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How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

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Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#111

Post by ojosilva »

infecto wrote: post #43
dzonga wrote: post #29

One day we will westerners will learn why the Chinese are releasing models that are optimized for cost of training n yet good enough to run locally or cheaply. when the music stops, suddenly a lot of people won't just sit on the ground but plunge into the depths of hell.

I keep hearing this but I don’t know of many folks utilizing Chinese models, even those hosted in an agreeable territory.

Yeah, I'm one of them, using Qwen 3 coder on Cerebras as coding agent through CC. What I keep hearing is (very ballpark anecdata)...

50% of people into coding agents are quite concerned about that last mile in difference with frontier models that they "can't afford to lose" - my experience tells me otherwise, the difference is negligible once you have a good setup going and knows how to tune your model + agent.

The other 50% don't give a damn, they just landed, or got locked, into some deal for a coding agent and are happy with what they got, so why change? These deals arrived from the big model providers and resellers first, so Chinese arrived late and with too little to the party.

Running Chinese models (for coding) requires many things that you need to figure-out yourself. Are you running the model on your hw or through a provider? Are you paying by token or on a plan? Does the model pair well with you agent CLI/IDE of choice? (Zed, Cline, Opencode, etc) Does it even work with your favorite tool? (tool calling is very wobbly) Is it fast (tps)? Is it reliable? How do you do "ultrathink" with a secondary model? How do you do "large context"? Does it include a cache or are you going to eat through the plan in 1hr/day? What context size are you getting? Does it include vision and web search or do you have to get another provider/mcp for that? And, yeah, is it in a territory where you can send your client's code to? A lot to grok.

Cerebras Coder Max is really cool if you want to hack your way through this, but they couldn't care less about your experience: no cache, no tool endpoint fine-tuning, no plans or roadmap on updating models, on increasing context windows, adding vision, or anything really. They just deleted some of the tools they were recommending out of the website (ie Cursor) as they got reports of things that stopped working.

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#112

Post by watwut »

literatepeople wrote: post #92
dcre wrote: post #45

Numbers are always interesting, assuming they're real, but I just want to comment on the Cursor thing: Zitron has been insisting for 6 months that Anthropic screwed Cursor somehow by raising prices on them but the claim has always been gibberish. It's not that it's false, it's that it's impossible to figure out what Zitron claims happened. He cannot describe (here or in https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-and-opena…

Ed has constantly done this, and it's a shame because it has taken the air out of the room for real AI criticism. Most of Ed's criticism comes from a place of giving a narrative to people who are wishing for a magic bullet that makes ChatGPT vanish tomorrow rather than actually pressuring companies about the harms this technology can cause. This in part is why his writing so often focuses on perceived financial issue…

Zitron is too much of a small player to "suck the air off other criticism of ai".

Claiming that a single journalist blog has power to stop others from criticiaing ai for different reasons ia kind of absurd.

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#114

Post by steveklabnik »

x0x0 wrote: post #109
steveklabnik wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so actual dollars out rather than some imaginary cost per token is the metric that matters. Even if we take this as true, the point is that this is different than "the cost of inference isn't going down." It is going down, it's just that people want more performance, and are willing to pay for it. Spend going up is not the same as cost going up. I don't disagree that there are a wide variety of things to talk about…

Playing word games labeling inference narrowly as the cost per token rather than the per-X $ going to your llm api provider per customer/user/use/whatever is kinda silly? The cost of inference -- ie $ that go to your llm api provider -- has increased and certainly appears to continue to increase. see also https://ethanding.substack.com/p/ai-subscriptions-get-short-...

> The cost of inference -- ie $ that go to your llm api provider

This is the crux of it: when talking about "the cost of inference" for the purposes of the unit economics of the business, what's being discussed is not what they charge you. It's about their COGs.

That's not word games. It's about being clear about what's being talked about.

Talking about increased prices is something that could be talked about! But it's a different thing. For example, what you're talking about here is total spend, not about individual pricing going up or down. That's also a third thing!

You can't come to agreement unless you agree on what's being discussed.

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#115

Post by watwut »

swyx wrote: post #105
isoprophlex wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you glossing over the whole "aws bill isnt structural infra spend" thing?! they spend 104% of revenue on ONE cloud provider and costs scale linearly with revenue growth. assume zitron didn't pull these numbers out of his ass. educate me how this isnt selling $20 bills for $5. you're a smart dude; i myself aint seeing the "sustainable business practices" here

the entire point is that stressing sustainable business practices here at this point in a startup's life is extremely short sighted and is the kind of shitty analysis that gives HN a bad rep. pull up Uber's financials leading up to IPO. unsustainable and everyone knew it. they work it out after because they burned money and eventually achieved a sustainable moat. this is why venture exists. HN doesnt like venture whi…

Afaik Uber numbers were significantly smaller.

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#116

Post by dcre »

x0x0 wrote: post #95
steveklabnik wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is addressed in the post.

Right, but if I understand you, the counterargument is dumb since the context in which we are discussing is business viability (vcs investing in businesses where the unit economics require inference cost decreases), so actual dollars out rather than some imaginary cost per token is the metric that matters. Inference is getting so much cheaper that cursor and zed have had to raise prices.

Why do the unit economics require a decrease in inference spend per user? This is discussed at the end of the post. I think this is based on the very strange assumption that these businesses must charge $20 a month no matter how much inference their customers want to use. This is precisely what the move to usage-based pricing was about. End users want to use more inference because they like it so much, and are knocking down these companies’ doors demanding to be allowed to pay them more money to get more inference.

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#117

Post by rdtsc »

jayd16 wrote: post #40
rdtsc wrote: post #9

> through September, Anthropic has spent more than 100% of its estimated revenue (based on reporting in the last year) on Amazon Web Services, spending $2.66 billion on compute on an estimated $2.55 billion in revenue. Well I don't have to scratch my head any longer and wonder why Amazon hasn't jumped on the AI bandwagon with their own Gemini or whatever. They are sitting pretty and selling shovels and pickaxes to th…

They actually do have Alexa.

They do and they've had her for a while, but from what I understand that's "so last Tuesday" in the AI race. It was ok in the race with "Ok Google" and "Siri" but not competing with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini.

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#118

Post by dist-epoch »

tadfisher wrote: post #104
dist-epoch wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FT Alphaville dissed bitcoin and Tesla for 10 years. Not the greatest track record.

As the saying goes, "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." I hope the next fad is to invest in boring companies that employ people and give steady returns, and they can stop replacing all the stores in my city with Dollar Trees.

Ok, I have the perfect company for the next fad - https://www.boringcompany.com

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#119

Post by tadfisher »

dist-epoch wrote: post #118
tadfisher wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the saying goes, "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." I hope the next fad is to invest in boring companies that employ people and give steady returns, and they can stop replacing all the stores in my city with Dollar Trees.

Ok, I have the perfect company for the next fad - https://www.boringcompany.com

Ah, yes, the company famous for the next innovation in public transport: humans slowly driving Teslas through an expensive tunnel.

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#120

Post by OptionOfT »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #93
OptionOfT wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you talk about ARR if you only look at 1 year?

It's useful for financial planning. Less useful for overall financial reporting given how volatile it is.

I should've been more clear. How can you talk about ARR if you only have 1 year?

How do you know it's recurring? What data do you have (historic) that makes you believe the revenue will happen again?

Is this based on signed contracts etc so you have some guarantees?

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