Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#331

Post by ActorNightly » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 4:50 PM UTC

boeingUH60 wrote: post #79

xena wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason why companies don't allow NSFW content is because of puritan payment processors that see that stuff and then go absolute sicko mode and lock people out of the traditional finance system.

It's because NSFW content has higher risks of chargeback and fraud (there's a reason their payment processors charge 20%+). Besides, companies don't want to be on the bad side of outrage; it only takes one mistake of processing a payment for child pornography and your name will be plastered everywhere as a child porn enabler. Do you really think the execs at Visa and Mastercard are puritans and not profiteering capit…

Nothing to do with outrage.

Everything to do with one politician essentially getting their way by targeting a payment processor with legal shit concerning potential enablement of CP/CT. Nobody wants that kind of attention.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#332

Post by tangjurine » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 4:58 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #329

cubefox wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is amazing that in the year 2023, where things are possible that were science fiction until recently, we still rely on private payment processors, credit card companies, which extract fees for a service that doesn't have any technical necessity anymore. I think the reason is just inertia. They work well enough in most cases, and the fees aren't so high as to be painful, so there is little pressure to switch to som…

> we still rely on private payment processors, credit card companies, which extract fees for a service that doesn't have any technical necessity anymore The technical necessity is there; for your chase-backed visa card to pull money from chase and deposit it into your shop's citibank, there needs to be some infrastructure. Whether a private company or the government provides this infrastructure is another story. (Alt…

Do you have an estimate of the cost of the infrastructure required vs. how much credit card companies charge today?

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#333

Post by mike_hearn » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 4:59 PM UTC

anentropic wrote: post #326

mike_hearn wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were Apple I'd be thinking about the following issues with that strategy: 1. That RAM isn't empty, it's being used by apps and the OS. Fill up 64GB of RAM with an LLM and there's nothing left for anything else. 2. 64GB probably isn't enough for competitive LLMs anyway. 3. Inferencing is extremely energy intensive, but the MacBook / Apple Silicon brand is partly about long battery life. 4. Weights are expensive t…

But right now what incentive have I to buy a new laptop? I got this 16GB M1 MBA two years ago and it's literally everything I need, always feels fast, silent etc 1. the idea would be that now there is a reason to buy loads more RAM, whereas currently the market for 64GB is pretty niche 2. 64GB is a big laptop today, in a few years time that will be small. And LLaMA 65B int4 quantized should fit comfortably 4. LLMs wi…

1. You're working backwards from a desire to buy more RAM to try and find uses for it. You don't actually need more RAM to use LLMs, ChatGPT requires no local memory, is instant and is available for free today.

2. Why would anybody be satisfied with a 64GB model when GPT-4 or 5 or 6 might even be using 1TB of RAM?

3. That may not be the case. With every day that passes, it becomes more and more clear that large LLMs are not that easy to build. Even Google has failed to make something competitive with OpenAI. It's possible that OpenAI is in fact the new Google, that they have been able to establish permanent competitive advantage, and there will no more be free commodity LLMs than there are free commodity search engines.

Don't get me wrong, I would love there to be high quality local LLMs. I have at least two use cases where you can't do them or not really well with the OpenAI API and being able to run LLama locally would fix that problem. But I just don't see that being a common case and at any rate I would need server hardware to do it properly, not Mac laptop.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#334

Post by nickpp » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #314

robertlagrant wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would think, however, that capitalists would not ignore such an obvious profit center as the sex industry Because you're conflating capitalism and greed. Capitalism doesn't mean "do anything for money". It means "as much as possible, people get to decide among themselves how to allocate their money and time". Some of them will invest in anything, just as people in non-capitalist countries. Most will only invest i…

> Capitalism doesn't mean "do anything for money". In the abstract, perhaps not. The way it exists in the US, though, it means exactly that.

This very thread is exactly about how, in US, it doesn’t.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#335

Post by ChadNauseam » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 5:11 PM UTC

cubefox wrote: post #187

andsoitis wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> switch to something more modern such as?

I would be very surprised if something based on Blockchain or similar software doesn't offer a solution here. Another route would be to establish a protocol for near instantaneous bank transfers, and try to get a lot of banks on board. The immediacy of transfers seems to be the main reason why companies use credit card services, not buyer protection or actual credit.

> I would be very surprised if something based on Blockchain or similar software doesn't offer a solution here.

There is, it's a layer-2 on Ethereum called zkSync. It's not totally satisfactory (the company that makes it can steal your money, centralized sequencer, etc), but it's pretty mature and works quite well. To replace Visa you want high throughput and low latency and zk-rollups like zkSync can provide both. (There are other options too, like Starknet, but AFAIK zkSync is the most mature.)

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#336

Post by anentropic » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #333

anentropic wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But right now what incentive have I to buy a new laptop? I got this 16GB M1 MBA two years ago and it's literally everything I need, always feels fast, silent etc 1. the idea would be that now there is a reason to buy loads more RAM, whereas currently the market for 64GB is pretty niche 2. 64GB is a big laptop today, in a few years time that will be small. And LLaMA 65B int4 quantized should fit comfortably 4. LLMs wi…

1. You're working backwards from a desire to buy more RAM to try and find uses for it. You don't actually need more RAM to use LLMs, ChatGPT requires no local memory, is instant and is available for free today. 2. Why would anybody be satisfied with a 64GB model when GPT-4 or 5 or 6 might even be using 1TB of RAM? 3. That may not be the case. With every day that passes, it becomes more and more clear that large LLMs…

1. You're working backwards from a desire to buy more RAM to try and find uses for it.

I'm really not

I had no desire at all until a couple of weeks ago. Even now not so much since it wouldn't be very useful to me

