Live data from Hacker News

Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

bloomberg.com

211–220 of 868 posts

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#211

I find it crazy that Google considers Anthropic to be worth almost 10% of Google itself (350B valuation mentioned in the article). Anthropic gets traction but has no moat, no infrastructure and relatively small team working for it. I feel for 40B you can get a lot of very smart people and a lot of very good hardware to outcompete it.

> I feel for 40B you can get a lot of very smart people and a lot of very good hardware to outcompete it

Nah, see Meta

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#212

It is very difficult for me to see any amount of money being thrown at Anthropic as a bad idea. The amount of new revenue that I am personally able to create for my clients, using Claude models for dev, and Claude models inside the insanely agile products delivered, is astounding. If I was not currently experiencing this myself, and someone told me that this was possible, I would be calling them names.

Why do AI boosters like yourself all have the same writing style? Was the comment AI generated?

It's like insane hype marketing speak. "insanely agile products delivered" like huh?

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what’s needed when you go from $9B in ARR … to $30B in ARR literally just one quarter later . That kind of insane growth & demand is unprecedented at that scale. https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...

What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and worse.

You seem to be under the impression that making services better or cheaper _for the consumer_ is the goal of any corporation. The goal is to make their own operations better and cheaper for them. They are laying off employees and adding features of questionable value as a pretext to raise prices. The playbook has not changed, it has only accelerated.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#214

If you added up all the major AI valuations, it's apparently worth more than products Americans constantly buy and rely on for their main life. So either AI is going to be involved in every Americans life to a large degree, and paying real money for, or these valuations are insanely wrong.

The valuations on AI companies are a bet on them capturing enough of the $60 trillion annual wages paid to people to have a good ROI.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#215

If you added up all the major AI valuations, it's apparently worth more than products Americans constantly buy and rely on for their main life. So either AI is going to be involved in every Americans life to a large degree, and paying real money for, or these valuations are insanely wrong.

there are plenty of people who basically believe this is the end of the human economy - there will be nothing left that isn't done by AI in the future. Even the bits left that humans do will be human facades on AI driven activity (like your hairdresser will be viewing you through AI powered glasses using AI powered scissors etc).

So from that point of view you can indeed look at it as the entire value of the economy should be invested into AI companies.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what’s needed when you go from $9B in ARR … to $30B in ARR literally just one quarter later . That kind of insane growth & demand is unprecedented at that scale. https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...

What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and worse.

I can say in one role in my job, I'm getting a lot of use and I know my colleagues are at least trying a lot of things. One use is a first-pass review of animal care and use protocols. The Claude project was given all of the relevant policies and guidelines as well as a fairly long prompt that explains the things we look for in protocol review. It's checking some things that the software we use makes very tedious to check and raising inconsistencies between sections. Some places have a full time "protocol reader" who does this kind of first check, but we've never had that, so it's helpful.

Another project I'm seeing in the same realm is taking an approved protocol and some study results and checking that the records of what was done match what they said they could do in the approved protocol. It can also make sure that surgical records have all the things they should have. This can help meet one of the requirements from the national accreditation organization to do "post approval monitoring".

Another way I've used it is to have it collate and compare a particular kind of policy across many institutions who transparently put their policies online. Seeing the commonality between the policies and where some excel helped me rewrite our policy.

This is work that just wasn't happening before or, more accurately, it was being spread over lots of people, and any improvement in efficiency or consistency is hard to measure.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#217
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly, Microsoft allegedly did that for the very selfish reason of looking better in terms of being a monopoly.

Of course this is well known. Everything Microsoft does is for selfish capitalist reasons and everything Apple does is for altruistic philanthropic reasons.

They’re publicly traded for-profit companies, selfishness is literally the definition of both of them and it’s the farthest thing from a secret.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#218
post #148

Anyone else has an increasing feeling that all the AI hype is turning into a "Dot-Com Bubble x 2008 Credit Default Swaps" collab?

I feel the same until I’m reminded I’m paying Anthropic $100 every month for something that’s indispensable to me now and would probably pay a lot more. Very inelastic demand as long as competition is low at the frontier.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some coworker who says something similar, he vibe coded tons of cryptic code, which indeed solves some problem though could be way more compact and well structured. Now it is hitting complexity limitation, since llm now cant comprehend it, and human cant comprehend it by large a margin.

honest recommendation: nuke and pave after analyzing (w/ AI of course) where it went horribly wrong. it's trivial to reimplement a better solution.

Its a bit of workspace politics, I would need to call that guy out to tell that he is not hyper-performer, but just pushed lots of low quality code which will produce lots of negative impact in a long term.

Also, I am not sure if it is trivial to implement. The code is injected into many scenarios and workflows, so replacement will be painful and risky if new solution break some edge case.

Post reply on HN