Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200 • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#191

Post by tristanj » Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:50 AM UTC

jstummbillig wrote: post #156

tristanj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad read on the situation. xAI has too much compute and not enough customers using it. They have around half a million GPUs, some of which are stolen from Tesla, running at 11% utilization. xAI predicted more people would be using Grok, but Grok is not a SOTA model & users primarily want to use SOTA models. They have excess capacity and it makes sense to rent out GPUs to other customers while they improve their model…

Why are they selling compute instead of using it to build that SOTA model?

They tried and failed. xAi made a mistake building Colossus 1 and ended up with heterogenous cluster of H100/H200/GB200 GPUs. This is a nightmare to train huge models on because each card has different specs, features, and hardware requirements. During gradient synchronization, a heterogeneous cluster would bottleneck on the slowest GPU (H100) so the faster GPUs would end up idling. They also probably ran into unexpected compatibility issues, which are difficult to resolve.

It makes more sense to use this cluster for inference, since they can segment the cluster by GPU type and avoid GPU mixing. xAI doesn't have enough inference customers so it makes sense to monetize this to companies that need inference compute such as Anthropic or Cursor.

Apparently xAI will try building SOTA models on Colossus 2, which will be built on Blackwell GPUs only.

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#192

Post by olmo23 » Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:55 AM UTC

ReptileMan wrote: post #147

olmo23 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My go-to usecase for Gemini is summarizing Youtube tech-influencers.

How do you do it?

I basically open up a new conversation, copy paste a link to Theo's latest video and ask it to summarize his yapping :p

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#193

Post by spacebanana7 » Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:56 AM UTC

stefan_ wrote: post #182

spacebanana7 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX's data centre business is much more valuable than Grok, so this wouldn't make sense.

Valuable? If SpaceX is a majority "resell electricity" business, its valuation will be a tiny fraction of what they are trying to push.

You won’t see “resell electricity” on the IPO brochures. They’ll say something like multi billion dollar ARR hyperscaler business.

To the extent both are true, it’s non trivial to have large grid connections in the US these days or even gas pipeline connections hooked up to generators around a datacenter. Those assets are valuable.

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#194

Post by renticulous » Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:59 AM UTC

palmotea wrote: post #127

nelox wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xAI’s turbines produce meaningful local/regional pollution (especially NOx in a vulnerable area) but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.

> xAI’s turbines produce meaningful local/regional pollution (especially NOx in a vulnerable area) but represent a rounding error nationally and globally. If you shoot someone in the face, it will produce a meaningful increase in local/regional murder, but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.

No one should drive any kind of vehicle because they cause accidents.

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#195

Post by Topfi » Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:59 AM UTC

blizarre wrote: post #152

akimbostrawman wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opposed to all other models being the bastion of objectivity? Must be truly vindicating to have to hear other peoles opinions after decades in the silicon valley bubble.

As a non-US AI user I do not particularly like using a US model following the recent political events, but I specifically do not want to use a model made by an ex-member of the current administration.

It is always great fun using a model via API without search/web access and quoting a recent development, being told that it must be hamfisted satire, then providing access. The reasoning traces are a delight, Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 during the administrations war with Anthropic were prime grade A kobe beef.

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#196

Post by renticulous » Thu, May 21, 2026, 10:03 AM UTC

tristanj wrote: post #191

jstummbillig wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are they selling compute instead of using it to build that SOTA model?

They tried and failed. xAi made a mistake building Colossus 1 and ended up with heterogenous cluster of H100/H200/GB200 GPUs. This is a nightmare to train huge models on because each card has different specs, features, and hardware requirements. During gradient synchronization, a heterogeneous cluster would bottleneck on the slowest GPU (H100) so the faster GPUs would end up idling. They also probably ran into unexpe…

How can something so obvious be overlooked by team building the data centre? Can't the sharding be uneven so that weaker GPUs still finish fast by taking on a smaller workload?

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#197

Post by nroets » Thu, May 21, 2026, 10:04 AM UTC

stevefan1999 wrote: post #184

Aren't Anthropic afraid of Elon siphoning the model weights out from the network buses?

Theft of trade secrets. And so many people will have to be involved that evidence of the crime is bound to leak out.

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#198

Post by renticulous » Thu, May 21, 2026, 10:05 AM UTC

olmo23 wrote: post #192

ReptileMan wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do it?

I basically open up a new conversation, copy paste a link to Theo's latest video and ask it to summarize his yapping :p

I copy paste the transcript because sometimes youtube has blocked AIs from scrapping

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#199

Post by Nition » Thu, May 21, 2026, 10:10 AM UTC

ChicknNuggt wrote: post #124

Nition wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A superintelligent AI will be safe though, because it learnt its morality from us.

Doesnt AI learning its morality from humans makes it unsafe, I mean just look at some cases, humans dont exactly always have good morals

Yeah, look at the parent comment I was sarcastically responding to.

Of course top of all that, even if human morals were perfect, it's still a dubious claim.

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#200

Post by ACCount37 » Thu, May 21, 2026, 10:24 AM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #188

stevefan1999 wrote: post #184

Aren't Anthropic afraid of Elon siphoning the model weights out from the network buses?

Pretty sure models are encrypted all the way.

Can't run inference on encrypted weights and get any kind of performance out of it.