But the current LLM business model where there are a small number of API providers, and anything built using this new tech is forced into a subscription model... I don't see it sustainable, and I think the buzz around llama.cpp is a taste of that

I'm saying imagine a future where it is painless to run a ChatGPT-class LLM on your laptop (sounded crazy a year ago, to me now looks inevitable within few years), then have a look at the kind of things that can be done today with Langchain... then extrapolate

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#337

Post by jjtheblunt » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

dpflan wrote: post #44

"Dario Amodei, the former VP of research at OpenAI, launched Anthropic in 2021 as a public benefit corporation, taking with him a number of OpenAI employees, including OpenAI’s former policy lead Jack Clark. Amodei split from OpenAI after a disagreement over the company’s direction, namely the startup’s increasingly commercial focus." So Anthropic is the Google-supported equivalent of OpenAI? Isn't the founder going…

Curiously, Anthropic.com was launched in 2021, but a small custom software shop in Arizona around since the mid-late 90s had registered and been using Anthropic.ai in 2020 for a couple projects.

How does that name collision work?

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#338

Post by revelio » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

IMTDb wrote: post #78

seydor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, let's make an EU commercial LLM. Let's start by scraping all the Francophone internet. Then let's remove all the PII data and potentially PII-data. Easy-peasy. Then let's train our network so as not to spew out or make up PII data - easy peasy Then let's make it able to delete PII data that it has inadvertedly collected on request. Simultaneously it should be recording all the conversations for safety reasons.…

You forgot that anyone using it must click a button that says that he will not use it for evil purposes. You also must acknowledge that the AI will not track you. These must be separated disclaimers that need to be validated on every prompt. API usage is thus not allowed. The AI should also make it 100% clear that whatever gets produced is clearly identifiable as coming form an AI. As a consequence; text cannot be pr…

Heh. Also important: anyone can object to the presence of information that mentions them or they created being known to the AI at any time, and if they object within writing you have 3 days to re-train the AI to remove whatever they objected to. If you fail to meet this deadline then you have to pay 10% of your global revenue to the EU Commission and there is no court case or appeal you can file, you just have to pay.

Unless of course you have a legitimate reason for that data to be in the AI, or to reject the privacy request. What is and is not legitimate isn't specified anywhere because it's obvious. If you ask for clarification because you think it's not obvious, you won't be given any because we don't do things that way around here. If you interpret this clause in a way that we later decide makes us look bad, then the definition of "need" and "legitimate" will change at that moment to make us look good.

BTW inability to retrain within three days is not a legitimate reason. Nor is the need to be competitive with US firms. Now here is your 300,000 EUR grant, have fun!

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#339

Post by bootsmann » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #313

anentropic wrote: post #288

If Apple would wake up to what's happening with llama.cpp etc then I don't see such a market in paying for remote access to big models via API, though it's currently the only game in town. Currently a Macbook has a Neural Engine that is sitting idle 99% of the time and only suitable for running limited models (poorly documented, opaque rules about what ops can be accelerated, a black box compiler [1] and an apparent…

If I were Apple I'd be thinking about the following issues with that strategy: 1. That RAM isn't empty, it's being used by apps and the OS. Fill up 64GB of RAM with an LLM and there's nothing left for anything else. 2. 64GB probably isn't enough for competitive LLMs anyway. 3. Inferencing is extremely energy intensive, but the MacBook / Apple Silicon brand is partly about long battery life. 4. Weights are expensive t…

> Even if a high end MacBook can do local inferencing, the iPhone won't and it's the iPhone that matters

Doesn't the iPhone use the local processor for stuff like the automatic image segmentation they currently do? (Hold on any person in a recent photo you have take and iOS will segment it)

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#340

Post by horsawlarway » Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #313

anentropic wrote: post #288

If Apple would wake up to what's happening with llama.cpp etc then I don't see such a market in paying for remote access to big models via API, though it's currently the only game in town. Currently a Macbook has a Neural Engine that is sitting idle 99% of the time and only suitable for running limited models (poorly documented, opaque rules about what ops can be accelerated, a black box compiler [1] and an apparent…

If I were Apple I'd be thinking about the following issues with that strategy: 1. That RAM isn't empty, it's being used by apps and the OS. Fill up 64GB of RAM with an LLM and there's nothing left for anything else. 2. 64GB probably isn't enough for competitive LLMs anyway. 3. Inferencing is extremely energy intensive, but the MacBook / Apple Silicon brand is partly about long battery life. 4. Weights are expensive t…

> but it's hard to see situations where the local approach beats out the cloud approach.

I think the most glaring situation where this is true is simply one of trust and privacy.

Cloud solutions involve trusting 3rd parties with data. Sometimes that fine, sometimes it's really not.

Personally - LLMs start to feel more like they're sitting in the confidant/peer space in many ways. I behave differently when I know I'm hitting a remote resource for LLMs in the same way that I behave differently when I know I'm on camera in person: Less genuinely.

And beyond merely trusting that a company won't abuse or leak my data, there are other trust issues as well. If I use an LLM as a digital assistant - I need to know that it's looking out for me (or at least acting neutrally) and not being influenced by a 3rd party to give me responses that are weighted to benefit that 3rd party.

I don't think it'll be too long before we see someone try to create an LLM that has advertising baked into it, and we have very little insight into how weights are generated and used. If I'm hitting a remote resource - the model I'm actually running can change out from underneath me at any time, jarring at best and utterly unacceptable at worst.

From my end - I'd rather pay and run it locally, even if it's slower or more expensive.