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

Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 868 posts

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

#671

Post by Miner49er »

_puk wrote: post #172
an0malous wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and worse.

I keep seeing this take. And yet.. building shit is no longer the sole domain of the software engineer. That's the sea change. I've literally had finance and GTM stand things up for themselves in the last few weeks. A few tweaks (obviously around security and access), and they are good to go. They've gone from wrangling spreadsheets to smooth automated workflows that allow them to work at a higher level in a matter o…

Are they doing PRs? Putting their code in git? Is AI deploying it or do they get help with that?

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

#672

Post by cmrdporcupine »

kshacker wrote: post #346
nubg wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 pa…

To me it seems clear a long time ago that senior leadership at Anthropic are getting high on their own supply.

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

#673

Post by mark_l_watson »

This is an interesting conversation: some of you correctly pointing out that so much AI driven development is not having a positive effect on business profitability, and others correctly pointing out positive results that give evidence for great future progress.

I have an unusual set of metrics for evaluating AI. I am old and comfortably retired but I still like to experiment with AI tools for updating many of my old (or ancient) open source projects and creating new projects. I am blown away by how good my dedicated Hermes Agent setup on a VPS and also running Google AntiGravity with Claude and Gemini are. Both systems are unbelievably good.

I can only imagine how effective companies with a solid engineering process will be as appropriate roles for human and AI developers solidify. I can also imagine companies with a poor process and poor engineering taste will waste a lot of money.

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

#674

Post by cmrdporcupine »

twobitshifter wrote: post #338
stephc_int13 wrote: post #78

My opinion about this is that Google see it as a way to weaken OpenAI, and few other side benefits, including the option to acquire Anthropic. And it may very well be bad news for OpenAI.

OpenAI was created to counter the threat of Google controlling a possible AGI. What if we still end up in the same state in the end? Both Anthropic and OpenAI have abandoned any pretense of altruism at this point and find themselves overwhelmed bythe forces of capitalism.

Find themselves overwhelmed by?

They are the forces of capitalism embodied.

"All that is solid melts into air"

This makes 19th century mechanization look like the paleolithic, but it's the same fundamental force.

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

#675

Post by qwaG »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #673

This is an interesting conversation: some of you correctly pointing out that so much AI driven development is not having a positive effect on business profitability, and others correctly pointing out positive results that give evidence for great future progress. I have an unusual set of metrics for evaluating AI. I am old and comfortably retired but I still like to experiment with AI tools for updating many of my old…

Where is the software that is produced using the purported efficiency gains and why are you pulling up the ladder behind you?

If you were in AI for such a long time, of course you are biased and want to see it succeed.

Look at what has been written in open source since 2023. Very little. There are no efficiency gains and the incessant talk about prompts and AI just paralyzes the entire field. And people who love to talk have the ears of the managers.

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

#676

Post by svnt »

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.

How does it follow that companies that are months apart will trip the singularity and this will prevent the others from doing so?

Who supplies the hardware for the singularity?

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

#677

Post by Spooky23 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #535
Spooky23 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GE Capital was a different creature, riding the line of fraud in some ways. They misapplied accounting rules and had to write down or capitalize over $20B for long term care insurance.

I don't know the full the history of this story, but I honestly wonder if type of scandal is still possible in the United States. After Enron and Worldcomm, the US introduced Sarbanes-Oxley reporting regulations. Additionally, after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/2009, there was a dramatic increase in regulations for banks (of all kinds) and insurance companies.

lol yes.

The POTUS kids are players in Polymarket and Kalshi, and are running crypto grifts.

The SEC fired most of their investigators, hasn’t appointed members to key boards, and cancelled most of their contracts with FINRA. (Which has laid off a ton of people) Nobody is watching.

So there’s an open season for normal corporate bullshit, and if you’re personally committing felonies attributable to you, you make sure you do it in Florida, and pay a vig to the library fund for a pardon.

We’ll have a fun run, then everything starts exploding in mid 2027-2029.

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

#678

Post by _zoltan_ »

nothrowaways wrote: post #490
threepts wrote: post #487

I work at google for chrome, I can assure you nobody in our team is using gemini over claude. Haha this is hilarious

What do you even mean?

That Claude is much better than Gemini for coding. The message you replied to was quite clear.

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

#679

Post by 4ndrewl »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #669
4ndrewl wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the dev that gets AI done in 5 hours will have a poorer mental model of the code. Whether that's important might or might not depend on whether that bites you in the ass at some point.

But does it matter? If you write a program in Python or JavaScript, you have a terrible mental model for how that code is actually executed in machine code. It's irrelevant though, you figure it out only when it's a problem. Even if you don't have a great mental model, now you have AI to identify the problems and generate an explanation of the structure for you.

No, but you have a great mental model of the interface between your problem domain and the code, which is where you can affect change.

Outsourcing that to an AI SaaS might be ok I guess. Given past form there's going to be a rug-pull/bait-and-switch moment and dividends to start paying out.

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

#680

Post by dominotw »

barnabee wrote: post #254
an0malous wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and worse.

Where I work: - Development velocity is very noticeably much higher across the board. Quality is not obviously worse, but it's LLM assisted, not vibe coding (except for experiments and internal tools). - Things that would have been tactically built with TypeScript are now Rust apps. - Things that would have been small Python scripts are full web apps and dashboards. - Vibe coding (with Claude Desktop, nobody is using…

what have you guys built exactly?
Post reply on HN