They just announced their new chip, and they are the ones created transformers yet investing this amount in a competitor? I don’t know what to make of it
hedge your bets, I know I would
Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
381–390 of 868 posts
Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry to hear that you have people abusing their new superpowers. I run a team and am spending my time/tokens on serious pain points.
Such as?
I'll throw this out as something where it has saved literally weeks of work: debugging pathological behaviour in third-party code. Prompt example: "Today, when I did U, V, and W. I ended up with X happening. I fixed it by doing Y. The second time I tried, Z happened instead (which was the expected behaviour). Can you work out a plausible explanation for why X happened the first time and why Y fixed it? Please keep track of the specific lines of code where the behaviour difference shows up."
This is in a real-time stateful system, not a system where I'd necessarily expect the exact same thing to happen every time. I just wanted to understand why it behaved differently because there wasn't any obvious reason, to me, why it would.
The explanation it came back with was pretty wild. It essentially boiled down to a module not being adequately initialized before it was used the first time and then it maintained its state from then on out. The narrative touched a lot of code, and the source references it provided did an excellent job of walking me through the narrative. I independently validated the explanation using some telemetry data that the LLM didn't have access to. It was correct. This would have taken me a very long time to work out by hand.
Edit: I have done this multiple times and have been blown away each time.
Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
#383Earlier 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…
I have one that serves a few functions- Tracks certificates and licenses (you can export certs in any of the majorly requested formats), a dashboard that tells you when licenses and certs are close to expiring, a user count, a notification system for alerts (otherwise it's a mostly buried Teams channel most people miss), a Downtime Tracker that doesn't require people to input easily calculatable fields, a way for teams to reset their service account password and manage permissions, as well as add, remove, switch which project is sponsoring which person, edit points of contact, verify project statuses, and a lot more. It even has some quick charts that pull from our Jira helpdesk queue- charts that people used to run once a week for a meeting are just live now in one place. It also has application statuses and links, and a lot more.
I'd been fighting to make this for two years and kept getting told no. I got claude to make a PoC in a day, then got management support to continue for a couple weeks. It's super beneficial, and targets so many of our pain points that really bog us down.
Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
#384Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
#385Context: 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.
GE Capital was not just vendor financing and its serious problems were not due to vendor financing. I don’t think it is a great example in any way.
Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but $200 a month is not a sustainable price.
Cable TV begs to differ. I grew up working poor and plenty of people around me dumped a lot of money into cable TV subscriptions, and $120 back in the late 90s is $240 now. Computer costs keep collapsing. Image and audio generation is turned out to be less computer intensive than text (lol). First company to launch 24/7 customized streaming AI slop wins!
I think the poster was saying giving away the models for $200 isn't sustainable for the provider, not that a user won't pay $200 for the latest and greatest models.
Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The correction will be brutal, worse than the Industrial Revolution. Has it occurred to you that there might not be a correction, and that the outcome would still be brutal, at least on par with the industrial revolution.
Do you mean as in there will be no happy ending / reset and no another century of prosperity?
I mean as in living through the industrial revolution would have been wild. So whether we have an AI revolution or an AI bubble it's bound to be a roller coaster.
And that's without accounting for the various wars (and resultant economic impacts) that are already in progress. A large part of what drove the meat grinder of WWI was (very approximately) the various actors repeatedly misjudging the overall situation and being overly enthusiastic to try out their shiny new weapons systems. If one or more superpowers decide to have a showdown the only thing that might minimize loss of life this time around is (ironically enough) the rise of autonomous weapons systems. Even in that case as we know from WWII the logical outcome is a decimated economy and manufacturing sector regardless of anything else that might happen.
Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
#388Context: 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 h…
Sure, since Google is both a supplier and a competitor, it’s both vendor finance and hedging. Also, it increases their investment in AI, in general.
Arguably, too much of this kind of hedging is anti-competitive. But that doesn’t seem to be much of a problem yet?
Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
#389great move by google
Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
#390Earlier 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…
The ones I can mention.. one that watches a specific web site until an offer that is listed expires and then clicks renew (happens about once a day, but there is no automated way in the system to do it and having the app do it saves it being unlisted for hours and saves someone logging in to do it). Several that download specific combinations of documents from several different portals, where the user would just suck it up previously and right-click on each one to save it (this has a bunch of heuristics because it really required a human before to determine which links to click and in what order, but Claude was able to determine a solid algo for it). Another one that opens PDFs and pulls the titles and dates from the first page of the documents, which again was just done manually before, but now sends the docs via Gemma4 free API on Google to extract the data (the docs are a mess of thousands of different layouts).