I had the experience of working at a shop where the business side would use that sort of justification for all sorts of antics.
The favorite I was not involved in, was when they spent many months (at least 3, maaaaybe more than 6?) working on a thing, with verbal promises on the other side, but then the owner of the business that kept promising to sign a contract once we got to a certain point died and at that point the whole thing got quietly killed.
Again, not my project; the ones I was involved in (different product,) at least half of which did materialize but most of them never made up the volume for the pain of the work, either on the dev side or the business side [0].
[0] - My favorite was when we did an integration with Tesla. they decided to use a VIN as the primary key for their salesforce integration. So, if a customer got an inspection on a trade-in, waited, then decided to try again... oops!
> If Anthropic is losing a fortune now with $13 billion in costs how are they going to break even spending $100+ billion per year? Don’t worry, their godlike AI will figure that out?
It's wild that this is an accurate summation of their position here. It's equally wild that a company building and selling a technology as actually useful as an LLM - yes, I think they're useful, sue me - can't begin to think about how to make money with one.
I agree with the article - they'd better hope they are messianic super geniuses, because if not, they're gonna seem real stupid when we have all moved in in a few years. The technology will stay, but that doesn't mean they will.
> I agree with the article - they'd better hope they are messianic super geniuses
It sounds remarkable, and I didn't believe it at first. But after more reading, I am convinced an influential part of Anthropic leadership really is something like a religious movement
You mean to say "you need to be a monopoly or maybe duopoly". Both are illegal but what are the chances the Trump administration is going to do anything?
> It's equally wild that a company building and selling a technology as actually useful as an LLM [...] can't begin to think about how to make money with one.
I think they can. I think every frontier LLM company in this industry knows exactly how to make money with an LLM and furthermore it's almost bulletproof - they just don't want to say it.
LLMs are going to be the most devastatingly effective ad delivery mechanism that we've ever seen once they start flipping the switches. They're going to load the context up with all your demographic information and preferences and advertising susceptibilities and then tell it to subtly suggest to you all kinds of shit you need to buy.
It's going to be nearly subliminal and so slick that you're not even going to know you're being advertised to. It will be like your best friend gently convincing you over a period of months to buy a new EV, or that you need to refinance your mortgage, or that you should move to Atlanta.
They know exactly how to make money with these things, they just can't be the first ones to say it.
‘Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.’
I mean, if you’re gonna aim big may as well go all out. Next week OpenAI will claim to transform the global economy more than life itself.
All horseshit, of course. Still haven’t found a benefit to AI in my work or personal life. I hope the crash is a doozy.
I think AI will transform things but the Anthropic financials are crazy. I suspect you'll get your crash. It's like Webvan saying the internet would transform commerce. Yes but...
Here are my biggest risks for Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX that don't seem to get the attention they deserve:
1. What happens to your existing hardware investments when NVidia releases new hardware that allows buyers to run the same models at a fraction of the cost in energy times? IMHO performance-per-Watt is going to be the only significant metric here. Yes, your existing hardware will still work but efficiency is going to be the name of the game;
2. How are you going to deal with the threat of open weight models that can be run locally and/or or cloud GPU infrastructure? We already have relatively affordable hardware (ie Mac Studios) that can run models as large as 500B-1T parameters with 3-4 bit quantization. That's only going to get better; and
3. The only use cases for AI really are:
a) Raising prices;
b) Cutting costs, particularly labor; and
c) Military applications such as targeting and autonomous drone and missile operation.
A society where even 20% of people end up unemployed is one that catastrophically fails.
What never checks out (aside from most of it) is how they will raise prices to a market that shrinks due to unemployment. Can’t sell apples to people without money.
29 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 54.6 ms ] threadThe favorite I was not involved in, was when they spent many months (at least 3, maaaaybe more than 6?) working on a thing, with verbal promises on the other side, but then the owner of the business that kept promising to sign a contract once we got to a certain point died and at that point the whole thing got quietly killed.
Again, not my project; the ones I was involved in (different product,) at least half of which did materialize but most of them never made up the volume for the pain of the work, either on the dev side or the business side [0].
[0] - My favorite was when we did an integration with Tesla. they decided to use a VIN as the primary key for their salesforce integration. So, if a customer got an inspection on a trade-in, waited, then decided to try again... oops!
We were supposed to make it all up on being able to hard-sell the user on addons and multi-pack buys.
Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows AI vision, surging costs
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49886005
It's wild that this is an accurate summation of their position here. It's equally wild that a company building and selling a technology as actually useful as an LLM - yes, I think they're useful, sue me - can't begin to think about how to make money with one.
I agree with the article - they'd better hope they are messianic super geniuses, because if not, they're gonna seem real stupid when we have all moved in in a few years. The technology will stay, but that doesn't mean they will.
Maybe it could if they stop crippling it so much
It sounds remarkable, and I didn't believe it at first. But after more reading, I am convinced an influential part of Anthropic leadership really is something like a religious movement
I think they can. I think every frontier LLM company in this industry knows exactly how to make money with an LLM and furthermore it's almost bulletproof - they just don't want to say it.
LLMs are going to be the most devastatingly effective ad delivery mechanism that we've ever seen once they start flipping the switches. They're going to load the context up with all your demographic information and preferences and advertising susceptibilities and then tell it to subtly suggest to you all kinds of shit you need to buy.
It's going to be nearly subliminal and so slick that you're not even going to know you're being advertised to. It will be like your best friend gently convincing you over a period of months to buy a new EV, or that you need to refinance your mortgage, or that you should move to Atlanta.
They know exactly how to make money with these things, they just can't be the first ones to say it.
I mean, if you’re gonna aim big may as well go all out. Next week OpenAI will claim to transform the global economy more than life itself.
All horseshit, of course. Still haven’t found a benefit to AI in my work or personal life. I hope the crash is a doozy.
1. What happens to your existing hardware investments when NVidia releases new hardware that allows buyers to run the same models at a fraction of the cost in energy times? IMHO performance-per-Watt is going to be the only significant metric here. Yes, your existing hardware will still work but efficiency is going to be the name of the game;
2. How are you going to deal with the threat of open weight models that can be run locally and/or or cloud GPU infrastructure? We already have relatively affordable hardware (ie Mac Studios) that can run models as large as 500B-1T parameters with 3-4 bit quantization. That's only going to get better; and
3. The only use cases for AI really are:
a) Raising prices;
b) Cutting costs, particularly labor; and
c) Military applications such as targeting and autonomous drone and missile operation.
A society where even 20% of people end up unemployed is one that catastrophically fails.
A society where 98% end up unemployed because they no longer need to work for a living is something else completely.
American zeitgeist.
The way they calculate that is, last month's revenue x 12.
The leaked numbers are old.