6 ms·

They're also getting closer to IPO and have a growing user base. They can't justify losing a very large number of billions of other people's money in their IPO

They're also getting closer to IPO and have a growing user base. They can't justify losing a very large number of billions of other people's money in their IPO prospectus. So there's a push for them to increase revenue per user, which brings us closer to the real cost of running these models.

giwook 6mo ago
I agree, and I'm also quite skeptical that Anthropic will be able to remain true to its initial, noble mission statement of acting for the global good once they IPO. At that point you are beholden to your shareholders and no longer can eschew profit in favor of ethics. Unfortunately, I think this is the beginning of the end of Anthropic and Modei being a company and CEO you could actually get behind and believe that they were trying to do "the right thing". It will become an increasingly more cutthroat competition between Anthropic and OpenAI (and perhaps Google eventually if they can close the gap between their frontier models and Claude/GPT) to win market share and revenue. Perhaps Amodei will eventually leave Anthropic too and start yet another AI startup because of Anthropic's seemingly inevitable prioritization of profit over safety.
- devmor 6mo ago
  Skeptical is a light way to put it. It is essentially a forgone conclusion that once a company IPOs, any veil that they might be working for the global good is entirely lifted. A publicly traded company is legally obligated to go against the global good.
  - giwook 6mo ago
    Fair point. Call me an optimist, but I'm still holding out hope that Amodei is and still can do the right thing. That hope is fading fast though.
    - thibauts 6mo ago
      « Don’t be evil »
      - abirch 6mo ago
        If no one can buy your soul, what's its value? Every Management Consulting Firm
  - WarmWash 6mo ago
    The problem is that people equate money to power and power to evil. So no matter what, if you do something lots of people like (and hence compensate you for), you will be evil. It's a very interesting quirk of human intuition.
    - arcanemachiner 6mo ago
      A reasonable conclusion, considering that money and power seem to have their own gravity, so people with more of both end up getting even more of both, and vice versa. Can't blame someone who comes to such a conclusion about money and power.
      - WarmWash 6mo ago
        The unreasonable part automatically labeling power as evil.
        ModernMech 6mo ago
        Labeling power evil is not automatic, its just making an observation of the common case. Money-backed power almost never works for the forces of good, and the people who claim they're gonna be good almost always end up being evil when they're rich and powerful enough. See also: Google.
        WarmWash 6mo ago
        Google is the company that created a class-less non-hierarchical internet. Everyone can get the same access to the same services regardless of wealth or personhood. Google is probably the most progressive company to ever exist, because money stops no one from being able to leverage google's products. Born in the bush of the Congo or high rise of Manhatten, you are granted the same google account with the same services. The cost of entry is just to be a human, one of the most sacrosanct pillars of progressive ideology. Yet here they are, often considered on of the most evil companies on Earth. That's the interesting quirk.
  - mattkevan 6mo ago
    It’s not really, companies like GM used to boast about how well they treated their employees and communities. It was Jack Welch and a legion of like-minded arseholes who decided they should be increasingly richer no matter who or what paid for it.
    - dboreham 6mo ago
      See also HP. Pretty much only Costco left.
      - chrisweekly 6mo ago
        This is where PBCs (Public Benefit Companies) and B-Corps may have a role to play. Something like that seems necessary to enable both (A) sufficient profitability to support innovation and viability in a capitalist society and (B) consideration of the public good. Traditional public companies aren't just disincentivized from caring about externalities, they're legally required to maximize shareholder profits, full stop. Which IMHO is a big part of the reason companies ~always become "evil".
