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

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

#721

Post by flyinglizard » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 3:41 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #682

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In terms of runtime performance of applications, AI is a net win. You can easily remove abstractions like Electron, React, various libraries. Just let the AI write more code. You can even do the unthinkable and write desktop native again.

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

#722

Post by DeathArrow » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 3:42 PM UTC

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…

>So what's worth 380 billion exactly? The brand?

>These valuations just look really off. Not by one order of magnitude, but more like by 4 orders of magnitude. Like 380 million might be a reasonable valuation, but not billion.

Or maybe the USD isn't worth that much now.

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

#723

Post by kloop » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 3:46 PM UTC

datavirtue wrote: post #620

netcan wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just hard to tell the difference between "real" demand and "circular." That's the concern. PG had an essay about this during the dotcom, when he worked at yahoo. Iirc...Yahoo's share price and other big successes in the space attracted investment into startups. Startups used that money to advertise on yahoo. Yahoo bought some of these the startups. So... a lot of the revenue used to analyze companies for investm…

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…

> 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.

This doesn't tell me anything. Two devs who cared and didn't have a bunch of pointless meetings could already, and regularly did, scoop the big tech teams.

There were always 2 ways to complete a ticket. One that did what the stakeholder wanted, and one that does what the ticket says.

But devs that care about the product and what the stakeholders need are rare, and finding one of them was already a significant bottleneck on most projects.

AI might be an accelerator, but we've yet to see if it's optimizing the part that was actually the bottleneck yet.

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

#724

Post by kowbell » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 3:47 PM UTC

zakisaad wrote: post #147

consumer451 wrote: post #104

It is very difficult for me to see any amount of money being thrown at Anthropic as a bad idea. The amount of new revenue that I am personally able to create for my clients, using Claude models for dev, and Claude models inside the insanely agile products delivered, is astounding. If I was not currently experiencing this myself, and someone told me that this was possible, I would be calling them names.

You could say the same about Codex (and other tooling). Opus as a model is market leading (trading blows with the greatest that OpenAI is peddling), but there will be a reckoning when open weight models are good enough - and I'd argue we are almost there with some of the latest releases. If you hook up the latest OpenAI models to something like OpenCode, its a taste of what an open harness with a powerful model (outs…

> there will be a reckoning when open weight models are good enough

Will you have the hardware to run them? Perhaps. Will enough of Anthropic's/OpenAI's large enterprise customers have the hardware to run them and the money/desire to have their own internal teams set up and maintain them?

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

#725

Post by p1esk » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

UltraSane wrote: post #699

svieira wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What new laws would you like to see?

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

#726

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

thawab wrote: post #630

bandrami wrote: post #627

If they're investing at the same valuation Anthropic had in their last round, what happened to all that previous money?

You might be miss remembering, the last round they raised 30b.

[deleted]

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

#727

Post by camdenreslink » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

Daishiman wrote: post #716

camdenreslink wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Well, that is still having the LLM write code which is more like my second scenario. I use SOTA LLMs for coding literally every day. I don't think my knowledge is "outdated by at least a year".

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

#728

Post by camdenreslink » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #571

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.

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…

I question the premise that faster iteration on prototypes leads to better revenue or business outcomes.

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

#729

Post by UltraSane » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

p1esk wrote: post #725

UltraSane wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What new laws would you like to see?

a national dividend

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

#730

Post by fizlebit » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 4:20 PM UTC

The big bet here is that anthropic stays ahead of the curve and is the goto tool for businesses. The risk is disruption to that leader position, or that it can't sell all those tokens because the value/cost ratio is too lower for consumers of them. I suspect that disruption is the bigger risk because the tokens in my experience are valuable, so as they innovate we're betting the value of the tokens goes up and the cost comes down.