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Must be nice to have unquota’ed tokens to use with frontier AI (is this the case for Anthropic employees?). One thing I think is fascinating as we enter the Int

Must be nice to have unquota’ed tokens to use with frontier AI (is this the case for Anthropic employees?). One thing I think is fascinating as we enter the Intellicene is the disproportionate access to AI. The ability to petition them to do what you want is currently based on monthly subscriptions, but will it change in the future? Who knows?

selcuka 9mo ago
> is this the case for Anthropic employees? Not sure about all Anhropic employees, but that must definitely be the case for Boris Cherny.
Aurornis 9mo ago
> (is this the case for Anthropic employees?) It would be funny if the company paying software engineers $500K or more along with gold-plated stock options was limiting how much they could use the software their company was developing.
- joshribakoff 9mo ago
  Why is that funny? What company gives you unlimited resources? That doesn’t scale. Google employees can’t just demand a $10,000 workstation. It’s reasonable to assume they have some guardrails, for both financial and stability reasons. Who knows… if it’s unlimited now, will it stay that way forever? Probably unlimited in the same sense as unlimited pto.
  - cma 9mo ago
    If it takes a lot of back and forth it between lots of people it is more like a $12000 workstation or more after the labor for requesting and approving.
  - seg_lol 9mo ago
    Folks in MEGACORP cloud env can spend > 5 digits a month and not get noticed.
    - perfmode 9mo ago
      Can they spend 7 digits?
      - seg_lol 9mo ago
        Yes, but it would get noticed.
  - plorkyeran 9mo ago
    I can't get a $10k workstation but if I used $10k/month on cloud compute it'd take a few months for anyone to talk to me about it and as long as I was actually using it for work purposes I wouldn't run into any consequences more severe than being told to knock it off if I couldn't convince people it was worth the cost.
  - groby_b 9mo ago
    If an employee has a business need for a $10k workstation, I'm fairly certain they'll get a $10k workstation. Yes, accounting still happens. Guardrails exist. But quibbling over 2% of a SWEs salary if it's clear that the productivity increase will be significantly more than 2% would be... not a wise use of anybody's time.
  - Aurornis 9mo ago
    > Why is that funny? What company gives you unlimited resources? Anthropic has raised tens of billions of dollars of funding. Their number of employees is in the thousands. This isn't like Google. Claude Code is what they're developing. The company is obviously going to encourage them to use it as much as possible. Limiting how much the Claude Code lead can use Claude Code would be funny because their lead dev would have to stop mid-day and wait for his token quota window to reset before he can continue developing their flagship coding product. Not going to happen. I'm strangely fascinated by the reaction in the comments, though. A lot of people here must have worked in oddly restrictive corporate environments to even think that a company like this would limit how much their own employees can use the company's own product to develop their own product.
  - saagarjha 9mo ago
    Google gives most of their engineers access to machines that would cost that much. If you’re working on specific projects (e.g. Chrome) you can request even more expensive machines.
- codesnik 9mo ago
  well, not only their software but also hardware resources they're renting, but I agree they don't.
- perfmode 9mo ago
  Tokens aren’t free.
  - Aurornis 9mo ago
    When you work for the company supplying those tokens and you're working on the product that sells those tokens at scale, the company will let you use as many tokens as you want.
- blhack 9mo ago
  Especially when the software they're developing is supposed to speed up the speed at which the software they are developing is developed.
- michaelmcmillan 9mo ago
  It is a long-standing policy at Netflix for employees to pay for their own subscriptions. It ensures that employees "live the member experience".
  - Aurornis 9mo ago
    That’s for personal use at home. I guarantee the engineers at Netflix who develop and test video streaming aren’t doing so on their family’s home Netflix plan.
dcre 9mo ago
Pretty sure I have seen them imply in one of the panel discussions on their YouTube channel (can't remember which) that they get unlimited use of the best models. I remember them talking about records for the most spent in a day or something.
returnInfinity 9mo ago
Its not unlimited, the compute allocation was one of the reason for the coup at OpenAI
- pbmonster 9mo ago
  Pretty sure that was scientists competing for 6 month training runs of new 100B+ parameter models, not coders burning through a couple of million tokens.
avereveard 9mo ago
Owning the means of cognition is going to be more and more importan as it allows one to scale more than linearly. Outsiders will be tied to limited or pay per use because owning the means of cognition will be a massive extractive economy
crthpl 9mo ago
It is the case that Anthropic employees have no usage limits. Some people do experiments where they spawn up hundreds of Claude instances just to see if any of them succeed.
- OccamsMirror 9mo ago
  Are they using these tests as a form of RLHF?

selcuka 9mo ago

> is this the case for Anthropic employees? Not sure about all Anhropic employees, but that must definitely be the case for Boris Cherny.

