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Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

bloomberg.com

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

#751

Post by jmalicki »

netcan wrote: post #596
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…

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…

While value isn't linear, prejudgement of value for allocation of resources is very imperfect.

A lot of stuff that doesn't make the cut is the the stuff that does have value. When you're lowering the bar, remember it's a noisy bar - so a lot more good stuff is going to come through as well.

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

#754

Post by mcmcmc »

agentbc9000 wrote: post #752

this wont stop the pay per token system being forced onto its users - lets see how much you'll be prepared to pay? Powerusers paying $15/$40 per day?

Turns out AI is expensive… who knew? Giving it away for free was a predatory trap to create dependency. Now that they’ve captured enough market share they can try to cover their costs. The interesting question will be if it’s even even possible for them to turn a profit without a cartel or massive government subsidies.

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

#756

Post by zymhan »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #606
paganel wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you aware that all heavy industry in all highly developed nations make extensive use of vendor financing to sell their products? The OP did mention GE Capital, the motherload of all heavy industry vendor financing. And of massaging the accounting books in order to increase shareholder value in the short term, also.

> motherload of all heavy industry vendor financing I doubt they are bigger than other national "heavy industry" champions from East Asia and Western/Central Europe. Without checking, I would guess that the global leaders are Boeing and Airbus.

Its odd that don't care enough to at least confirm your arguments are right.

I'd suggest learning more about this subject instead of assuming you already know enough.

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

#757

Post by Lihh27 »

bluecalm wrote: post #109

I find it crazy that Google considers Anthropic to be worth almost 10% of Google itself (350B valuation mentioned in the article). Anthropic gets traction but has no moat, no infrastructure and relatively small team working for it. I feel for 40B you can get a lot of very smart people and a lot of very good hardware to outcompete it.

cheaper than finding out their own 40B internal project has no users in two years.

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

#758

Post by TeMPOraL »

nocman wrote: post #745
bethekidyouwant wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think the likelyhood of "electricity and Internet, running water grocery stores" being pulled out from underneath you (either by long term failure or prohibitive cost changes) is anywhere near as high as it is for subscription-based AI tools (at least not in the US).

That was a factor with electricity early on as it was first put to use. The flip side of the infamous "does it make the beer taste better?" adage/nonsense is that, per the story, back then you had breweries build their own power plants, because electricity was just that useful. It took a while for the market to start feeling comfortable with reliability of electricity supply and price point.

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

#759

Post by aenis »

eieie wrote: post #463
jameshart wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has always been a gap between the experience of solo/small shop developers, vs. developers who work in teams in a large corporate environment. But thanks to open source, we have for the past twenty years at least mostly all been using the same tools. But right now, the difference in developer experience between a dev on a team at a business which has corporate copilot or Claude licenses and bosses encouraging t…

Let’s take an extreme example. Meta seemingly has a constant stream of product managers. If llm’s really augment the productivity of engineers, why isn’t meta launching lots more stuff? I mean there’s no harm in at least launching one new thing. What are all those people doing with the so called productivity enhancements? What I’m calling into question is how much does generating more code matter if the bottle neck i…

In a word, bottlenecks moved.

What I see in my backyard: coding now takes significantly less time, but its just coding. Before one gets to building there are squabbles between business and product people. Testing takes just as much as it used to. Since nice to haves are easy to add and product people begin to take it for granted, the product cycles don't get shorter.

Give it time. Right now its just coding, but procedural AI will come after product development, architecture, and then whatever is left of management.

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

#760

Post by aenis »

elliotec wrote: post #495
jameshart wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has always been a gap between the experience of solo/small shop developers, vs. developers who work in teams in a large corporate environment. But thanks to open source, we have for the past twenty years at least mostly all been using the same tools. But right now, the difference in developer experience between a dev on a team at a business which has corporate copilot or Claude licenses and bosses encouraging t…

Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is the vast difference? Who's doing more of what, or whatever you're implying? And how do you quantify this?

The people who use AI to the maximum learn more.

A neutral hobbyist on a $20 budget will build something and immediately bump into quotas. Its not going to be an enjoyable experience.

A negatively predisposed pro who only dabbles in AI gets to the first disappointment, smiles, and thinks "yeah, about what i expected" and quits.

To learn those new tools one needs to not be stingy. Invest as much as needed into tokens, subscriptions, and maybe most importantly invest the time. Spend time building various things. Try out various models not just for coding, but as part of apps being built. For bonus points, meaningfully experiment with local models. I try to avoid discussions with sceptics who have not put at least a few months of effort into learning those tools. It's like discussing driving with my mother in law, who spent maybe 20hrs behind the wheel through her whole life (and is very, very opinionated!).

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