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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

#411
post #295

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.

I am, oddly, able to get really quite a lot of mileage out of $20/mo of OpenAI plan, and I have never encountered a usage limit. I have gotten warnings that I was close a couple times. I wonder what I’m doing differently. I did spend quite a bit of time, mostly manually, improving development processes such that the agent could effectively check its work. This made a difference between the agent mostly not working an…

I wonder if you're like me? I tried out the MCPs and sub agents and rules and bells and whistles and always just came back to a plain Codex / Claude Code / Cursor Agent terminal window, where I say what I want, @ a few files, let it rip, check the diff, ask for some adjustments, then commit and start the process over after clearing context.

Haven't found a process that beats this yet and I burn very few tokens this way.

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

#412

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 h…

I look at this as Google needs a competitor. While Anthropic seems to be the flavor of the quarter OAI looks like such a dumpster fire right now that it's in Google's best interest to help keep Anthropic moving towards winning the #2 spot. I say the #2 spot because it doesn't matter how good this week's LLM is. Until someone else owns the infra and has an actually profitable business model they're all just lighting money and the world around us on fire.

I actually mentioned to a Google friend the other week that I wouldn't be surprised to see Google tipping the hat towards Anthropic soon so as to put a little more heat on OAI.

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

#413
Funny how the strongest challenge to Nvidia's near-monopoly(full monopoly?) is coming from Google, and not AMD.

Still rooting for AMD to catch up too, especially if they can continue improving their software stack. They seem to be moving in the right direction.. though, they could benefit from speeding up a bit more.

Google now has it's fingers in all the pies.. is successfully fully vertically integrated and now expanding horizontally.

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

#414

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…

I am an early Gemini daily driver type engineer, feels like Node, Firefox, React and Tailwind all over again, Claude Sonnet is 10x more expensive, quick thought experiment do you think 10 Gemini prompts is needed to match the quality of one Claude Code prompt? The harness around Gemini is an issue but I built my own (in Rust)

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's substantial observable change pointing towards a universal software development speedup in the neighborhood of 2x. Much of it is internal company metrics, simply because it's meaningless in most enterprise contexts to count how much software is released. Things you can count, like the number of phone apps published, show the same pattern: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/18/the-app-store-is-booming-a...

I'll grant that there's evidence of more low-level activity, but I'm not sure that equates to meaningful change particularly. "Released an app" is a neutral signal on its own, in much the same way that the Unity asset store led to an increase in game releases, but 'more asset flips' isn't really a major change to the gaming industry.

If software development speed has doubled, then we should be seeing not just an increase in apps being released, but an increase in product output from the big players too.

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

#417
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What makes you think I haven't tried it myself?

The "costs" are subsidized, it's a loss-leader.

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

#418
My $0.02: Competing against exp(t/2) + exp(t/2) is much much easier than exp(t/2+t/2)=exp(t).

(If anthropic didn't exist, ØpenAI would suck up all the capital and talent in the room. Anthropic's existence has helped divide capital+talent that'd otherwise be gobbled up by the single fastest growing player.)

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

#420

My $0.02: Competing against exp(t/2) + exp(t/2) is much much easier than exp(t/2+t/2)=exp(t). (If anthropic didn't exist, ØpenAI would suck up all the capital and talent in the room. Anthropic's existence has helped divide capital+talent that'd otherwise be gobbled up by the single fastest growing player.)

Is that like Lyft and Uber?
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