Aurornis 9mo ago

> (is this the case for Anthropic employees?) It would be funny if the company paying software engineers $500K or more along with gold-plated stock options was limiting how much they could use the software their company was developing.

joshribakoff 9mo ago
Why is that funny? What company gives you unlimited resources? That doesn’t scale. Google employees can’t just demand a $10,000 workstation. It’s reasonable to assume they have some guardrails, for both financial and stability reasons. Who knows… if it’s unlimited now, will it stay that way forever? Probably unlimited in the same sense as unlimited pto.
- cma 9mo ago
  If it takes a lot of back and forth it between lots of people it is more like a $12000 workstation or more after the labor for requesting and approving.
- seg_lol 9mo ago
  Folks in MEGACORP cloud env can spend > 5 digits a month and not get noticed.
  - perfmode 9mo ago
    Can they spend 7 digits?
    - seg_lol 9mo ago
      Yes, but it would get noticed.
- plorkyeran 9mo ago
  I can't get a $10k workstation but if I used $10k/month on cloud compute it'd take a few months for anyone to talk to me about it and as long as I was actually using it for work purposes I wouldn't run into any consequences more severe than being told to knock it off if I couldn't convince people it was worth the cost.
- groby_b 9mo ago
  If an employee has a business need for a $10k workstation, I'm fairly certain they'll get a $10k workstation. Yes, accounting still happens. Guardrails exist. But quibbling over 2% of a SWEs salary if it's clear that the productivity increase will be significantly more than 2% would be... not a wise use of anybody's time.
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  > Why is that funny? What company gives you unlimited resources? Anthropic has raised tens of billions of dollars of funding. Their number of employees is in the thousands. This isn't like Google. Claude Code is what they're developing. The company is obviously going to encourage them to use it as much as possible. Limiting how much the Claude Code lead can use Claude Code would be funny because their lead dev would have to stop mid-day and wait for his token quota window to reset before he can continue developing their flagship coding product. Not going to happen. I'm strangely fascinated by the reaction in the comments, though. A lot of people here must have worked in oddly restrictive corporate environments to even think that a company like this would limit how much their own employees can use the company's own product to develop their own product.
- saagarjha 9mo ago
  Google gives most of their engineers access to machines that would cost that much. If you’re working on specific projects (e.g. Chrome) you can request even more expensive machines.
codesnik 9mo ago
well, not only their software but also hardware resources they're renting, but I agree they don't.
perfmode 9mo ago
Tokens aren’t free.
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  When you work for the company supplying those tokens and you're working on the product that sells those tokens at scale, the company will let you use as many tokens as you want.
blhack 9mo ago
Especially when the software they're developing is supposed to speed up the speed at which the software they are developing is developed.
michaelmcmillan 9mo ago
It is a long-standing policy at Netflix for employees to pay for their own subscriptions. It ensures that employees "live the member experience".
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  That’s for personal use at home. I guarantee the engineers at Netflix who develop and test video streaming aren’t doing so on their family’s home Netflix plan.

dcre 9mo ago

Pretty sure I have seen them imply in one of the panel discussions on their YouTube channel (can't remember which) that they get unlimited use of the best models. I remember them talking about records for the most spent in a day or something.

returnInfinity 9mo ago

Its not unlimited, the compute allocation was one of the reason for the coup at OpenAI

pbmonster 9mo ago
Pretty sure that was scientists competing for 6 month training runs of new 100B+ parameter models, not coders burning through a couple of million tokens.

avereveard 9mo ago

Owning the means of cognition is going to be more and more importan as it allows one to scale more than linearly. Outsiders will be tied to limited or pay per use because owning the means of cognition will be a massive extractive economy

crthpl 9mo ago

It is the case that Anthropic employees have no usage limits. Some people do experiments where they spawn up hundreds of Claude instances just to see if any of them succeed.

OccamsMirror 9mo ago
Are they using these tests as a form of RLHF?