Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 308 posts

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#241

Post by coredog64 »

throwup238 wrote: post #101
dweekly wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pricing models that are published on AWS' website almost certainly have almost nothing to do with the pricing models that are discussed behind closed doors for a $100 billion commitment.

Of course not, but unless they’re getting the sweet heart deal of a lifetime from Amazon of all places, it’s still a hogwash. We’re talking about enough capital to build their own fab and a dozen datacenters*. This deal isn’t going to be buying existing capacity because that’s already stretched, it will be paying for new buildouts. Afterwards Amazon will be milking the machines these commitments buy for nearly a deca…

You can get a significant AWS discount with an annual spend starting around $1M/year.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#242

Post by lelanthran »

stavros wrote: post #44
alex_duf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "fully caught up" mean in the context of an ever evolving technology? I think I'm in support of open weight models (though there are safety implications), but these things aren't cheap to train and run. This fact alone gives no incentive for leading labs to release cutting edge open weight models. Why spend the money then give the product for free? Now if "fully caught up" means today's level of intelligenc…

Yeah I don't understand it, it's a marathon with three companies perpetually a minute ahead, and people keep saying "I expect the stragglers to catch up". The only thing I can see them meaning is what you said, "in a minute the stragglers will be where the leaders were a minute ago", which, yeah, sure.

That's fine. I can afford to wait a minute if it means I pay $10/m instead of $5k/m.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#243

Post by hirako2000 »

sethops1 wrote: post #235
hirako2000 wrote: post #102

I thought vendor financing was illegal.

Sadly it isn't, and even if it was, it's not like the current administration is enforcing commerce or securities law.

I assumed independent bodies enforced justice. But even from outside the U.S I can sense things are getting blurry.

My mistake for believing it was law, it must have been some compliance corporate training mentioning it wasn't tolerated.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#245

Post by oceansky »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #203
postalrat wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a decade the cost of compute will be a tiny fraction of what it costs now. Specialized hardware will exist that will be cheap and efficient.

The difference in the cost of compute between 2026 and 2036 won’t be nearly as large as the difference in the cost of compute between 2016 and 2026. Even at 2016 the slowdown in improvements was noticeable. We might see a one time bump in inference when we move off GPUs onto more limited and efficient dedicated hardware, but the sustained fast pace of improvements are far behind us.

Compute power improvement between 2016 and 2026 wasn't that impressive either. Moore's law is essentially dying.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#246

Post by otherme123 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #182
Argonaut998 wrote: post #131

Does anyone feel that the jig is almost up? Surely the returns aren’t anywhere close to what investors expect with the sheer amount of cash at this point in time. Are Anthropic and OpenAI rushing to IPO for immediate cash so they can delay the inevitable? Surely this cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay John to pay Tim must end. We are only just now getting a taste of the “true cost” of these tokens. Then there…

> Surely this cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay John to pay Tim must end. I think a LOT of companies really never needed to be on the public market, and its a darn shame that so many go on the stock market, we have this obnoxious culture where you have to fire tons of people if you have a bad quarter just to show you're stopping the bleeding. Companies literally fire and hire x number of people every quarter…

There is nothing that stops you from buying stock and holding it forever, Buffett does this.

There are very stable companies in the stock market, like Cocacola. But they are not glamurous and don't give headlines.

And there are enormous fish in the private market, e.g. Cargill.

Stock markets are great if you have a company that needs money to expand quickly, and don't mind to share ownership. Stay away from IPO-jackpot stuff, and it shouldn't be that awful.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#247

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #224
nielsole wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about SEC rules but the anthropic CEO said they have a 50%+ margin on API pricing.

I'm going to be a dickhead for a moment here, apologies, there's no way to say this that isn't rude to you. This is still the same hearsay "In an interview, somewhere." A bit of google searching later can get us a specific interview. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dario-amodei-2 > Let’s say half of your compute is for training and half of your compute is for inference. The inference has some gross margin that’s more than…

Self reply as I could've explained the SEC thing better:

Anti-fraud regulators like the SEC give an inherent trustworthiness and credibility to CEOs and other market participants. You can trust that they're not lying to you, because they would be sent to jail if they were.

Another example are general anti-fraud regulations; Consider how one would trust North American or European steel suppliers more than Chinese steel suppliers.

It's not that the Chinese are "evil lying people" and Americans are "saints who never lie", it's that you can trust American, Canadian, and European courts to hold the liars accountable by regulations even if you're not in any of those regions. But the Chinese liars won't be held accountable by regulations.

Thus also the opposite, if someone opts out of this credibility granted to them by anti-fraud regulations, their words may not be quite so truthful.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#248

Post by torginus »

IMTDb wrote: post #106
shubhamjain wrote: post #11

If you think you need to spend $100B, does using a third-party cloud provider still make sense? It doesn’t matter what sweet deal Amazon is pitching—in that scenario, you’d want to own your stack. Especially in a hyper-competitive field like this, where margins are going to matter a lot soon. It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner…

The problem is that at that scale, the alternative is building your own data centers. You'd probably want at least 2 in the US, 2 in Europe, 2 in Asia, maybe 1 in Africa and 1 in LATAM. So 8-10, and you need at least half of them ready "on time." What does "on time" mean? You'll need to negotiate with local authorities, some friendly, some not. Data centers aren't exactly popular neighbors these days. Then negotiate…

Btw where does this obsession with datacenters come from? If you can tolerate ~150ms ping (which chatbots certainly can, as their internal processing can take much longer), you can serve US and Europe from a single US location, and the whole planet if you can tolerate ~300ms (Asian websites are usually very slow to load for me, I think it has to do with the way the internet is set up, not any physical limitations, but mostly commercial ones, as Western companies rarely have good market penetration in Asia)

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#249

Post by grogers »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #204
IMTDb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that at that scale, the alternative is building your own data centers. You'd probably want at least 2 in the US, 2 in Europe, 2 in Asia, maybe 1 in Africa and 1 in LATAM. So 8-10, and you need at least half of them ready "on time." What does "on time" mean? You'll need to negotiate with local authorities, some friendly, some not. Data centers aren't exactly popular neighbors these days. Then negotiate…

Maybe for right now, but even in the very near future it seems like data center expertise would absolutely be a core competency of any AI leaders. Heck, look at Facebook. Granted, they got started slightly before AWS, but not by much. Owning all of their own data centers is a huge competitive advantage for them, and unlike most of the other hyperscalers they don't sell compute to other companies (AFAIK). Again, the c…

It's interesting that you mention Facebook. They have a ton of their own data centers and yet they are now also spending tens of billions on cloud. It's not that easy to build hundreds of data centers on short notice.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#250

Post by laughing_man »

kgwgk wrote: post #208
giancarlostoro wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely this cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay John to pay Tim must end. I think a LOT of companies really never needed to be on the public market, and its a darn shame that so many go on the stock market, we have this obnoxious culture where you have to fire tons of people if you have a bad quarter just to show you're stopping the bleeding. Companies literally fire and hire x number of people every quarter…

> I wish there were an alternative to the stock market where you invest for the long haul, and you cannot take your money out in x number of years. That exists already! People often complain as well when a company ends its golden years because of some economic hurdle and ends up being acquired by a bigger fish who is _not_ on the stock market.

When that happens the current shareholders usually make out very well.
Post reply on HN