        mattkevan 6mo ago
        The company I currently work for is both a B-Corp and an employee-owned trust. The difference in culture, attitude and behaviour to the previous place I worked at, which only cared about quarterly results is stark.
      - devmor 6mo ago
        Costco is such a strange and stark case standing in opposition to this general rule. From everything I hear, I can only gather that the reason is because of extremely experienced and level-headed executive staff.
    - renticulous 6mo ago
      Middle class productive population produces commons goods and resources which gets exploited by Elites. Tragedy of the Commons applied to wealth generation process itself.
- snek_case 6mo ago
  I think the pivot to profit over good has been happening for a long time. See Dario hyping and salivating over all programming jobs disappearing in N months. He doesn't care at all if it's true or not. In fact he's in a terrible position to even understand if this is possible or not (probably hasn't coded for 10+ years). He's just in the business of selling tokens.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    And worse, he (eventually) has to sell tokens above cost - which may have so much "baggage" (read: debt to pay Nvidia) that it'll be nearly impossible; or a new company will come to play with the latest and greatest hardware and undercut them. Just how if Boeing was able to release a supersonic plane that was also twice as efficient tomorrow; it'd destroy any airline that was deep in debt for its current "now worthless" planes.
    - outofpaper 6mo ago
      That's why open models are going to win in the long run.
      - otterley 6mo ago
        I think the key question is “when”? In a highly competitive business environment, companies are going to naturally be attracted to the most capable model if it leads to a competitive advantage and the switching costs are low. This suggests that “open” (giving away inference despite ever-higher training costs) may not win for a very long time, if ever.
        rapind 6mo ago
        When frontier models plateau and efficiency increases sufficiently that it becomes a commodity like other cloud compute. One driver of open models might be foreign actors. With the entire US economy being held up by AI, it's a crucial vulnerability for a capable foreign actor (guess who) to exploit if they wanted to.
- sumedh 6mo ago
  > At that point you are beholden to your shareholders No not really, you can issue two types of shares, the company founders can control a type of shares which has more voting power while other shareholders can get a different type of shares with less voting power. Facebook, Google has something similar.
  - what 6mo ago
    No, they still have to act in the interest of shareholders even if they have no voting power.
    - wsun19 6mo ago
      As a PBC, the intent of the company is not only profit, but it's hard to analyze the counterfactuals of if Anthropic were a pure for-profit or a non-profit
      - hiroboto 6mo ago
        thats the benefit of a pbc
    - sumedh 6mo ago
      What will happen if they don't because the founders control the voting powe
ljm 6mo ago
They're also getting into cloud compute given you can use the desktop app to work in a temporary sandbox that they provision for you. I was about to call it reselling but so many startups with their fingers in the tech startup pie offer containerised cloud compute akin to a loss leader. Harking back to the old days of buying clock time on a mainframe except you're getting it for free for a while.
- lelanthran 6mo ago
  > Harking back to the old days of buying clock time on a mainframe except you're getting it for free for a while. I submitted this yesterday but it got no traction (I did not write it): https://www.mjeggleton.com/blog/AIs-mainframe-moment https://www.mjeggleton.com/blog/AIs-mainframe-moment
zozbot234 6mo ago
The "real cost" of running near-SOTA models is not a secret: you can run local models on your own infrastructure. When you do, you quickly find out that typical agentic coding incurs outsized costs by literal orders of magnitude compared to the simple Q&A chat most people use AI for. All tokens are very much not created equal, and the typical coding token (large model, large noisy context) costs a lot even under best-case caching scenarios.

