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

281–290 of 308 posts

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

#281

Post by fineIllregister »

tptacek wrote: post #258
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…

People had literally the same arguments about Amazon, a company Matt Yglesias once described as "a charity run on behalf of the American consumer by the finance industry".

This is an interesting comparison. So what's the AWS equivalent that can actually provide returns on the titanic investments going into AI?

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

#282

Post by twoodfin »

jcgrillo wrote: post #271
twoodfin wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic business math is (to start) software companies realizing that spending $10k, $20k, $50k (more ?) per year, per developer for current models at current token rates might not be particularly insane, given the value return. Models are likely going to keep getting better, and as costs go down, demand is likely to rise faster .

> as costs go down Huh? Why would that happen? Indications are that costs will likely go up , especially if currently vendors are selling tokens at a loss.

The main operational expense of a million LLM tokens is pennies of electricity.

Even if you generously depreciate the GPU and other hardware, it’s hard to believe inference at scale in April 2026 isn’t highly profitable.

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

#283

Post by stackskipton »

postflopclarity wrote: post #257
stackskipton wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEC rules means CEO cannot lie or deliberately hide the cost of something. 50%+ Margin statements have basically been "We are making 50% on delivering it." This does not include ANY of the costs of getting to this point, training, scraping, datacenters, people and so forth. They are basically saying "Oh yea, the cost of GAS in the car is only X so charging Y per mile is great margin" while ignoring maintenance, cost…

but comparing your margin of charging to drive a mile to the price of gas makes a lot of sense? that is the only variable cost in the equation. training / scraping / people are all pretty much fixed costs.

Maybe, maybe not. None of us know since these companies are not public, we are not getting clear accounting.

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

#284

Post by danny_codes »

vorticalbox wrote: post #45
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…

It’s never free your shifting costs from paying a company for their api use vs the power costs of running it locally.

Sure, but it’ll be orders of magnitude cheaper in a few years. The consumer industry is already moving in this direction, with Apple leading the pack

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

#285

Post by pseudohadamard »

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…

It's not a "Hail Mary to get to AGI ASAP", it's a means of extending the money-go-round ride a bit longer. We'll make up some numbers and promise to donate those numbers to you if in return you make up some numbers and promise to donate those numbers to us. Banks, are you listening? Numbers! Big ones! Extend us more credit!

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

#286

Post by jamesfinlayson »

oceansky wrote: post #245
bitmasher9 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I went shopping for a new computer a couple of years ago (to replace a 7 year old computer) and... the specs for what was for sale were the same as what I bought 7 years prior, and the price wasn't much lower.

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

#288

Post by bitmasher9 »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #286
oceansky wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah I went shopping for a new computer a couple of years ago (to replace a 7 year old computer) and... the specs for what was for sale were the same as what I bought 7 years prior, and the price wasn't much lower.

I would much rather buy a 2026 computer than a 2019 computer. Two generations of Nvidia GPUs, Apple M series chips, the X3D AMD chips, and pcie5 ssds are all major upgrades.

It’s just that the pace of new stuff is slowing down, and many people are operating under the assumption that this wave will ride on forever.

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

#289

Post by tacet »

danieldoesbio wrote: post #151
rvz wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open models are promising and cost a fraction of what they proprietary models cost which the big two are vulnerable to when companies start to feel the cost of tokens. Anthropic are scared of open weight models and need to fear-monger towards you to continue paying for their models. That's the whole point of their 'safety' marketing narrative, account bans, and Dario being the AI scarecrow scaremongering everyone a…

Genuine question here about the open-weight models finding the same vulnerabilities as mythos thing: is it just a matter of false negatives/positives? I’ve seen a few cases where people show other models (even opus) can find the same vulnerabilities given many passes. Is there some disadvantage to the extra passes that give the claimed Mythos performance extra value (assuming it finds them in less)?

You have to keep in mind that it's not like anthropic just asked mythos to "find fancy bug, make no mistakes" and got the result.

my quick read of the process they describe is that first they asked agents to rank files in order of potential to have interesting bugs, then they launch agents for each file in order of "interesting bug potential" and finally launch another agent for verification. (maybe i am mistaken, this is my read of this post https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/ )

it's not clear to me if they made just one pass over each file or made several passes for same file, but regardless, I think if you recreate roughly same process and burn 20000$ on tokens with other reasonably good model, you will find some fancy bugs too.

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

#290

Post by Danox »

red_hare wrote: post #218
sandworm101 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that per-token cost is a total joke. All these companies are fighting to build market share in some future dominated by one or two AI ecosystems. It is musical chairs until someone creates the one ring to rule them all. So they are charging token amounts just to claim revenue as they burn through investor dollars. In short: per-token charges currently cover maybe 1% of the total costs in this field. To pay ongoin…

If that's true, it's very unsustainable. Gemma-4 26B-A4B + M5 MacBook Pro + OpenCode isn't Claude Code _yet_, but it's good enough that if I were forced to use it I would be fine.

It’s getting better on both the hardware and the software fronts the barbarians are banging at the gates.
Post reply on HN