7 ms·

Seems like Anthropic has too much money on their hands and are looking for ways to spend it. It’s surprising to see lean AI startups accumulate fat so quickly.

by brap 2y ago

Seems like Anthropic has too much money on their hands and are looking for ways to spend it. It’s surprising to see lean AI startups accumulate fat so quickly. Usually this sort of wheel spinning is reserved for large corporations. And it’s not just them. To me this trend screams “valuations are too high”, and maybe hints at “progress might start to stagnate soon”.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
I don't see it. This is just an analysis of how Anthropic customers are using the product and what investment areas seem most promising in the future - why wouldn't they want that?
- sofixa 2y ago
  Even on the contrary, this is very important information to have, in order to understand your customer base and how sticky you are with them, what features you need to focus on, etc etc
- nerdponx 2y ago
  It's clearly more than an interesting tech blog post written by one of the data guys in their spare time. It's an "initiative". That said, this doesn't seem like completely superfluous "fat" like what Mozilla does. It seems very much targeted at generating interesting bits of content marketing and headlines, which should contribute to increasing Anthropic's household brand name recognition vs. other players OpenAI, as well as making them seem like a serious, trustworthy institution, rather than a rapacious startup that has no interest in playing nice with the rest of society. That is: it's a good marketing tool. My guess is that they developed it internally for market research, and realized that the results would make them look good if published. Expect it to be "sunset" if another AI winter approaches.
peterlk 2y ago
I disagree. I think Anthropic, like the other big players, is trying to get some of that government money. Releasing policy-adjacent papers seems like a way to alert government officials that Anthropic ought to be in the room when the money starts changing hands.
beepbopboopp 2y ago
The exact opposite. Relative to ChatGPT Anthropic has an enormous "brand problem." What they should be doing is exclusive deals like this, but with deals with large publishers on a recurring basis and figure out how to teach consumers who they are and how to use them best. For like 99% of the use cases all these products are parody and the real business gains are finding a way into consumers lives. Semi-relevant sidenote: ChatGPT, spent $8m on a super bowl commercial yesterday just to show cool visualizations instead of any emotional product use case to an ultra majority audience has never had a direct experience with the product. These companies would be best served building a marketing arm away from the main campus in a place like LA or NY to separate the gen pop story from that of the technology.
noah_buddy 2y ago
I am inclined to agree. If you’re at the precipice of automating or transforming knowledge work and the value for being the first is nearly infinite (due to “flywheel effects”), why would you dedicate any energy to studying the impact of AI on jobs directly? The thesis is everything changes. I think AI in its current iteration is going to settle into being like a slightly worse version of Wikipedia morphed with a slightly better version of stackoverflow.
- lblume 2y ago
  I think that strongly underestimates the impact LLMs, especially reasoning models, have on how code is written today.
  - noah_buddy 2y ago
    Educate me. I find them useful but they are less so when you try to do something novel. To me, it seems like fancy regurgitation with some novel pattern matching but not quite intuition/reasoning per se. At the base of LLM reasoning and knowledge is a whole corpus of reasoning and knowledge. I am not quite convinced that LLMs will breach the confines of that corpus and the logical implications of the data there. No “eureka” discovery, just applying what we already have laying around.
    - mistrial9 2y ago
      this is one example https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu/leaderboard.html https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu/leaderboard.html
    - BeetleB 2y ago
      > find them useful but they are less so when you try to do something novel. Well over 90% of work out there is not novel. It just needs someone to do it.
    - hansonkd 2y ago
      I think the trap people fall in is that LLMs don't need to be novel or reason as well as a human to revolutionize society. Plenty of value is already added just by converting unstructured data to structured data. If that is all LLMs did they would be still be a revolution in programming and human development. So much manual entry and development work has essentially evaporated overnight. If there was never a chat based LLM "agent" LLMs just converting arbitrary text to structured JSON schema would be the biggest advancement in comp sci since the internet. There is nothing equivalent that existed before except for manual extraction or rule based hard coding. Judging LLMs based on some criteria of creativity or intuition from a chat is missing the forest for the trees.
raldi 2y ago
Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation whose governance is very different from a typical company in that it doesn’t put shareholder ROI above all else. A majority of its board seats are reserved for people who hold no equity whatsoever and whose explicit mandate is to look out for humanity. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust https://time.com/6983420/anthropic-structure-openai-incentives/ https://time.com/6983420/anthropic-structure-openai-incentiv...
- idiotsecant 2y ago
  Put this and 'dont be evil' and 5 dollars in my hand and I'll give you a cup of coffee.
  - nonchalantsui 2y ago
    Coffee for $5? That's a steal in this economy!
    - flurie 2y ago
      The coffee is made with the assistance of AI, which means some nonzero portion will be something other than coffee, but at least it means every sip is an adventure.
      - amarcheschi 2y ago
        This is one of the funniest takes on ai I've read, it could've been out of a videogame like the outer worlds with its absurd takes on crapitalism It's not the best choice, it's spacer's choice!
      - idiotsecant 2y ago
        Isn't there an SCP where occasionally it spits out liquid magma or strange matter or something?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
tinyhouse 2y ago
Understating who is using your product is wheel spinning?
amazingamazing 2y ago
idk, the models themselves are quickly becoming a commodity. it makes sense to spend money figuring out go to market rather than just improve the models themselves.
throwaway954399 2y ago
And yet they don't have the resources to let job applicants know when their application was unsuccessful. You just get an email after you applied saying: "We may not reach out unless we think you are a strong fit for the role you applied to. In the meantime, we truly appreciate your patience throughout our hiring process." They also tell you not to use AI in the application.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
They only have like 500 employees. And you could argue this is part of their stated mission.
- Artemon 2y ago
  only?
laidoffamazon 2y ago
I would argue this is within their overall objective. It’s not like Stripe creating a publisher (??)
castigatio 2y ago
We live in a world where there's a lot of talk about how AI might impact societies and economies - but little actual data. To me it seems very worthwhile to try to add 'any' data to that discussion and track how things change over time. Are reports of economic or labour trends pointless? Should companies not track how people use their products? I don't think it costs Anthropic much to do this - it's work for a couple of people to analyze their database.

