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Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

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

#681

Post by dominotw »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #519
camdenreslink wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> My impression has always been it's more important the build the correct thing (what the customer needs/wants) rather than more stuff faster. The process of learning what the customer needs/wants is a heavily iterative one, often involving throwing prototypes at them or betting at a solution, then course-correcting based on their reaction. Similarly, the process of building the correct thing is almost always an iter…

no customers will accept "throwing prototypes at them". my time is not for QA-ing your product.

why do you think restaurants rarely change their menus.

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

#682

Post by kibwen »

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.

> It's irrelevant though, you figure it out only when it's a problem.

For the past decade people have been clawing their eyes out over how sluggish their computers have become due to everything becoming a bloated Electron app. It's extremely relevant. Meanwhile, here you are seemingly trying to suggest that not only should everything be a bloated, inefficient mess, it should also be buggy and inscrutable, even moreso than it already is. The entire experience of using a computer is about to descend into a heretofore unimaginable nightmare, but hey, at least Jensen Huang got his bag.

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

#684

Post by anothereng »

Spacemolte wrote: post #494
james2doyle wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re paying the subsidized cost. Those margins will shrink once the real bill comes due. I really think everyone will look back at this time as the golden area of cheap AI. We are already seeing the costs (and restrictions/limits) creep up with the Western models.

It amazes me how productive it's possible to be using AI, but I also has this nagging feeling that we are being reeled into being so reliant on this that when the price starts going up, we will simply eat the cost. The math is pretty simple, and it's easy to justify still paying the price even if it goes up 10 fold, when compared to hirering more resources its still cheap. So I guess having multiple players and compe…

as long as the chinese exist and offer alternatives I think were going to be okay in terms of price, as long as you dont lock in in any american model

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

#685

Post by nvarsj »

4ndrewl wrote: post #664
datavirtue wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to transition how we build software at our company due to the power of AI. No more: five code monkey contractors under a lead. Two top-notch devs are all that is needed now, unrestrained by sprints and mindless ceremonies. There is going to be a giant sucking sound in India. I can't continue the current model. The dev that gets AI is done in five hours, the ones that don't are thrashing for the next two…

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.

Don’t really agree with this.

That dev is productive with AI precisely _because_ they have a good mental model.

AI like other tools is a multiplier - it doesn’t make bad devs good, but it makes good devs significantly more productive.

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

#686

Post by notnullorvoid »

an0malous wrote: post #153
tiffanyh wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what’s needed when you go from $9B in ARR … to $30B in ARR literally just one quarter later . That kind of insane growth & demand is unprecedented at that scale. https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...

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.

This is my take away too. I see some interesting toys here and there, but not much of substance. Meanwhile all the GitHub issues I follow for open source projects have slowed to a halt, the products I use have no significant updates. Even AI products are slow to improve their interfaces.

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

#687

Post by Jach »

CoolThings wrote: post #410
scottyah wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one that serves a few functions- Tracks certificates and licenses (you can export certs in any of the majorly requested formats), a dashboard that tells you when licenses and certs are close to expiring, a user count, a notification system for alerts (otherwise it's a mostly buried Teams channel most people miss), a Downtime Tracker that doesn't require people to input easily calculatable fields, a way for tea…

>> a dashboard that tells you when licenses and certs are close to expiring Or, Excel > Data > Sort > by the Date column. No dashboard needed, no app needed.

A lot of businesses can get by just fine with making it one person's responsibility to maintain a spreadsheet for this. It can be fragile though as the company grows and/or the number of items increases, and you have to make sure it's all still centralized and teams aren't randomly purchasing licenses or subscriptions without telling anyone, it needs to be properly handed off if the person leaves/dies/takes a vacation, backed up if not using a cloud spreadsheet... I've probably seen at least a dozen startups come and go over the years purporting to solve this kind of problem, other businesses integrate it into an existing Salesforce/other deployment... it seems like a fine choice for an internal tool, so long as the tool is running on infrastructure that is no less stable than a spreadsheet on someone's machine.

In the startup world something like "every emailed spreadsheet is a business" used to be a motivating phrase, it must be more rough out there when LLMs can business-ify so many spreadsheet processes (whether it's necessary for the business yet or not). And of course with this sort of tool in particular, more eyes seeing "we're paying $x/mo for this service?" naturally leads to "can't we just use our $y/mo LLM to make our own version?". Not sure I'd want to be in small-time b2b right now.

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

#688

Post by embedding-shape »

fallat wrote: post #633
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't get that far. It's physically impossible to build out the datacenters required for the "AI is actually good and we have mass layoffs" scenario. This Anthropic investment is spurred on because they've already hit a brick wall with capacity. $40B goes a long way, but not for datacenters where nearly every single component and service is now backordered. Even if you could build the DC, the power connection won'…

We pretty much already had the layoffs, at least that's my perception. The next level of layoffs is probably still 25 years out.

> The next level of layoffs is probably still 25 years out.

Hasn't even been 25 years years since the previous layoffs before the current ones.

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

#689

Post by mike_hearn »

netcan wrote: post #662
grafmax wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech industry goes through investment phases to produce oligopolies it turns around and enshittifies, parasitizing income off what it has built. Venture capital, acquisitions, acquihires, circular investments - It’s been incestuous for years. The question is whether competition from China’s sophisticated tech sector, which already surpasses the US in many areas, will put a pin in these plans this time round.

I don't agree with the "full cynicism" POV, but I do agree that TechnoChina's existence is a potential paradigm shifter. But generally speaking, AI is currently pretty competitive and robust. Straightforward business model where users pay money and select the best deal are central. Market power is relatively dispersed. So... Idk. Nvidia doesn't have competition. But Intel didn't have much competition either, and they…

Nvidia clearly has competition, that's what this deal with Google is about (TPUs).

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

#690

Post by annexrichmond »

luke727 wrote: post #666
fnoef wrote: post #579

$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.

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

Well, historically this has been more effective than any other system known to man.
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