Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 868 posts

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

#461

Post by jedberg »

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.

The first to AGI, or a close approximation, is the winner. That’s what the investors in Anthropic and OpenAI are betting on.

I’d be willing the bet that the Venn diagram of investors in those two companies is nearly a circle.

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

#462

Post by strange_quark »

wjeje wrote: post #455
strange_quark wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CFOs or VPs absolutely benefit by hyping their company up to private investors by allowing tokenmaxxing to go on unchecked. Tender offers, acquisitions, and aquihires all exist. Or just good old fashioned resume padding by saying you "enabled AI transformation" or whatever helps you land a big payday at some other company.

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

#463

Post by eieie »

jameshart wrote: post #451
stasomatic wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Let’s take an extreme example.

Meta seemingly has a constant stream of product managers. If llm’s really augment the productivity of engineers, why isn’t meta launching lots more stuff? I mean there’s no harm in at least launching one new thing.

What are all those people doing with the so called productivity enhancements?

What I’m calling into question is how much does generating more code matter if the bottle neck is creativity/imagination for projects?

The only thing I’ve seen is a really crummy meta AI thing implemented within WhatsApp.

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

#464

Post by devmor »

jedberg wrote: post #461
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.

The first to AGI, or a close approximation, is the winner. That’s what the investors in Anthropic and OpenAI are betting on. I’d be willing the bet that the Venn diagram of investors in those two companies is nearly a circle.

Are these investors high? Or just insane?

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

#465

Post by devmor »

komali2 wrote: post #411
amluto wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

I don’t really write code with it at all, and that’s why I burn so many tokens.

I like writing code, I’m good at writing code. What I hate doing is dredging through logs, filtering out test scenarios and putting together disparate information from knowledge silos - so I have the AI doing that. It’s my research assistant.

Effectively I’m using it like an automated search engine that indexes anything I want and refines the results by using the statistical near neighbors of how other people explained their searches.

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

#466

Post by svnt »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #353
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 h…

$40B is not anywhere near half of Anthropic at this point. You do get the same access as nvidia, aws, and other investors, which has value.

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

#468

Post by svnt »

jedberg wrote: post #461
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.

The first to AGI, or a close approximation, is the winner. That’s what the investors in Anthropic and OpenAI are betting on. I’d be willing the bet that the Venn diagram of investors in those two companies is nearly a circle.

This depends on a fantasy cascade of functional consequences of AGI, whatever that acronym even means anymore.

It is just cargo cult financing at this point.

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

#469

Post by saintfire »

devmor wrote: post #464
jedberg wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first to AGI, or a close approximation, is the winner. That’s what the investors in Anthropic and OpenAI are betting on. I’d be willing the bet that the Venn diagram of investors in those two companies is nearly a circle.

Are these investors high? Or just insane?

Its just market euphoria.

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

#470

Post by lukan »

jedberg wrote: post #461
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.

The first to AGI, or a close approximation, is the winner. That’s what the investors in Anthropic and OpenAI are betting on. I’d be willing the bet that the Venn diagram of investors in those two companies is nearly a circle.

"The first to AGI, or a close approximation, is the winner. "

But why? Assuming there is a secret undiscovered algorithm to make AGI from a neuronal network ... then what happens if someone leaks it, or china steals it and releases it openly tomorrow?

Post reply on HN