Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic • Hacker News Board

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

#691

Post by pwinnski » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #680

barnabee wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I kept asking this question last year, especially after that initial METR report showing people believed themselves to be faster when they were slower. Then I decided to dive in feet-first for a few weeks so that nobody could say I hadn't tried all I could.

At work, what I see happening is that tickets that would have lingered in a backlog "forever" are getting done. Ideas that would have come up in conversation but never been turned into scoped work is getting done, too. Some things are no faster at all, and some things are slower, mostly because the clankers can't be trusted and human understanding can't be sped up, or because input is needed from product team, etc. But the sorts of things that don't make it into release notes, and are never announced to customers, those are happening faster, and more of them are happening.

We review server logs, create tickets for every error message we see, and chase them down, either fixing the cause or mitigating and downgrading the error message, or however is appropriate to the issue. This was already a practice, but it used to feel like we were falling farther behind every week, as the backlog of such tickets grew longer. Most low-priority stuff, since obviously we prioritized errors based on user impact, but now remediation is so fast that we've eliminated almost the entire backlog. It's the sort of things that if we were a mobile app, would be described as "improvement and bug fixes" generically. It's a lot of quality-of-life issues for use as backend devs.

At home, I'm creating projects I don't intend for anyone outside my family to see. So far things I could theoretically have done myself, even related to things I've done myself before, but at a scale I wouldn't bother. Like a price-checker that tracks a watchlist of grocery items at nine local stores and notifies me in discord of sales on items and in categories I care about. It's a little agent posting to a discord channel that I can check before heading out for groceries.

Or several projects related to my hobbies, automating the parts I don't enjoy so much to give me more time for the parts I do. My collection of a half-dozen python scripts and three cron jobs related to those hobbies has grown to just over 20 such scripts and 14 cron jobs. Plus some that are used by an agent as part of a skill, although still scripts I can call manually, because I'll go back to cron jobs for everything if the price of tokens rises a bit more.

I was super-skeptical, and now I'm not. I think companies laying off employees are delusional or using LLMs as an excuse, but there is zero question in my mind that these things can be a huge boon to productivity for some categories of coding.

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

#692

Post by twic » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #605

robjeiter wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the whole market at this point is just AI since big tech other than Apple are all massively invested into that. Everyone owns either the S&P or the total world ETF which are both heavily skewed towards big tech and this trade - so literally everybody is in it. It might go well for a few more quarters/years but once something breaks or gets exponentially cheaper this will take down the whole market with it…

> literally everybody I personally make sure I really diversify, so that when I buy funds, I buy those with stocks of EU companies which pay dividends. AFAICT there are 0 European AI companies that pay dividends.

There are zero US pure-play AI companies which pay dividends, right?

You have to go pretty far down the list of holdings (under "Holding details") to find any big bets on AI:

https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/investments/vanguard-ftse...

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

#693

Post by kmacdough » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

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…

It's still circular. They will succeed or collapse together. And since they make up such a fraction of global market cap, we're in for the ride together.

And the circularity makes the actual investment numbers fairly meaningless. They don't mind if they end up overpaying for future services, as long as they overpay each other equally.

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

#694

Post by 4ndrewl » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

nvarsj wrote: post #685

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.

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.

Don't agree - the dev is productive because they have a good mental model of the problem space and can cajole the agent into producing code that agrees with the spec. The trend is for devs to become more like product managers (which is why you see some whip-smart product managers able to build products _without_ human devs)

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

#695

Post by mike_hearn » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

ngruhn wrote: post #442

lukan wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can there be a "winner takes it all" situation with AI? OpenAI lead the game while they were best. Antrophic followed and got better. Now openAI is catching up again and also google with gemini(?) ... and the open weight models are 2 years behind. Any win here seems only temporary. Even if a new breakthrough to a strong AI happen somehow.

I guess if you build the first AI that can autonomously self improve, then nobody can catch up anymore.

This is a common canard. AI already autonomously self improves. All the training pipelines for modern frontier models are filled with AI. AI generates synthetic data, it cleans data, it judges output quality and feeds back via RL, it does hyperparameter tuning, it rewrites kernels for speed and a thousand other things.

But: no singularity. At least not yet.

The flaw in this thinking seems to be the idea that AI is a singular thing. You point the model back at its own source code, sit back and watch as it does everything at once. Right now it's more like AI being an army of assistants organized by human researchers. You often need specialized models for this stuff, you can't just use GPT for everything.

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

#696

Post by mrits » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

lionkor wrote: post #557

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…

But let's be real, the AI output today is largely complete and utter shit. Like, really, without careful promoting and oversight, it's not fun to read, it's not smart, it's not accurate, it's not thorough, and it's certainly not yet over the massive show stopping hurdle that is lying and hallucinating all the time.

It's usually drastically better than humans. Most humans can't code. If you are comparing it to specialists then you are already admitting they are on their way to replacing us.

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

#697

Post by grafmax » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

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…

There is a giant capital outlay required to produce a competitive model. Joe Schmo can’t jump into this market. Best he could do would be to ingratiate himself to an existing funding cartel. The moat surrounding a handful of market participants is billions of dollars wide.

There’s competition now among the American companies (who have a head start in this space) as always happens as the professional oligopolists try to manufacture their footholds in the new market.

Nor is it cynical to objectively appraise the interests and economics at play. People aren’t playing circular financing games out of the goodness of their hearts.

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

#698

Post by WarmWash » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

UltraSane wrote: post #186

ordinaryradical wrote: post #59

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…

YouTube is a kind of moat for Google.

YouTube is not the moat, ad block is.

No YouTube competitor can rise because ad blocking is so pervasive and celebrated. People think (selfishly) that ad blocking is some niche thing, the but the reality is that it's around 30% on average, and up to 70% if you have a tech literate audience.

So we have paid competitors, like nebula and curiosity stream, but those are essentially dead because they have to compete with "free" YouTube.

The internet is, pretty predictablely, totally unwilling to look in the mirror.

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

#699

Post by UltraSane » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:24 PM UTC

svieira wrote: post #629

UltraSane wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The valuations on AI companies are a bet on them capturing enough of the $60 trillion annual wages paid to people to have a good ROI.

And when these AI companies are slurping up $30 trillion of the annual wages ... where does it re-enter the human economy? Or does it just disappear into NVIDIA and never come out again?

Without new laws it just make the richest people even richer.

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

#700

Post by wavemode » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:24 PM UTC

kmacdough wrote: post #693

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…

It's still circular. They will succeed or collapse together. And since they make up such a fraction of global market cap, we're in for the ride together. And the circularity makes the actual investment numbers fairly meaningless. They don't mind if they end up overpaying for future services, as long as they overpay each other equally.

Even if Anthropic completely folds, that wouldn't "collapse" Google. $40B is less than 1/3 of Google's net income (that is, the profit they made which otherwise would just be lying around) in a single year.