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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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm starting a new trend: ask every person that is so certain about the negative outlook how big their short position is. so how big is your short position? please let us know.

That's a dishonest argument. For a short to work, you need to be right about the direction _and_ the timing. Being right too soon amounts to being wrong, and the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

> market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

This is more mantra - professional shorts exist and they make money. So either you know something (in which case you'd be mum about it and just placing your bets) or you know nothing.

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

#132
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'm starting a new trend: ask every person that is so certain about the negative outlook how big their short position is. so how big is your short position? please let us know.

> Often someone pronounces his propositions with such confident and inflexible defiance that he seems to have entirely laid aside all concern for error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes he reveals that he is persuaded enough for one ducat but not for ten. For he would happily bet one, but at ten he suddenly becomes aware of what he had not previously noticed, namely that it is quite possible that he has erred.

—Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

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

#133

I have sat with these numbers for a great deal of time, and I can’t find any evidence that Anthropic has any path to profitability outside of aggressively increasing the prices on their customers to the point that its services will become untenable for consumers and enterprise customers alike. This is where he misunderstands. Enterprise companies will absolutely pay 10x the cost for Claude. Meta and Apple are two lar…

Its too easy to switch providers when theres a billion dollars a year at stake. If youre an apple exec who sees that the company is spending 10k per employee per year why wouldnt you start an initiative that cuts that spend to 1k per employee per year? Then you can go to the board and say you personally saved them all that money and get a big promotion.

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

#134
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I definitely seen him cited as an authority by AI critics far more than anyone else. The bending truth to tell them what they want to hear (and the gratuitous swearing) really helps.

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

#135

Ed Zitron's style isn't for everybody, I understand that. But if these numbers, and the direction they're going in, are correct... to me this points to a significant AI bubble deflation coming soon. It just isn't sustainable, it seems.

There is nothing particularly concerning about the raw numbers, and I'd assume they are correct. (And they are also interesting, since we rarely get data at this granularity. Thanks to Zitron for publishing the leak with such completeness, despite the personal risk to his source.)

But Zitron's analysis is as incorrect or irrelevant as ever. The problem is just that as usual there is so much tripe that it's impossible to rebut it all.

The way I'd think about this leaked data is that it's giving us a reasonable upper bound on the fully loaded R&D compute cost for Claude Sonnet 4 - a product that will be making $7 billion in revenue with very good unit economics. Other than that, this just tells us that Anthropic, just like the other frontier AI lab, will be spending as much on training as they can.

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

#136

I have sat with these numbers for a great deal of time, and I can’t find any evidence that Anthropic has any path to profitability outside of aggressively increasing the prices on their customers to the point that its services will become untenable for consumers and enterprise customers alike. This is where he misunderstands. Enterprise companies will absolutely pay 10x the cost for Claude. Meta and Apple are two lar…

Its too easy to switch providers when theres a billion dollars a year at stake. If youre an apple exec who sees that the company is spending 10k per employee per year why wouldnt you start an initiative that cuts that spend to 1k per employee per year? Then you can go to the board and say you personally saved them all that money and get a big promotion.

Yes yes, why not just build our own cloud and our own workspace/365 provider, brilliant plan. Genius move to get a promo at any F500.

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

#137

I have sat with these numbers for a great deal of time, and I can’t find any evidence that Anthropic has any path to profitability outside of aggressively increasing the prices on their customers to the point that its services will become untenable for consumers and enterprise customers alike. This is where he misunderstands. Enterprise companies will absolutely pay 10x the cost for Claude. Meta and Apple are two lar…

I'm much more skeptical about this for two major reasons. Firstly, a huge amount of labour that can be accelerated by LLMs fall into the "bullshit jobs" category, where you can make someone faster at writing emails but the emails themselves don't really contribute much value. The majority of LLM use I see falls into this category. Many people can speed up parts of their job, but you can add as much efficiency as you…

You don't need to remove rolls if it makes everyone 10% better at their job. You think companies like paying for Office 365? That's barely a value add compared to free versions, but every company on the planet forks over money for that.

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its too easy to switch providers when theres a billion dollars a year at stake. If youre an apple exec who sees that the company is spending 10k per employee per year why wouldnt you start an initiative that cuts that spend to 1k per employee per year? Then you can go to the board and say you personally saved them all that money and get a big promotion.

Yes yes, why not just build our own cloud and our own workspace/365 provider, brilliant plan. Genius move to get a promo at any F500.

Doesnt matter if it is a shitshow. It saved a billion dollars a year

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

#139
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm starting a new trend: ask every person that is so certain about the negative outlook how big their short position is. so how big is your short position? please let us know.

> Often someone pronounces his propositions with such confident and inflexible defiance that he seems to have entirely laid aside all concern for error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes he reveals that he is persuaded enough for one ducat but not for ten. For he would happily bet one, but at ten he suddenly becomes aware of what he had not previously noticed, namely that it is quite possible that he has erred. —Kant,…

yes this is exactly my strategy in getting people to really reveal the strength of their beliefs :)

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes yes, why not just build our own cloud and our own workspace/365 provider, brilliant plan. Genius move to get a promo at any F500.

Doesnt matter if it is a shitshow. It saved a billion dollars a year

and yet Meta and Apple are both paying Anthropic hundreds of millions...
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