by brap 2y ago

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

I don't see it. This is just an analysis of how Anthropic customers are using the product and what investment areas seem most promising in the future - why wouldn't they want that?

sofixa 2y ago
Even on the contrary, this is very important information to have, in order to understand your customer base and how sticky you are with them, what features you need to focus on, etc etc
nerdponx 2y ago
It's clearly more than an interesting tech blog post written by one of the data guys in their spare time. It's an "initiative". That said, this doesn't seem like completely superfluous "fat" like what Mozilla does. It seems very much targeted at generating interesting bits of content marketing and headlines, which should contribute to increasing Anthropic's household brand name recognition vs. other players OpenAI, as well as making them seem like a serious, trustworthy institution, rather than a rapacious startup that has no interest in playing nice with the rest of society. That is: it's a good marketing tool. My guess is that they developed it internally for market research, and realized that the results would make them look good if published. Expect it to be "sunset" if another AI winter approaches.

peterlk 2y ago

I disagree. I think Anthropic, like the other big players, is trying to get some of that government money. Releasing policy-adjacent papers seems like a way to alert government officials that Anthropic ought to be in the room when the money starts changing hands.

beepbopboopp 2y ago

The exact opposite. Relative to ChatGPT Anthropic has an enormous "brand problem." What they should be doing is exclusive deals like this, but with deals with large publishers on a recurring basis and figure out how to teach consumers who they are and how to use them best. For like 99% of the use cases all these products are parody and the real business gains are finding a way into consumers lives. Semi-relevant sidenote: ChatGPT, spent $8m on a super bowl commercial yesterday just to show cool visualizations instead of any emotional product use case to an ultra majority audience has never had a direct experience with the product. These companies would be best served building a marketing arm away from the main campus in a place like LA or NY to separate the gen pop story from that of the technology.

