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Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

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

#801

Post by brainwad »

throwawaytea wrote: post #45

If you added up all the major AI valuations, it's apparently worth more than products Americans constantly buy and rely on for their main life. So either AI is going to be involved in every Americans life to a large degree, and paying real money for, or these valuations are insanely wrong.

The consumer goods companies can generate a lot of value for customers and also be terrible investments that consequently don't have high market caps. Indeed, that's the expected end state of a relatively stable competitive market - razor-thin profit margins with consumers getting almost all of the surplus.

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

#802

Post by shimman »

simianwords wrote: post #589
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.

Technology and productivity have reduced more death than any redistribution

What a hilariously moronic comment. In what way is this true? When the cotton gin was invented, slavery absolutely exploded and productivity rose like several 100,000%.

Was this meaningful for humanity? Keeping 20% of the population in bondage because we didn't want to upset the productivity gains of slavers in the south? All progress IS progress after all right?

Government welfare programs have done more to decrease poverty than anything else in the history of human existence. Also one doesn't have to go back in time 200+ years either to see the massive failures of neoliberal economics. Who thinks their lives are better because they have slightly faster phone while they continue to not afford healthcare, can't educate themselves, provide for children, or own homes.

You think 50% of the population seeing their lives materially decrease is meaningful? Good grief, do you honestly care more about trinkets than children? Actually don't answer that for the sake of your soul.

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

#803

Post by netcan »

jmalicki wrote: post #751
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…

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.

Yes.. I agree.

.. and that entropy can be where all the ultimate value is. That said... considering the point at hand is the context, it's important to start with the diminishing marginal returns.

To give a simple example... Google and FB do not have "invest able software opportunities" at hand. They've been searching everywhere for nails for their "build software" hammer. They are well resourced and risk tolerant.

The diminishing returns curve for "more software" is steep.

Good stuff coming through often starts with $100m markets becoming $1bn markets. That's not even noise at the scale they're thinking about. Long term, sure. Plausibility range is as wide at it has maybe ever been.

But... systemic value is hard to make.

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

#804

Post by brainwad »

northern-lights wrote: post #174
Oras wrote: post #9

They just announced their new chip, and they are the ones created transformers yet investing this amount in a competitor? I don’t know what to make of it

Why do you think Google considers Anthropic a competitor?

Google makes a competing product to Claude's main product? So competing, in fact, that they have to ban Googlers from using Claude in order to get enough dogfooders.

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

#805

Post by simianwords »

shimman wrote: post #802
simianwords wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology and productivity have reduced more death than any redistribution

What a hilariously moronic comment. In what way is this true? When the cotton gin was invented, slavery absolutely exploded and productivity rose like several 100,000%. Was this meaningful for humanity? Keeping 20% of the population in bondage because we didn't want to upset the productivity gains of slavers in the south? All progress IS progress after all right? Government welfare programs have done more to decrease…

i'm a bit worried for politics in the next 10-20 years because the upper class believe in conspiracy theories like this.

all your welfare and distribution were only possible because technology created the wealth that could be redistributed later. i would suggest researching this with a calm mind.

> Was this meaningful for humanity? Keeping 20% of the population in bondage because we didn't want to upset the productivity gains of slavers in the south? All progress IS progress after all right?

Slavery was actually leading to less overall productivity, abolishing it was crucial to make everyone richer and not just the slaves.

Apart from that, technology (and not redistribution) mostly resulted in much higher life expectancy and much lower poverty levels especially in developing countries like India and China.

You can ask your favourite LLM agent the primary reason the world achieved emancipation from poverty (hint it was because of economic activity and technology)

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

#806

Post by kaiokendev »

barnabee wrote: post #254
an0malous wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and worse.

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…

> Every time someone has any idea it's accompanied by a multi page "Clauded" memo explaining why it's a great idea and what exactly should be done (about 20% of which is useful).

we're in the same boat, and currently trying to fix that 20% problem because it's the biggest hindrance to shipping things quickly

there is a ton of learned ceremony that we have to undue gracefully because it's extremely tempting to vibe code a problem spec as opposed to just... talking to users directly and understanding what the actual problem is

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

#807

Post by kakacik »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #762
kakacik wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah they are just replaced by chinese cars, people won't drive less or buy less cars just because EU became noncompetitive. We just lost big part of economy to somebody else.

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

#808

Post by paganel »

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.

Back in the day GE (including GE Capital) was, on paper at least, the largest company in the world when it comes to market cap, my memory is fuzzy but I’d say that happened just after the Dot Com crash and going into the Great Recession. Greater than a heavy industry company like Samsung, yes. Again, this was in a big part as a result of GE Capital doing very scammy things, but for a good few years Jack Welch was regarded like an actually business guru.

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

#809

Post by techlover14159 »

4ndrewl wrote: post #694
nvarsj wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I believe these tools change the value of different skill sets in a very profound ways. Being good with rules of a programming language and syntax is no longer as valuable as it used to be.

Understanding the problem space is becoming more valuable. Strength in architecture of a solution is another skill that is becoming very valuable.

We are close to getting to a point where someone with overall general (and perhaps not very detailed) understanding of arch and design and a good understanding of the problem space and having a good taste in usability will be able to create awesome solutinos.

I can't wait to see these solutions being created by one or two person teams.

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

#810

Post by Saline9515 »

SirMaster wrote: post #767
Saline9515 wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kimi and Deepseek are in China and don't have access to the US capital market.
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