I'm burning an insane number of tokens 8-12 hours a day for the dramatic improvement of some internal tooling at a big tech company. Using it heavily for an unannounced future project as well. I presume I'm not the only one.
We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time. Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of thos…
> it's apparently worth more than products Americans constantly buy and rely on for their main life What are you counting in this category?
There are countless examples, but let's say Ford. Worth $150 billion, $50 billion not counting debt. My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.
Ford probably made 3k profit on that car. Given the falling costs of inference, what are the chances your neighbor gives anthropic 3k in profit over the next few years? Not terribly bad.
>Such as? it's crazy that the experiences are still so wildly varying that we get people that use this strategy as a 'valid' gotcha. AI works for the vast majority of nowhere-near-the-edge CS work -- you know, all the stuff the majority of people have to do every day. I don't touch any kind of SQL manually anymore. I don't touch iptables or UFW. I don't touch polkit, dbus, or any other human-hostile IPC anymore. I do…
That's all well and good, but what happens when the price to run these AIs goes up 10x or even 100x. It's the same model as Uber, and I can't afford Uber most of the time anymore. It's become cost prohibitive just to take a short ride, but it used to cost like $7. It's all fun and games until someone has to pay the bill, and these companies are losing many billions of dollars with no end in sight for the losses. I do…
It's an important concern for those footing the bill, but I expect companies really in the face of being impacted by it to be able to do a cost-benefit calculation and use a mix of models. For the sorts of things GP described (iptables whatever, recalling how to scan open ports on the network, the sorts of things you usually could answer for yourself with 10-600 seconds in a manpage / help text / google search / stack overflow thread), local/open-weight models are already good enough and fast enough on a lot of commodity hardware to suffice. Whereas now companies might say just offload such queries to the frontier $200/mo plan because why not, tokens are plentiful and it's already being paid for, if in the future it goes to $2000/mo with more limited tokens, you might save them for the actual important or latency-sensitive work and use lower-cost local models for simpler stuff. That lower-cost might involve a $2000 GPU to be really usable, but it pays for itself shortly by comparison. To use your Uber analogy, people might have used it to get to downtown and the airport, but now it's way more expensive, so they'll take a bus or walk or drive downtown instead -- but the airport trip, even though it's more expensive than it used to be, is still attractive in the face of competing alternatives like taxis/long term parking.
Context: a few weeks ago, Anthropic signed a deal to buy "multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity" from Google and Broadcom [1]. There have been several previous deals, too. Some people call this sort of thing a "circular deal", but perhaps a better way to think of it is as a very large-scale version of vendor financing? The simple version of vendor financing is when a vendor gives a retailer time to pay f…
Reciprocal agreements aren't new, sometimes they're used to gain access to a market the other party already has established a foothold in for other industry segments. These companies operate in the same general industry: tech/internet so it could be complementary services they are each after.
So far both of these companies have shown they suck at support so we know that's not it. It could be that it might help Anthropic to leverage Gemini in their competition with OpenAI and Google will take compute commitments.
Anecdata: I'm finding a lot of my "type random question in URL/search bar" has decent top Gemini answers where I don't scroll to results unless I need to dive deeper.
That was precisely my thought on seeing the news. I did not know about Google's existing entanglements with anthropic, but it seemed like a clear message - Do not panic on the money, do the work.
"Do not panic on the money, do the work." - sorry what do you mean by that?
If you look at their recent actions, they all seem financial as if they have become the monopoly already and can do anything. Maybe it is driven by fear of going bankrupt
Example. Them doing a AB test where they remove Claude CLI from the 20$ pro plan ... they rolled it back now. Other rate limits where they publicly double your quota at NON peak times but lower it during peak quietly. These are tacky and signs of panic.
One such issue is experimentation. But when you see back to back issues, it looks odd.
I think the subtext of the last few weeks is the Anthropic was becoming severely capacity constrained (or approaching that). They seem to have had to sign two somewhat adverse contracts with Amazon and Google in short succession. suddenly model quality is back up again.
It feels like the market is full Wiley Coyote on frontier model makers, and I like Anthropic's B2B business model. But all progress points to a commodification of foundation models--Google first named it as "we have no moat, neither does anyone else." So there must be some secondary play driving this, right? Hardware sales? Hedging for search ad revenue? Still feels mispriced. I think asset inflation leaves too much…
You don't need a moat if you're selling shovels and everyone's digging holes.
It’s pretty wild how badly Altman siding with Hegseth has backfired. (And how competently Dario has played his hand.) I don’t think that’s the ultimate cause of the turnaround in fortunes. But it strikes me, at least from the investor and potentially urban-consumer perspectives, as a pivotal moment in both companies’ fortunes.
"(And how competently Dario has played his hand.)" lol hes barely done anything, but sometimes that is all that's necessary when a bozo opponent is hell-bent on screwing things up. He didn't get fired the first time for no reason.
> hes barely done anything, but sometimes that is all that's necessary when a bozo opponent is hell-bent on screwing things up
An former chess instructor told me most games are won not by brilliant maneuver, but by not screwing up. Repeatedly making the boring play is a winning strategy far more often than any mastermind play.
They just announced their new chip, and they are the ones created transformers yet investing this amount in a competitor? I don’t know what to make of it
It makes every bit as much sense as investing in Snap while still operating their own social network product. Seems to have worked out fine (for Google, not Snap).
FWIW I’d buy SNAP now that they are at rock bottom