noah_buddy 2y ago

I am inclined to agree. If you’re at the precipice of automating or transforming knowledge work and the value for being the first is nearly infinite (due to “flywheel effects”), why would you dedicate any energy to studying the impact of AI on jobs directly? The thesis is everything changes. I think AI in its current iteration is going to settle into being like a slightly worse version of Wikipedia morphed with a slightly better version of stackoverflow.

lblume 2y ago
I think that strongly underestimates the impact LLMs, especially reasoning models, have on how code is written today.
- noah_buddy 2y ago
  Educate me. I find them useful but they are less so when you try to do something novel. To me, it seems like fancy regurgitation with some novel pattern matching but not quite intuition/reasoning per se. At the base of LLM reasoning and knowledge is a whole corpus of reasoning and knowledge. I am not quite convinced that LLMs will breach the confines of that corpus and the logical implications of the data there. No “eureka” discovery, just applying what we already have laying around.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    this is one example https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu/leaderboard.html https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu/leaderboard.html
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    > find them useful but they are less so when you try to do something novel. Well over 90% of work out there is not novel. It just needs someone to do it.
  - hansonkd 2y ago
    I think the trap people fall in is that LLMs don't need to be novel or reason as well as a human to revolutionize society. Plenty of value is already added just by converting unstructured data to structured data. If that is all LLMs did they would be still be a revolution in programming and human development. So much manual entry and development work has essentially evaporated overnight. If there was never a chat based LLM "agent" LLMs just converting arbitrary text to structured JSON schema would be the biggest advancement in comp sci since the internet. There is nothing equivalent that existed before except for manual extraction or rule based hard coding. Judging LLMs based on some criteria of creativity or intuition from a chat is missing the forest for the trees.

raldi 2y ago

Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation whose governance is very different from a typical company in that it doesn’t put shareholder ROI above all else. A majority of its board seats are reserved for people who hold no equity whatsoever and whose explicit mandate is to look out for humanity. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust https://time.com/6983420/anthropic-structure-openai-incentives/ https://time.com/6983420/anthropic-structure-openai-incentiv...

idiotsecant 2y ago
Put this and 'dont be evil' and 5 dollars in my hand and I'll give you a cup of coffee.
- nonchalantsui 2y ago
  Coffee for $5? That's a steal in this economy!
  - flurie 2y ago
    The coffee is made with the assistance of AI, which means some nonzero portion will be something other than coffee, but at least it means every sip is an adventure.
    - amarcheschi 2y ago
      This is one of the funniest takes on ai I've read, it could've been out of a videogame like the outer worlds with its absurd takes on crapitalism It's not the best choice, it's spacer's choice!
    - idiotsecant 2y ago
      Isn't there an SCP where occasionally it spits out liquid magma or strange matter or something?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

tinyhouse 2y ago

Understating who is using your product is wheel spinning?

amazingamazing 2y ago

idk, the models themselves are quickly becoming a commodity. it makes sense to spend money figuring out go to market rather than just improve the models themselves.

throwaway954399 2y ago

And yet they don't have the resources to let job applicants know when their application was unsuccessful. You just get an email after you applied saying: "We may not reach out unless we think you are a strong fit for the role you applied to. In the meantime, we truly appreciate your patience throughout our hiring process." They also tell you not to use AI in the application.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

They only have like 500 employees. And you could argue this is part of their stated mission.

Artemon 2y ago
only?

laidoffamazon 2y ago

I would argue this is within their overall objective. It’s not like Stripe creating a publisher (??)

castigatio 2y ago

We live in a world where there's a lot of talk about how AI might impact societies and economies - but little actual data. To me it seems very worthwhile to try to add 'any' data to that discussion and track how things change over time. Are reports of economic or labour trends pointless? Should companies not track how people use their products? I don't think it costs Anthropic much to do this - it's work for a couple of people to analyze their database.