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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

#471

Post by svnt »

conradkay wrote: post #439
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.

Recursive self-improvement is one argument. Otherwise winner takes all seems much less likely than a OpenAI/Anthropic duopoly. For the best models, obviously other providers will have plenty of uses, but even looking at the revenue right now it's pretty concentrated at the top. So if I'm Google I'd want a decent chunk of at least one of them.

What is the argument for a duopoly when Kimi and Deepseek models are only months behind?

It’s a commodity in the making.

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

#472

Post by stingraycharles »

argee wrote: post #443
stingraycharles wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that Anthropic is in this position and not OpenAI. Where did OpenAI go wrong? Lack of focus and overambitious in some of their spending commitments?

Isn’t the only thing OpenAI did was: throwing a half baked model out for the public to go ham on? I was at Google when they did this and we already had working LLMs internally, they just weren’t good enough to release without PR backlash. I don’t see why such a pithy “advantage” should have led to anything other than a moment in the spotlight? The “we have no moat and neither does OpenAI” essay was published very sho…

> throwing a half baked model out for the public to go ham on?

I think that’s underselling their contribution, which I believe is mainly: it’s possible and this is what it looks like as a product. Until that time, nobody had figured out how to shape it as a product, and ChatGPT showed how to do that. Don’t forget that for a year or two they kept making headlines all the time with Dall.E and whatnot.

For me it seems like what happened after that is where the lack of focus started to hurt them: they realized that models themselves will be a commodity and have no moat, and that they needed to somehow build a network or something to keep pulling people back in. Sora was one such attempt, and it failed hard.

To me, enterprise / B2B seems like a much easier, obvious market to approach, but I don’t know a lot about B2C. But it seems like B2C was what OpenAI was going after.

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

#473

Post by fc417fc802 »

svnt wrote: post #471
conradkay wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recursive self-improvement is one argument. Otherwise winner takes all seems much less likely than a OpenAI/Anthropic duopoly. For the best models, obviously other providers will have plenty of uses, but even looking at the revenue right now it's pretty concentrated at the top. So if I'm Google I'd want a decent chunk of at least one of them.

What is the argument for a duopoly when Kimi and Deepseek models are only months behind? It’s a commodity in the making.

That's certainly how it looks right now but where's the guarantee? What happens if it turns out that deep learning on its own can't achieve AGI but someone figures out a proprietary algorithm that can? That sort of thing. Metaphorically we're a bunch of tribesmen speculating about the future potential outcomes of the space race (ie the impacts, limits, and timeline of ASI).

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

#474

Post by fc417fc802 »

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?

Neither. It's the most severe FOMO in history. The best case scenario is equivalent to attempting to pick future winners just prior to the industrial revolution really kicking off. Except this time around the technological timelines appear to be severely compressed and everyone is fully aware of what's at stake. And again, that's the best case scenario.

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

#475

Post by dannyw »

mrandish wrote: post #267
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.

> suddenly model quality is back up again. I agree about the core motivation behind these deals, however I'm skeptical as to how "suddenly" we'll see substantial improvements. Despite their size, I'd be surprised if Google or Amazon had uncommitted chunks of Anthropic-scale, top-tier AI compute sitting around waiting to be activated. They're already over-subscribed and waiting for new data centers (and power plants)…

When people are moving from other models (e.g. GPT, Gemini, etc) the compute that is previously powering that inference now becomes available. Of course, I'm certainly doubtful that Google would break commits and give OpenAI GPUs to Anthropic, but the underlying effect is present and probably sorted out somehow. It's not completely net new compute for the world.

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

#476

Post by fc417fc802 »

hattmall wrote: post #456
ngruhn wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If humans are able to judge, and if the AI is more capable than a human in every respect, then why can't the AI be the judge of its own performance? Humans judge their own output all the time.

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

#477

Post by hattmall »

serf wrote: post #269
casey2 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as?

>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…

People ask for examples because they want to know what other people are doing. Everything you mention here is VERY reasonable. It's exactly the kind of stuff no one is going to be surprised that you are getting good results with the current AI. But none of that is particularly groundbreaking.

I'm not trying to marginalize your or anyone else's usage of AI. The reason people are saying "such as" is to gauge where the value lies. The US GDP is around 30T. Right now there's is something like ~12T reasonably involved in the current AI economy. That's massive company valuations, data center and infrastructure build out a lot of it is underpinning and heavily influencing traditional sectors of the economy that have a real risk of being going down the wrong path.

So the question isn't what can AI do, it can do a lot, even very cheap models can handle most of what you have listed. The real question is what can the cutting edge state of the art models do so much better that is productively value added to justify such a massive economic presence.

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

#478

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dmix wrote: post #425
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does that mean? I really couldn't have been more obscure, could I? :P In 1932, "the first oil field in the Persian Gulf outside of Iran" was discovered in Bahrain [1]. (The same year Saudi Arabia announced unification [2].) In the end, Saudi Arabia had larger reserves and wound up geopolitically dominating its first-moving rival. In commodities, the game tends to be scale in part through land grabbing. Less wh…

Plus the whole thing of first mover advantage being a myth, especially in the tech industry

> Plus the whole thing of first mover advantage being a myth, especially in the tech industry

Source? That would be surprising!

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

#479

Post by conradkay »

svnt wrote: post #471
conradkay wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recursive self-improvement is one argument. Otherwise winner takes all seems much less likely than a OpenAI/Anthropic duopoly. For the best models, obviously other providers will have plenty of uses, but even looking at the revenue right now it's pretty concentrated at the top. So if I'm Google I'd want a decent chunk of at least one of them.

What is the argument for a duopoly when Kimi and Deepseek models are only months behind? It’s a commodity in the making.

They're months behind now and have very low market share, so as long as they stay months behind the duopoly/triopoly can hold.
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