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Anthropic's Safety Superpower

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Re: Anthropic's Safety Superpower

#171

Post by vineyardmike »

dominotw wrote: post #169
HDThoreaun wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ai labs would be very dumb to get rid of subscriptions. First, I don’t even think the subscriptions are losing money, I suspect they’re around break even, maybe small loses. More importantly, the subscriptions are how they lock in users and convince companies to pay api rates. Without user loyalty that they cultivate with subscriptions businesses will just use the cheapest model on open router or maybe local mode…

> I don’t even think the subscriptions are losing money, I suspect they’re around break even, maybe small loses whats the basis for this thought

For Claude specifically, (1) enterprises pay API rates on top of subscriptions, so subscriptions profitability questions are only relevant for smaller companies and indie devs. Many of whom probably have sporadic or low usage which helps balance some heavy users.

Again, for Claude, (2) it’s rumored that their API rates have around a 90% profit margin. It’s also claimed that the subscription limits get you around 10x tokens per monthly dollar vs buying them with API rates.

Edit: to drive it home. If a tokens true cost to anthropic is 1/10 of what they sell it for at API rates, and a subscription gets you tokens at 1/10 the price, that’s cost-neutral for the business if every subscription uses every token. They’re selling tokens at cost, not at a loss. Many subscription users won’t use their full allotment. That means serving some users doesn’t cost the business as much - which might push the subscription business from cost neutral to profitable.

Re: Anthropic's Safety Superpower

#172

Post by dominotw »

vineyardmike wrote: post #171
dominotw wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t even think the subscriptions are losing money, I suspect they’re around break even, maybe small loses whats the basis for this thought

For Claude specifically, (1) enterprises pay API rates on top of subscriptions, so subscriptions profitability questions are only relevant for smaller companies and indie devs. Many of whom probably have sporadic or low usage which helps balance some heavy users. Again, for Claude, (2) it’s rumored that their API rates have around a 90% profit margin. It’s also claimed that the subscription limits get you around 10x…

not sure how that concludes that subscriptions are not losing money.

Re: Anthropic's Safety Superpower

#173

Post by HDThoreaun »

dominotw wrote: post #169
HDThoreaun wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ai labs would be very dumb to get rid of subscriptions. First, I don’t even think the subscriptions are losing money, I suspect they’re around break even, maybe small loses. More importantly, the subscriptions are how they lock in users and convince companies to pay api rates. Without user loyalty that they cultivate with subscriptions businesses will just use the cheapest model on open router or maybe local mode…

> I don’t even think the subscriptions are losing money, I suspect they’re around break even, maybe small loses whats the basis for this thought

I think theyre charging at least 3x marginal cost for the api and I think that the average subscription uses around half its token allotment. So subscription needs to give 6x as many tokens as the api would cost for it to break even for the lab and that's around where they tend to sit

Re: Anthropic's Safety Superpower

#174

Post by ACCount37 »

overfeed wrote: post #168
ACCount37 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good enough? That's a lie people tell each other because they lack imagination. "It's good enough" was said about GPT-4, o1, o3, Opus 4 and more. Guess what happened? Newer models released, people updated their expectations of what LLMs can do, usage got more aggressive, and somehow, GPT-4 went from "good enough" to "obsolete trash". If you have no imagination, then at least substitute your pattern recognition for it…

I wish you had addressed at least one of arguments in good faith before jumping to insults and countering a strawman argument I didn't make - I never claimed their will be no use for more capable models. You do your AI-maximalism, and I'll stick to making trade-offs based on the needs of each piece of work.

I.e. spending your time and effort on making choices that don't matter.

I'll do more "per-task model selection" when AIs themselves get good at it.

