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Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

bloomberg.com

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Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#571

Post by mewpmewp2 »

camdenreslink wrote: post #485
am17an wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds exhausting. Are your revenue numbers up?

I am also curious about the correlation between more PRs getting merged faster and actual business outcomes. My impression has always been it's more important the build the correct thing (what the customer needs/wants) rather than more stuff faster.

This with the ability to research, iterate on prototypes, in my opinion allows to determine the right thing quicker as well. Of course right now the value is largely intuition based, there may be some immediate revenue/profit, but revenue/profit will take time to follow, so in a way it is a speculative intuition based bet. Financial gains will take time to follow, so for a period of time it will be "trust me bro" for at least some cases, but I suppose future will show, since the intuition seems so strong about it. You can't have good data about an emerging tech like that.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#572

Post by jona-f »

lebuin wrote: post #525
svnt wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the argument for a duopoly when Kimi and Deepseek models are only months behind? It’s a commodity in the making.

The argument is based on one of these companies hitting the singularity, making it impossible for any other company to catch up ever. I still think it's way more likely we'll see a typical S-curve where innovation starts to plateau. But even a small chance of it happening in the future is worth a lot of money today.

There's a massive thinking gap in this singularity thinking. We ARE the singularity. It has been exponential all the way back to the big bang. First the stars, the solar system, life, consciousness, language, computers, the internet. Yes it is speeding up and that is exciting, cause we are going to experience a lot in our lifetimes. We have a lot of exponential growth to go before progress becomes instant. There are physical limits, too. Power generation for example. I can't believe on what dumb shit people bet the world economy on.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#574

Post by johanyc »

cameronbrown wrote: post #429
jeffbee wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urs used to talk (internally) about not publishing "industry-enabling papers" which is why most Google infrastructure papers were describing something that had already been turned off, or was already in the process of being replaced by the next system (GFS, Vitess, etc). The things that did get published were either considered not key advantages, that other companies simply cannot do, things that other companies woul…

> I also wonder if they are glad they published it https://youtu.be/ue9MWfvMylE Jeff Dean is asked this question by Geoffrey Hinton at 37:35 - might worth watching. Overall an interesting video.

Link with time code: https://youtu.be/ue9MWfvMylE?t=2261

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#575

Post by Capricorn2481 »

com2kid wrote: post #242
zmmmmm wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are plenty of people who basically believe this is the end of the human economy - there will be nothing left that isn't done by AI in the future. Even the bits left that humans do will be human facades on AI driven activity (like your hairdresser will be viewing you through AI powered glasses using AI powered scissors etc). So from that point of view you can indeed look at it as the entire value of the economy…

That is ultimately where it is headed and has been headed for over 100 years now. The question is when will we get there. If the answer is tomorrow, money means nothing and none of these investments matter. If the answer is 30 years, well lots of money to be made up until the inflection point of machines being able to design, build, and repair themselves.

You heard AI powered scissors and thought that's where we're heading? I think you'd have to be totally divorced from the average person to believe this.

Meanwhile people are still begging car manufacturers to stop locking their glove box behind a touch screen. Or how about a TV that isn't loaded with crappy software that makes it unusable after 2 years. There's a reason we don't put tech in everything.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#576

Post by OJFord »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #560
throwaway2037 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be honest, I think "vendor financing" is still a very risky premise. Are you aware that all heavy industry in all highly developed nations make extensive use of vendor financing to sell their products? Siemens is a perfect example of a well-run, stable, industrial giant. They offer vendor financing for large purchases. Same for the "heavies" (Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, IHI, Hyundai, Doosan, Hanjin) in Japan and Korea…

Are we replacing "Let me google that for you" with "Here is a prompt to feed ChatGPT" now? Edit: I am not asking whether ChatGPT is better than Google Search, I am asking after the standard dodge of citing one's sources.

It's a good use case really – it'll tell it differently according to what it knows about your background, if you 'just Google it' you'll get the same maybe-appropriate results as anyone else.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#577

Post by duskdozer »

trhway wrote: post #290
msy wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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 those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial. well, isn't that what AI can be used effectively for - to generate [auto]response to the AI generated content.

What a delightful world we're building.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#578

Post by fauigerzigerk »

netcan wrote: post #534
skybrian wrote: post #276

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…

So yes, but that doesn't negate the circular investment aspect, for most intents and purposes. The risk is from this structure is mostly to do with how this affects market cap. Companies using the value of their shares to fund demand for their services. That's a risk.

>Companies using the value of their shares to fund demand for their services.

That's not what's happening here though. Google isn't using the value of its shares to fund demand. Google is using its own cash flow to fund this demand from Anthropic.

The question is whether Anthropic has demand from end users for the capacity they are buying from Google (that's a yes I guess) and whether that demand is profitable for Anthropic (that's a question mark).

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#579

Post by fnoef »

$40B. Insane. Imagine what could be done with this money to improve humanity. Instead, it’s spent on a fancy text generator that promises to eliminate most of the non mundane and physical jobs, as well as create autonomous killing machines, on top of burning the entire worlds electricity. Crazy.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#580

Post by 2ndorderthought »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #560
throwaway2037 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be honest, I think "vendor financing" is still a very risky premise. Are you aware that all heavy industry in all highly developed nations make extensive use of vendor financing to sell their products? Siemens is a perfect example of a well-run, stable, industrial giant. They offer vendor financing for large purchases. Same for the "heavies" (Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, IHI, Hyundai, Doosan, Hanjin) in Japan and Korea…

Are we replacing "Let me google that for you" with "Here is a prompt to feed ChatGPT" now? Edit: I am not asking whether ChatGPT is better than Google Search, I am asking after the standard dodge of citing one's sources.

Google search has gone way down hill after they nerfed it and then did nothing to prevent the flood of AI slop seo websites. So unfortunately, instead of sharing links everyone now gets sent to the inefficient text generator that hallucinates nonsense and will color the average summary of a topic by whoever trained it and your most recent chat history instead.
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