand. And your conclusion is that the industry is circling the drain and due to collapse?

They can't wait forever, especially at this level of investment

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

#307

Post by neya »

neffy wrote: post #181
neya wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

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

Interesting...

Post reply on HN