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Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

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

#301
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.

I pay TMobile $100 a month but they aren't worth a trillion dollars.

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

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To me it is more like software consultant speak than AI booster speak. And it is not exactly surprising that the people in a particular subculture all talk similarly.

Well, I hear it from people who are regular devs and not consultants, although it's more common with people who aren't really working in the trenches anymore.

Like ex-developer turned PM who is now vibe coding everything they can and thinks it's the greatest thing ever.

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

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's like insane hype marketing speak because that is genuinely the difference from what it was like to develop software 6 months ago. You see many people using the same language, often in comments that are otherwise stylistically quite different, because many people are experiencing the same thing. I get that it's tedious to sit on tech forums listening to an endless stream of people insisting that suchandsuch techn…

It's "world changing" yet the world seems mostly the same other than the increasing enshittification of everything...

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

#304
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all we know they could have a revenue of $100 and claim a run-rate revenue of $30B. Can you explain how that’d work? What would the $30B figure be based on if they only have $100 in revenue?

As far as I understand run rate revenue is just a fancy way of saying that "the last month we had sales, and if that continues for a year we will have a AAR of 30B. meaning it's not 30B yet, but the sales numbers indicates that we get there by continue selling at the current speed. But to have revenue of $100 and get $30B in ARR I guess the period looked at needs to be seconds.... (Run Rate = Revenue in Period / # of…

Not even that. It's not based on actual sales in, for example, the past month. It's based on an expected continuous growth based on the growth of the past month (or whatever period you pick).

It's a forecast.

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

#305
post #28

I consider them competitors… This reminds me of Microsoft in 1997 investing $150 million in Apple, saving it from near bankruptcy

googles multiple businesses and gemini isn't the largest one. anthropic is the anchor external customer of tpu's and nvidia is worth more than all of google. If tpu's actually breakout as a viable alternative over the next few years for multiple clients the business could easily be worth as much as search, maybe more.

Google cloud also need to be able to offer Anthropic models on Vertex otherwise they just won't be competitive.

Microsoft is in the same boat with Azure.

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

#306

Context: a few weeks ago, Anthropic signed a deal to buy "multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity" from Google and Broadcom [1]. There have been several previous deals, too. Some people call this sort of thing a "circular deal", but perhaps a better way to think of it is as a very large-scale version of vendor financing? The simple version of vendor financing is when a vendor gives a retailer time to pay f…

It could be legit, it could be a thickly veiled accounting fraud continuing the valuation inflation with fake deals that count money multiple times.

Maybe a little bit of both.

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

#307

Context: a few weeks ago, Anthropic signed a deal to buy "multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity" from Google and Broadcom [1]. There have been several previous deals, too. Some people call this sort of thing a "circular deal", but perhaps a better way to think of it is as a very large-scale version of vendor financing? The simple version of vendor financing is when a vendor gives a retailer time to pay f…

To be honest, I think "vendor financing" is still a very risky premise.

Vendors may be positioned to know how a customer is doing, but they're also incentivized to overestimate how well a customer is going to perform.

GE Capital (edit: and GMCA) is a great example of how seemingly reasonable vendor financing can cause the lender serious problems.

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm burning an insane number of tokens 8-12 hours a day for the dramatic improvement of some internal tooling at a big tech company. Using it heavily for an unannounced future project as well. I presume I'm not the only one.

AI is truly perfect for internal tooling. Security is less or no concern, bugs are more acceptable, performance / scalability rarely a concern. Quickest way to get things done, and speed up production development, MVP development etc.

This comment makes me want to scream.

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

#309

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.

You’re paying the subsidized cost. Those margins will shrink once the real bill comes due. I really think everyone will look back at this time as the golden area of cheap AI. We are already seeing the costs (and restrictions/limits) creep up with the Western models.

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I work: - Development velocity is very noticeably much higher across the board. Quality is not obviously worse, but it's LLM assisted, not vibe coding (except for experiments and internal tools). - Things that would have been tactically built with TypeScript are now Rust apps. - Things that would have been small Python scripts are full web apps and dashboards. - Vibe coding (with Claude Desktop, nobody is using…

Is your team measuring how much of your code is being written with claude and comparing amongst the team, like what works best in your codebase? How are you learning from each other? I’m making a team version of my buildermark.dev open source project and trying to learn about how teams would like to use it.

Different teams are using it in very different ways so it can be tough to compare meaningfully.

Backends handling tens to hundreds of thousands of messages per second with extremely high correctness and resilience requirements are necessarily taking a different approach to less critical services that power various ancillary sites/pages or to front end web apps.

That said there's a lot of very open discussion around tooling, "skills", MCP, etc., harnesses, and approaches and plenty of sharing and cross-pollination of techniques.

It would be great to find ways to better quantify the actual value add from LLMs and from the various ways of using them, but our experience so far is that the landscape in terms of both model capability and tooling is shifting so fast that that's quite hard to do.

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