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

711–720 of 868 posts

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

#711

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Planktonne wrote: post #416
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's substantial observable change pointing towards a universal software development speedup in the neighborhood of 2x. Much of it is internal company metrics, simply because it's meaningless in most enterprise contexts to count how much software is released. Things you can count, like the number of phone apps published, show the same pattern: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/18/the-app-store-is-booming-a...

I'll grant that there's evidence of more low-level activity, but I'm not sure that equates to meaningful change particularly. "Released an app" is a neutral signal on its own, in much the same way that the Unity asset store led to an increase in game releases, but 'more asset flips' isn't really a major change to the gaming industry. If software development speed has doubled, then we should be seeing not just an incr…

We should be, but I just don't know how you'd measure that in the short term. It's very hard to put a number to "how much software did Google release this month". You'd expect to see a substantial increase in revenue, but most kinds of software generate revenue only months down the line after adoption picks up, and few companies have even released Q1 results yet.

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

#712

Post by salemh »

devmor wrote: post #464
jedberg wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first to AGI, or a close approximation, is the winner. That’s what the investors in Anthropic and OpenAI are betting on. I’d be willing the bet that the Venn diagram of investors in those two companies is nearly a circle.

Are these investors high? Or just insane?

[dead]

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

#713

Post by bethekidyouwant »

liendolucas wrote: post #655
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…

And the day you don't have that drug what do you do? If anything you are training people to become dependent on one or more subscription services.

Like the drug of electricity and Internet, running water grocery stores?

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

#714

Post by throwaway173738 »

liendolucas wrote: post #655
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…

And the day you don't have that drug what do you do? If anything you are training people to become dependent on one or more subscription services.

Solidworks is also a subscription service.

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

#715

Post by larrytheworm »

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…

[dead]

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

#716

Post by Daishiman »

camdenreslink wrote: post #489
Daishiman wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you ignoring the fact that grabbing data from heterogeneous sources, combining it and presenting it is generally never a trivial task? This is exactly what LLMs are good for.

If you are using an LLM to actually fetch that data, combine it, and present it to you in an ad hoc way (like you run the same prompt every month or something), I wouldn't trust that at all. It still hallucinates, invents things and takes short cuts too often. If you are using an LLM to create an application to grab data from heterogeneous sources, combine it and present it, that is much better, but could also basica…

Your knowledge of LLMs is outdated by at least a year. For the past three months at least my team has been one-shotting complex SQL queries that are as semantically correct as your ability to describe them.

And why do you diminish the skill of good data wrangling as if it weren’t the most valuable skill in the vast majority of computer programming jobs? Your cynicism doesn’t correspond with the current ground truth in LLM usage.

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

#717

Post by voncheese »

mattmanser wrote: post #637
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(a) it's ability/desire to make such investments is still driven by stock-driven optimism I don't think it has much to do with the stock price at all. Current platform oligopolists fear the rise of new platforms. They want a foot in the door for strategic reasons. What could happen is that frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI never become platforms and turn out to be providers of a largely commoditised, low margi…

But OpenAI/Anthropic are not selling the compute as they're buying that from Google/Amazon/etc. So they're selling the transformation, or the model. Or the ability to make a model. And their brand and their harness. And it seems like the model is definitely not worth 380 billion. Models depreciate incredibly fast. There are lots of models and the other models aren't that far behind. And it seems like the harness is n…

Not directly related to the valuation question you asked, but for Google there's a lot of value in getting as much Anthropic workload to run on their hardware as possible. The value comes from getting the insights and learnings of running these workloads, especially when they run on custom Google hardware. That hardware will get better as a result and increase the likelihood that Google has world class AI hardware in the future.

I can't say with any confidence that the $40B is a reasonable amount to pay for that value, but it doesn't seem unreasonable over a multi year time horizon given the stakes.

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

#719

Post by Ifkaluva »

aurareturn wrote: post #636
SJC_Hacker wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valued at a trillion by basically, no one who would actually invest anywhere close to that

Bring them to public market and I’d bet my house it will shoot up to $2t on first day.

I do in fact plan to bet my house on that day.

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

#720

Post by bdangubic »

Ifkaluva wrote: post #718
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.

Also to weaken NVIDIA

if I had a dollar for every company that is trying to “weaken NVIDIA” I’d richer than Elon
Post reply on HN