Re: Anthropic's Safety Superpower

#175

Post by ang_cire »

intended wrote: post #107
ang_cire wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media is old hat now. As someone on the "safety side of tech", social media is being exploited to increase surveillance and government control precisely because its actual social influence is heavily on the wane, and capital is happy to sacrifice what's left to increase the profits of the expanding public/private tech surveillance industry (with "protect the children" controls on social media like age verifica…

Cyber security has the maturity that trust and safety hopes to achieve at some point. Social media was being exploited from inception. Palantir had sales documents for sock puppet management software back in the PHP era. I don’t disagree that Government is interested in tech, but I will push back on the dismissal of child safety that is inherent in your comment, intended or not. For all that some people in the firm m…

The political will is already captured and redirected.

There are numerous bills to limit AI access for consumers, to combat deepfakes hurting children. There are no bills introduced or passed to prevent AI being used to target dronestrikes that kill children abroad, or surveil children domestically.

What the public wants doesn't actually matter right now, only what the government will allow to let pass, which in this case is additional internet surveillance.

Under a future, better government this may change, but (sadly) nothing is going to sink tech's dominance right now.

The anger and unhappiness against tech is good, and hopefully someday they'll burn down all the data centers and I'll never have to hear the words Cloud Computing again, but (to paraphrase a famous Eve Online interaction) it's not going to be today, and it's not going to be us.

Re: Anthropic's Safety Superpower

#176

Post by xboxnolifes »

embedding-shape wrote: post #53
botw44 wrote: post #9

The whole thesis falls apart though. You can't be on your way to "power over everything" and get distilled into free Chinese models within months. Pick one. The bottleneck is compute and data, not the model. That's why they could only gate it for a bit. The ITAR thing proves it: no nationality controls in place, so the only option was killing the whole thing. Not exactly what an all-powerful gatekeeper does.

> The whole thesis falls apart though. You can't be on your way to "power over everything" and get distilled into free Chinese models within months. Pick one. But is that last part actually true though? Sure, there might be 600B+ models available for download and local inference if you have the hardware, but does the users who use Anthropic switch over to those even if they're available even as hosted models? Seems l…

People dont pivot on a dime. If there stopped being major model improvements for a few years and equivalent free models have been out during the same period, we will see people slowly move over to competitors.

Re: Anthropic's Safety Superpower

#178

Post by mft_ »

0x3f wrote: post #133
mft_ wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where would they go? 1) It’s safe to assume the US would do its best to prevent it, and even if Anthropic was successful in exfiltrating their data, code, models, and people, I’d imagine the US would immediately block all US companies from working with them. So they’d be blocked from their own US-based compute, plus Google, Amazon, Microsoft, xAI, Meta, etc. 2) Where would they go? China maybe, but as far as we can t…

> the EU is hardly buzzing with AI innovation Depends what you mean. The academic work seems largely... fine? Plenty of good work came out of Europe or European researchers. It seems the problem is more "trying to build a trillion-dollar company of any kind". It's an interesting question: does the EU seek only to regulate successful modern American companies to death, or home grown ones too? Probably not a gamble wor…

Something commercial? Mistral is the only significant European LLM I'm aware of, and it's not frontier level. Then a dearth of EU-owned hyperscalers, AI-focussed data centers, GPU/CPU/memory manufacturers, even cheap energy...?

Re: Anthropic's Safety Superpower

#179

Post by epolanski »

dominotw wrote: post #169
HDThoreaun wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ai labs would be very dumb to get rid of subscriptions. First, I don’t even think the subscriptions are losing money, I suspect they’re around break even, maybe small loses. More importantly, the subscriptions are how they lock in users and convince companies to pay api rates. Without user loyalty that they cultivate with subscriptions businesses will just use the cheapest model on open router or maybe local mode…

> I don’t even think the subscriptions are losing money, I suspect they’re around break even, maybe small loses whats the basis for this thought

What's the basis for the opposite?

Re: Anthropic's Safety Superpower

#180

Post by lowbloodsugar »

>The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see.

- Satya Nadella

Microsoft when they're losing.

>Every company is going to have to build what I think of as human capital and token capital. Human capital comprises the knowledge, judgment, relationships, ingenuity, and pattern recognition of its people, while token capital is the firm’s AI capability it builds and owns. Importantly, human capital does not become less valuable as token capital grows.

- Satya Nadella

Either incompetent or lying.

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