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Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

bloomberg.com

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

#331

Post by dpark »

casey2 wrote: post #273
dpark wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think companies have started spending millions on tokens and no one from finance has been involved? You could argue that all the spending is wasted (doubtless some is), but insisting that the decision is being made in complete ignorance of financial concerns reeks of that “everyone’s dumb but me” energy.

More that there is a poor incentive structure. Just like how PE can make money by leveraged buyouts and running businesses into the ground. Many of the financial instruments that make both that and the current AI bubble possible were legal then made illegal within the lifetimes of the last 16 presidents. Round-tripping used to be regulated. SPVs used to be regulated. If you need a loan you used to have to go to somet…

My issue was not with criticism of the money being spent or how it’s being obtained. I was specifically commenting on this statement:

> “Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money.”

This isn’t meaningful criticism. This is a vacuous “those guys are so dumb”.

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

#332

Post by Planktonne »

serf wrote: post #269
casey2 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as?

>Such as? it's crazy that the experiences are still so wildly varying that we get people that use this strategy as a 'valid' gotcha. AI works for the vast majority of nowhere-near-the-edge CS work -- you know, all the stuff the majority of people have to do every day. I don't touch any kind of SQL manually anymore. I don't touch iptables or UFW. I don't touch polkit, dbus, or any other human-hostile IPC anymore. I do…

None of that is concrete though; it's all alleged speed-ups with no discernable (though a lot of claimed) impact.

> This whole "Yeah, well let me see the proof!" ostrich-head-in-the-sand thing works about as long as it takes for everyone to make you eat their dust.

People will stop asking for the proof when the dust-eating commences.

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

#333

Post by davidcann »

barnabee wrote: post #310
davidcann wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that it’s changing very fast, which is why my thesis is that this tooling will be needed to help everyone on the team keep up.

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

#334

Post by wasting_time »

bobkb wrote: post #74

I wonder what happens to the “Gemini enterprise”. Will it do a Google plus or Google wave ?

Gemini seems more tailored towards information retrieval and product integration (including Android and even iOS via Apple's deal).

Google may reckon they can't (yet) reconcile their vision of Gemini with the raw coding performance of Claude and Codex.

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

#335

Post by mancerayder »

hdndjsbbs wrote: post #232
msy wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time. Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of thos…

My team has also adopted this - it's much easier to add another layer than to refine or simplify what exists. We have AI skills to help us debug microservices that call microservices that have circular dependencies. This was possible before but someone would maybe notice the insane spaghetti. Now it's just "we'll fix it with another layer of noodles".

Unfortunately I saw this pre-AI with microservices, where while empowering developers with their beloved microservices, we create intense complexity and deployment headaches. AI will fix the slop with an obscuring layer of complexity on top.

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

#336

Post by Jach »

qingcharles wrote: post #271
msy wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time. Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of thos…

My main use of vibecoding is creating dozens of internal tools that have sped up tasks, or made tasks possible that were previously not. These tools would have taken weeks of time to build manually and would have been hard to justify, rather than just struggling with manual processes every now and again. AI has been life-changing in creating these kinda janky tools with janky UI that do everything they're supposed to…

Are you able to describe any of those internal tools in more detail? How important are they on average? (For example, at a prior job I spent a bit of time creating a slackbot command "/wtf acronym" which would query our company's giant glossary of acronyms and return the definition. It wasn't very popular (read: not very useful/important) but it saved myself some time at least looking things up (saving more time than it took to create I'm sure). I'd expect modern LLMs to be able to recreate it within a few minutes as a one-shot task.)

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

#337

Post by Planktonne »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #231
slopinthebag wrote: post #212

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…

> I get that it's tedious to sit on tech forums listening to an endless stream of people insisting that suchandsuch technology is world-changing.

It's tedious because the insistence doesn't seem to be matched by much observable change.

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

#338

Post by twobitshifter »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #78

My opinion about this is that Google see it as a way to weaken OpenAI, and few other side benefits, including the option to acquire Anthropic. And it may very well be bad news for OpenAI.

OpenAI was created to counter the threat of Google controlling a possible AGI. What if we still end up in the same state in the end? Both Anthropic and OpenAI have abandoned any pretense of altruism at this point and find themselves overwhelmed bythe forces of capitalism.

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

#339

Post by WarmWash »

skybrian wrote: post #276

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…

IIRC Google already outright owns 15% of Anthropic.

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

#340

Post by CamperBob2 »

sumedh wrote: post #264
jeffbee wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urs used to talk (internally) about not publishing "industry-enabling papers" which is why most Google infrastructure papers were describing something that had already been turned off, or was already in the process of being replaced by the next system (GFS, Vitess, etc). The things that did get published were either considered not key advantages, that other companies simply cannot do, things that other companies woul…

So Google allowed publishing the Attention paper because they didn't understand its value.

They patented it. When the dumb money stops sloshing around, we'll start to see the fallout from that.
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