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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

#511

Post by everly »

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.

$40 billion is about a quarter’s worth of profits for Google. They make that much every 3 months, what’s the risk

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

#512

Post by jameshart »

elliotec wrote: post #495
jameshart wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is the vast difference? Who's doing more of what, or whatever you're implying? And how do you quantify this?

The difference is (if you'll forgive me recruiting a couple of straw men for the purpose of illustrating the spectrum we are talking about here):

Hobbyist solo dev, counting tokens, hitting quotas, trying things on little projects, giving up and not seeing what the fuss is about.

vs

Corporate developer, increasingly held accountable by their boss for hitting metrics for token usage; being handed every new model as soon as it comes out; working with the tools every day on code changes that impact other developers on other teams all of whom have access to those same tools.

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

#513

Post by ipaddr »

_puk wrote: post #142
ipaddr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His neighbour isn't spending $60,000 on all of those together

Count the Fords on the street. Now count the Amazon deliveries in a year on said same street. And next year, and the year after, and.. however long one keeps a Ford these days.. It's quite a scary thought exercise.

The average person spends 2,800 with prime or 1100 without. 75% of Amazon shoppers have prime so about $2500 a year. Amazon collects 35% on each sale where they ship and package for you.

Amazon makes 800 dollars off of each person in revenue.

Ford makes $303 per person in revenue.

AWS makes the same.

AI spend for all platforms $450 per person

Their costs to produce aren't equal.

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

#514

Post by Aeolun »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #387
stasomatic wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> minimize loss of life this time around is (ironically enough) the rise of autonomous weapons systems

I think that just means the relative civilian loss of life will increase once again.

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

#515

Post by dagss »

sethops1 wrote: post #301
blueblisters wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same until I’m reminded I’m paying Anthropic $100 every month for something that’s indispensable to me now and would probably pay a lot more. Very inelastic demand as long as competition is low at the frontier.

I pay TMobile $100 a month but they aren't worth a trillion dollars.

Anthropic's market is global and the US is 4.5% of the worlds population. Telcos are regional.

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

#517

Post by modriano »

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.

So, what will AGI be able to do that will make that bet pay off? Human-like intelligence is already very common. Vastly better than human intelligence seems like it would be worth the expense, but I don't know where we'd get suitable training data.

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

#518

Post by buntp »

consumer451 wrote: post #104

It is very difficult for me to see any amount of money being thrown at Anthropic as a bad idea. The amount of new revenue that I am personally able to create for my clients, using Claude models for dev, and Claude models inside the insanely agile products delivered, is astounding. If I was not currently experiencing this myself, and someone told me that this was possible, I would be calling them names.

Curious, what do you do btw?

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

#519

Post by TeMPOraL »

camdenreslink wrote: post #485
am17an wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds exhausting. Are your revenue numbers up?

I am also curious about the correlation between more PRs getting merged faster and actual business outcomes. My impression has always been it's more important the build the correct thing (what the customer needs/wants) rather than more stuff faster.

> My impression has always been it's more important the build the correct thing (what the customer needs/wants) rather than more stuff faster.

The process of learning what the customer needs/wants is a heavily iterative one, often involving throwing prototypes at them or betting at a solution, then course-correcting based on their reaction. Similarly, the process of building the correct thing is almost always an iterative approximation - correctness is something you discover and arrive at after research and prototypes and trying and getting it wrong.

All of that benefits from any of its steps being done faster - but it's up to the org/team whether they translate this speedup to quality or velocity. For example, if AI lets you knock out prototypes and hypothesis-testing scripts much faster, you can choose whether to finish earlier (and start work on next thing sooner), or do more thorough research, test more hypothesis, and finish as normally, but with better result.

(Well, at least theoretically. If you're under competitive pressure, the usual market dynamics will take the choice away, but that's another topic.)

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

#520

Post by dragonwriter »

zarzavat wrote: post #500
fc417fc802 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Imagine such an AI exists. What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you? If you gatekeep, you will not make back the money you invested. If you don't gatekeep, your competitors will use your model to build competing models. I guess you can sell it to the Department of War.

> What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you?

Its awesome and world dominating, you just don’t sell access to that AI, you instead directly, by yourself, dominate any field that better AI provides a competitive advantage in as soon as you can afford to invest the capital to otherwise operate in that field, and you start with the fields where the lowest investment outside of your unmatchable AI provides the highest returns and, and plow the growing proceeds into investing in successive fields.

Obviously, it is even more awesome if you are a gigantic company with enormous cash to to throw around to start with when you develop the AI in question, since that lets you get the expanding domination operation going much quicker.

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