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

851–860 of 868 posts

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

#851

Post by lobsterthief »

aenis wrote: post #764
MrDarcy wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Ho…

As a CTO this has been my experience as well. I would add in every non-technical C-suite member aiming to use AI as some magic lever to avoid prioritizing projects or engaging in real critical thinking. Too many people are offloading their cognitive decisionmaking to some magic box, thinking it has all the answers, because its output appears magical and complete.

After 25 years in programming I think I’ll finally start that farm ;)

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

#852

Post by xnx »

am17an wrote: post #597
xnx wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing costs is also a business benefit.

The cost being reduced is the cost of your labour. Tokens are only getting more expensive.

Did you mean less expensive?

https://pricepertoken.com/trends#frontier-pricing

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

#853

Post by aenis »

LtWorf wrote: post #846
aenis wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

And it's not a waste of money because?

You'd have learned something new. Useful, not useful, thorough understanding of a new thing is rewarding.

Also, its not primarily about money - the real investment here is time.

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

#854

Post by LtWorf »

aenis wrote: post #853
LtWorf wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's not a waste of money because?

You'd have learned something new. Useful, not useful, thorough understanding of a new thing is rewarding. Also, its not primarily about money - the real investment here is time.

In my opinion it's a complete waste of time and money to learn something that is gated by a company that might disappear tomorrow.

It's akin to company courses to learn something that is specific to that company. Of course you do them on the job, there is no point in doing them if you don't work there.

Similarly what's the point of trying 300 different models if any job will decide for you which one they approve the use of, and you are liable to get fired and asked for damages if you let anything else access company intellectual property?

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

#855

Post by jwpapi »

komali2 wrote: post #403
jwpapi wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you drop this all you will absolutely kill it.

I'm not sure. I have a buddy that's one of the better engineers I know personally, and he struggled to maintain an "AI Lent" for even a month. He found he just wasn't productive enough without it. He did a writeup: https://buduroiu.com/blog/ai-lent-end/

His success measurement is PRs. The success measurement I mean is increased likelihood of company succeeding.

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

#856

Post by mullingitover »

eieie wrote: post #828
mullingitover wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we start getting rid of people who refuse to use AI? I don't even think the bigger companies are going to waste time on figuring out how to retrain, they're just going to do industrial scale layoffs and then rebuild from the ground up with people who won't get past interviews without demonstrating hard skills in this area. There is a shocking gap growing right now, it's a Wile E. Coyote not realizing he already…

Lol people like you operate in a local maximum. Ultimately the shareholders want to see the money. They dont give a crap about what you think or what the poster above thinks - you're both accountable to the shareholders who do not employ you for fun. They employ you for the sole purpose of making them wealthier. All this incremental spend on tokens shows up in the financials positively or it doesn't.

> Ultimately the shareholders want to see the money.

Seems like we're saying the same thing?

> All this incremental spend on tokens shows up in the financials positively or it doesn't.

Right, and we're talking about the staff failing to spend the incremental tokens at all, thus failing to discover whether or not they'll show up positively. I'm just saying, investors are probably going to decide to roll the dice on a complete staffing rebuild rather than try to wait for the existing corporate culture to adapt because they're going to get fomo. Arguably it's already happening.

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

#857

Post by barnabee »

dominotw wrote: post #680
barnabee wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

what have you guys built exactly?

Everything from complex backend logic and processing to new user facing festivals, ops and infra tools, analytical apps, etc.

A lot of engineers now describe the problem, discuss the outline of the solution with the LLM, and then get it to write and test most of it ahead of their review. They tell me it usually takes the same approach they would anyway and even when it doesn’t, it’s often faster to explain what’s wrong and give the LLM another try.

Very little (and even then, only simple internal tools) gets written without a human owning the code and reviewing it thoroughly, but even with that overhead the productivity boost is impressive.

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

#858

Post by matchbok3 »

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…

Literally nobody is talking about slavery here, dude. Did you post in the wrong thread?

Neoliberal? I bet you can't even define that what means other than "some thing I don't like and I have to signal my virtue by saying it".

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

#859

Post by TeMPOraL »

twoodfin wrote: post #634
TeMPOraL wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a frontier provider pivoted as you describe it would certainly change the landscape but they wouldn't be unassailable without developing some sort of secret sauce that gave them an extremely large advantage over everyone else. Integration, and mindset. AI, by its general-purpose nature, subsumes software products . Most products today try to integrate AI inside, put it in a box and use to supercharge the product…

One of the most valuable software products in the world is Instagram. Tens of billions of revenue annually. Any of Meta’s competitors could reproduce Instagram “the software” in every meaningful detail for (let’s say) $100M. They still don’t have Instagram the product. Reducing that outlay to a few billion tokens doesn’t change that. I guess I’ll believe this theory when Anthropic or OpenAI rolls out a search engine…

Instagram isn't a software product, though, except in the trivial sense. It's a portal to the actual service people care about, which is the social network. AI can't do anything about it now, because access to the Instagram social network is legally protected. As long as Meta has a right to control how Instagram is accessed, Instagram the app (or whatever else they decide) will remain at the edge. But beyond that, expect AI. It's happening already, plenty of companies and individuals use third-party software, business automation, and increasingly also AI to create, post, and monitor content. Expect all that to be eaten.

Same with any other social media, DRMed media streaming, and other non-software services, where actual client software does nothing useful and serves primarily as a toll gate.

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

#860

Post by aurareturn »

camdenreslink wrote: post #743
aurareturn wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but Tmobile enterprise customers don't pay much more for plans. In fact, they may pay less because of volume. However, Anthropic can and will charge much more for enterprise customers.

Why will Anthropic be able to do that? That assumes there won't be competition and switching costs will be high. That doesn't seem to be the case to me.

They're already doing it. There are reports of big companies like Meta spending hundreds of millions or billions on Claude tokens already.
Post reply on HN