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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

#761

Post by Planktonne »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #711
Planktonne wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We've had LLMs for far longer than a quarter now; even if you think that only the recent ones have led to any improvement, you'd still expect to see something.

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

#762

Post by TranquilMarmot »

kakacik wrote: post #587
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.

you can say the same about every recent US war, and add one 0 to the sum. Or, more controversially, say EU green deal which decimated EU car industry and lost/will lose us few millions of jobs. Losses up to a trillion and nothing to show for that

I know it may be a radical view, but less cars is always a good thing. Not too happy about the job losses, though.

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

#764

Post by aenis »

MrDarcy wrote: post #380
mullingitover wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Development velocity is very noticeably much higher across the board It's an absolute tornado of PRs these days. Everyone making the most of these tools is effectively an engineering team lead.

The CTO/VP of engineering role down is now singularly focused on keeping agents fed with a backlog of Linear issues. This is the new normal.

As a CTO I can say that this is not my experience.

My experience these days is fighting corporate bureaucracy and inertia to make sure we reap the benefits of faster coding. Feeding agents with work is not a problem. Building teams that use those tools effectively is the problem. (Say, shall we merge product and engineering teams? Do we start getting rid of people who refuse to use AI? What do we do with pentests? How do we strengthen the tools that do code analysis and weed out lazy devs who can now more easily pretend to be invested in their work? Stuff like this keeps me busy.

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

#765

Post by aenis »

camdenreslink wrote: post #485
am17an wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds exhausting. Are your revenue numbers up?

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.

For sure, but these days product management mistakes can be more easily rectified. Before that, if we invested 4 months in building something that did not land, we'd be quite reluctant to jettison this and start fresh. Egos, career considerations, sunk cost, etc. I think I will soon be able to say "not any more", since doing a U turn can be cheaper than pretending the bad choice is the best choice. "Oops, lets redo this" vs. 6 months of executive squabbling about whose fault it is that we wasted $3M in development costs on something that clearly does not perform.

Also, give it time. Real adoption in boring companies started Q1. Q2 is, I think, this settling in and people learning how to do their work and manage their responsibilities. Q3/Q4 will be the time when I expect to start seeing higher velocities across all IT-adjacent products I use.

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

#767

Post by SirMaster »

Saline9515 wrote: post #738
mattmanser wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Moonshot (Kimi) and Deepseek trained their model on chinese GPU, with little capital, and are raising now at around 20b$ valuations. Their latest models are arguably comparable to frontier ones. It is obvious that the valuations of the US companies are totally surreal now.

Apparently it's not obvious by evidence of the investment in them and stock value.

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

#768

Post by TranquilMarmot »

zahlman wrote: post #645
blueblisters wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same until I’m reminded I’m paying Anthropic $100 every month for something that’s indispensable to me now and would probably pay a lot more. Very inelastic demand as long as competition is low at the frontier.

Would it still be indispensable to you if you weren't in this industry?

I think about this a lot - on HN and elsewhere online, there's an outsized portion of people who are likely to see use in AI. If you're online, you're on a computer and you're likely to also do office work that an AI can help with / do for you.

I don't think a majority of people will find it actually useful in the long run. I do game development as a hobby outside of work and every artist I know is outright hostile towards any sort of AI, to the point that they are dropping out of any community that so much as allows any mention of AI workflows.

I know that OpenAI is at least exploring "AI as entertainment" (Sora) but it has yet to be seen if that will be widely accepted or profitable. I've also been reading about teens talking to chatbots more and more rather than talking to real people, which seems like it will only end in mental health disasters.

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

#769

Post by TranquilMarmot »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #24
palmotea wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The puzzling thing is why Google would try to help with that. Aren't they competitors? Wouldn't they want their competitor to have problems? It's more understanding for Amazon or Microsoft to make such an investment, because they're not as competitive in the model space.

There's always three: Google buys Anthropic. Microsoft buys Open AI (or vice versa depending on how things go). SpaceGrok buys Cursor, limps along in 3rd place. Meta is the last man standing, get's stuck with Oracle, dies. And then hopefully some open source models save us from this nightmare before China commadatises everything. Edit: I forgot Amazon. Who knows what they will do. They're the wildcard anyway.

I hate how plausible this is
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