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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

#351

Post by layoric »

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".

Are you concerned this will just lead to coupling everywhere like microservices tend to do?

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

#353

Post by fc417fc802 »

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…

In another context I might see it as vendor financing. However given that Google and Anthropic are competitors in this segment and given that Google has previously invested in them I'd rather see this as a sort of bartered stock purchase presumably for the purpose of hedging against failure. If Anthropic wins the race and it turns out to be winner takes all and you happen to own half of Anthropic then you still win half of the immediate spoils even though your internal team lost. If you view losing the race as an existential threat then having all your eggs in the one basket is a terrible proposition.

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

#354

Post by ux266478 »

33MHz-i486 wrote: post #55

I think the subtext of the last few weeks is the Anthropic was becoming severely capacity constrained (or approaching that). They seem to have had to sign two somewhat adverse contracts with Amazon and Google in short succession. suddenly model quality is back up again.

They should probably look at moving away from general purpose hardware for their actual products, and reserve GP hardware for RnD. You don't need frontier nodes to run circles around GPGPUs, an ASIC made with 28nm is more than enough to embarrass an H100 (and much cheaper)

AI is in such desperate need to adopt software-hardware co-development practices, it's infuriating watching the industry drag its feet about it. We are wasting so much electricity and absolutely wrecking the "free" market just because these companies are incentivized to work at an unsustainable breakneck speed in getting shit to market.

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

#356

Post by nvader »

leptons wrote: post #312
serf wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

That's all well and good, but what happens when the price to run these AIs goes up 10x or even 100x. It's the same model as Uber, and I can't afford Uber most of the time anymore. It's become cost prohibitive just to take a short ride, but it used to cost like $7. It's all fun and games until someone has to pay the bill, and these companies are losing many billions of dollars with no end in sight for the losses. I do…

Why not try it yourself? Inference providers like BaseTen and AWS Bedrock have perfectly capable open source models as well as some licensed closed source models they host.

You can use "API-style" pricing on these providers which is more transparent to costs. It's very likely to end up more than 200 a month, but the question is, are you going to see more than that in value?

For me, the answer is yes.

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

#358

Post by shimman »

Jach wrote: post #336
qingcharles wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's almost always a CRUD app or dashboard that no one uses while being extremely overkill for their use case.

edit: LOL called it, a bunch of useless garbage that no one really cares about but used to justify corporate jobs programs.

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

#359

Post by ttul »

barnabee wrote: post #254
an0malous wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

This sounds like my office, but we're a bit more tilted toward Codex. I personally use Claude Cowork for drudge-admin work, GPT 5.5-Pro for several big research tasks daily, and the LLMs munge on each other's slop all day as I try my best to wrap my head around what has been produced and get it into our document repository -- all the while being conscious that the enormous volume of stuff I'm producing is a bit overwhelming for everyone.

We are definitely reaching the point where you need an LLM to deal with the onslaught of LLM-generated content, even if the humans are being judicious about editing everything. We're all just cranking on an inhumanly massive amount of output and it's frankly scary.

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

#360

Post by shimman »

nikcub wrote: post #305
lanthissa wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google Cloud also needs to show constant quarterly growth so what better way than simply buying it and fudging the numbers?
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