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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

#451

Post by jameshart »

stasomatic wrote: post #327
barnabee wrote: post #254

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…

I am hobbyist playing around. Recently dropped CC (which gave me a sense of awe 2 months ago), but they realized GPUs need CapEx and I want to screw around with pi.dev on a budget. Then on to GH Copilot but couldn't understand their cost structure, ran out of quota half month in, now on Codex. I don't really see any difference for little stuff. I also have Antigravity through a personal Gmail account with access to O…

There has always been a gap between the experience of solo/small shop developers, vs. developers who work in teams in a large corporate environment. But thanks to open source, we have for the past twenty years at least mostly all been using the same tools.

But right now, the difference in developer experience between a dev on a team at a business which has corporate copilot or Claude licenses and bosses encouraging them to maximize token usage, vs a solo dev experimenting once every few months with a consumer grade chat model is vast.

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

#452

Post by Daishiman »

bakugo wrote: post #233
Jagerbizzle wrote: post #162

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 guess that's one way to tout a technology as revolutionary without actually needing to provide any proof of it. Just say you're using it for "internal tooling" and "unannounced projects", that way nobody can look at them and notice they're indistinguishable from the slop that clogs up Show HN nowadays. It's better than the "here's my code, it a giant pile of spaghetti but only luddites care about code quality and m…

I'm using it to write frontend code literally 5 times faster. What would have been a shell script is now a GUI backed by an API layer that doesn't require looking up internal documentation to know that it exists.

I've been using it to write tools that drastically facilitate spinning up local k8s cluster with an entire suite of development services that used to take two days to set up in Docker.

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

#453

Post by am17an »

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…

Sounds exhausting. Are your revenue numbers up?

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

#454

Post by lukan »

ngruhn wrote: post #442
lukan wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can there be a "winner takes it all" situation with AI? OpenAI lead the game while they were best. Antrophic followed and got better. Now openAI is catching up again and also google with gemini(?) ... and the open weight models are 2 years behind. Any win here seems only temporary. Even if a new breakthrough to a strong AI happen somehow.

I guess if you build the first AI that can autonomously self improve, then nobody can catch up anymore.

But if the second AI that can self improve comes up?

Then it all remains a question of who has the most compute power, as self improve seems compute heavy with the current approach.

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

#455

Post by wjeje »

strange_quark wrote: post #445
wjeje wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That magic trick only works for publicly traded stocks. Most firms are not a google or a Microsoft - a firms cash balance can become a strategic weapon in the right environment. So wasting money is not a great idea. Lest we forget dividends. Moreover if you have a budget set re. Spend on tokens - you have rationing. Therefore the firm should be trying to get the most out of token spend. If you are wasting tokens on s…

No, it works for any VC-backed companies. Something like 60% of VC funding last year went to AI companies. VCs aren't going to give you a money unless you're building an agentic AI-native agent platform for agents.

No Employees of publicly traded firms benefit from short-term gains in the stock price, assuming the stock price jump holds throughout the period of grant/vesting.

People who work at VC-backed firms do not get to enjoy the same degree of liquidity, not even close. There can be some outliers but that is 0.1% of all.

Can't believe simple stuff like this has to be said.

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

#456

Post by hattmall »

ngruhn wrote: post #442
lukan wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can there be a "winner takes it all" situation with AI? OpenAI lead the game while they were best. Antrophic followed and got better. Now openAI is catching up again and also google with gemini(?) ... and the open weight models are 2 years behind. Any win here seems only temporary. Even if a new breakthrough to a strong AI happen somehow.

I guess if you build the first AI that can autonomously self improve, then nobody can catch up anymore.

That seems really paradoxical and I think it would just burn up compute. The AI really doesn't have any way to know it's getting better without humans telling. As soon as the AI begins to recursively improve based on its own definition of improvement model collapse seems unavoidable.

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

#457

Post by nly »

morserer wrote: post #434
dieortin wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s like firing someone because he uses vim instead of VSCode. Who cares about the tools someone uses if he still does his job well?

Because the job itself has now changed, and they haven't. Their output speed might have been eclipsed by that of the engineers who efficiently adopted the new tooling. Where I work, the power dynamics have shifted wildly. There are a number of senior engineers who refuse to touch the stuff, and as a result, they can barely keep up with their peers. Some of our juniors are now running laps around them. When a stranger…

They aren't teaching themselves anything though are they, they are basically getting AI to do their work for them.

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

#458

Post by eieie »

am17an wrote: post #453
barnabee wrote: post #254

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…

Sounds exhausting. Are your revenue numbers up?

Incremental cash flows is what we should be observing - have to net out the costs of llm associated with the activity.

Thats just one set of costs but a good starting point.

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

#459

Post by Spooky23 »

zymhan wrote: post #307
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…

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 a different creature, riding the line of fraud in some ways. They misapplied accounting rules and had to write down or capitalize over $20B for long term care insurance.

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

#460

Post by calebkaiser »

lukan wrote: post #431
fc417fc802 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can there be a "winner takes it all" situation with AI? OpenAI lead the game while they were best. Antrophic followed and got better. Now openAI is catching up again and also google with gemini(?) ... and the open weight models are 2 years behind. Any win here seems only temporary. Even if a new breakthrough to a strong AI happen somehow.

2 years? 2 years ago, gpt-4o was OpenAI's flagship model. The gap is real, but much smaller than 2 years.
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