> 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
Surely this is a "hook 'em with low prices, then raise them later" scheme--the biggest one yet.
I wonder where the split between self-hosted LLMs (w new more powerful LLM hardware) and hosted LLMs (big iron from an LLM-provider or at your office) will fall. Will there be a future for both? LLMs and other ML tools just with different levels of capability? etc.
I think "locally hosted LLMs" and "frontier LLMs hosted by frontier labs" will both end up as less than 1% of "Open Source LLMs hosted remotely by a lowest-bidder commodity compute provider"
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.
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.
‘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...
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.
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 wonder where the split between self-hosted LLMs (w new more powerful LLM hardware) and hosted LLMs (big iron from an LLM-provider or at your office) will fall. Will there be a future for both? LLMs and other ML tools just with different levels of capability? etc.
Maybe it could if they stop crippling it so much
(Opus 5.5 thought a user was trying to hack it because their prompt contained the word "reasoning")
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.
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.
Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows AI vision, surging costs
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49886005