giwook 6mo ago

I agree, and I'm also quite skeptical that Anthropic will be able to remain true to its initial, noble mission statement of acting for the global good once they IPO. At that point you are beholden to your shareholders and no longer can eschew profit in favor of ethics. Unfortunately, I think this is the beginning of the end of Anthropic and Modei being a company and CEO you could actually get behind and believe that they were trying to do "the right thing". It will become an increasingly more cutthroat competition between Anthropic and OpenAI (and perhaps Google eventually if they can close the gap between their frontier models and Claude/GPT) to win market share and revenue. Perhaps Amodei will eventually leave Anthropic too and start yet another AI startup because of Anthropic's seemingly inevitable prioritization of profit over safety.

devmor 6mo ago
Skeptical is a light way to put it. It is essentially a forgone conclusion that once a company IPOs, any veil that they might be working for the global good is entirely lifted. A publicly traded company is legally obligated to go against the global good.
- giwook 6mo ago
  Fair point. Call me an optimist, but I'm still holding out hope that Amodei is and still can do the right thing. That hope is fading fast though.
  - thibauts 6mo ago
    « Don’t be evil »
    - abirch 6mo ago
      If no one can buy your soul, what's its value? Every Management Consulting Firm
- WarmWash 6mo ago
  The problem is that people equate money to power and power to evil. So no matter what, if you do something lots of people like (and hence compensate you for), you will be evil. It's a very interesting quirk of human intuition.
  - arcanemachiner 6mo ago
    A reasonable conclusion, considering that money and power seem to have their own gravity, so people with more of both end up getting even more of both, and vice versa. Can't blame someone who comes to such a conclusion about money and power.
    - WarmWash 6mo ago
      The unreasonable part automatically labeling power as evil.
      - ModernMech 6mo ago
        Labeling power evil is not automatic, its just making an observation of the common case. Money-backed power almost never works for the forces of good, and the people who claim they're gonna be good almost always end up being evil when they're rich and powerful enough. See also: Google.
        WarmWash 6mo ago
        Google is the company that created a class-less non-hierarchical internet. Everyone can get the same access to the same services regardless of wealth or personhood. Google is probably the most progressive company to ever exist, because money stops no one from being able to leverage google's products. Born in the bush of the Congo or high rise of Manhatten, you are granted the same google account with the same services. The cost of entry is just to be a human, one of the most sacrosanct pillars of progressive ideology. Yet here they are, often considered on of the most evil companies on Earth. That's the interesting quirk.
- mattkevan 6mo ago
  It’s not really, companies like GM used to boast about how well they treated their employees and communities. It was Jack Welch and a legion of like-minded arseholes who decided they should be increasingly richer no matter who or what paid for it.
  - dboreham 6mo ago
    See also HP. Pretty much only Costco left.
    - chrisweekly 6mo ago
      This is where PBCs (Public Benefit Companies) and B-Corps may have a role to play. Something like that seems necessary to enable both (A) sufficient profitability to support innovation and viability in a capitalist society and (B) consideration of the public good. Traditional public companies aren't just disincentivized from caring about externalities, they're legally required to maximize shareholder profits, full stop. Which IMHO is a big part of the reason companies ~always become "evil".
      - mattkevan 6mo ago
        The company I currently work for is both a B-Corp and an employee-owned trust. The difference in culture, attitude and behaviour to the previous place I worked at, which only cared about quarterly results is stark.
    - devmor 6mo ago
      Costco is such a strange and stark case standing in opposition to this general rule. From everything I hear, I can only gather that the reason is because of extremely experienced and level-headed executive staff.
  - renticulous 6mo ago
    Middle class productive population produces commons goods and resources which gets exploited by Elites. Tragedy of the Commons applied to wealth generation process itself.
snek_case 6mo ago
I think the pivot to profit over good has been happening for a long time. See Dario hyping and salivating over all programming jobs disappearing in N months. He doesn't care at all if it's true or not. In fact he's in a terrible position to even understand if this is possible or not (probably hasn't coded for 10+ years). He's just in the business of selling tokens.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  And worse, he (eventually) has to sell tokens above cost - which may have so much "baggage" (read: debt to pay Nvidia) that it'll be nearly impossible; or a new company will come to play with the latest and greatest hardware and undercut them. Just how if Boeing was able to release a supersonic plane that was also twice as efficient tomorrow; it'd destroy any airline that was deep in debt for its current "now worthless" planes.
  - outofpaper 6mo ago
    That's why open models are going to win in the long run.
    - otterley 6mo ago
      I think the key question is “when”? In a highly competitive business environment, companies are going to naturally be attracted to the most capable model if it leads to a competitive advantage and the switching costs are low. This suggests that “open” (giving away inference despite ever-higher training costs) may not win for a very long time, if ever.
      - rapind 6mo ago
        When frontier models plateau and efficiency increases sufficiently that it becomes a commodity like other cloud compute. One driver of open models might be foreign actors. With the entire US economy being held up by AI, it's a crucial vulnerability for a capable foreign actor (guess who) to exploit if they wanted to.
sumedh 6mo ago
> At that point you are beholden to your shareholders No not really, you can issue two types of shares, the company founders can control a type of shares which has more voting power while other shareholders can get a different type of shares with less voting power. Facebook, Google has something similar.
- what 6mo ago
  No, they still have to act in the interest of shareholders even if they have no voting power.
  - wsun19 6mo ago
    As a PBC, the intent of the company is not only profit, but it's hard to analyze the counterfactuals of if Anthropic were a pure for-profit or a non-profit
    - hiroboto 6mo ago
      thats the benefit of a pbc
  - sumedh 6mo ago
    What will happen if they don't because the founders control the voting powe

ljm 6mo ago

They're also getting into cloud compute given you can use the desktop app to work in a temporary sandbox that they provision for you. I was about to call it reselling but so many startups with their fingers in the tech startup pie offer containerised cloud compute akin to a loss leader. Harking back to the old days of buying clock time on a mainframe except you're getting it for free for a while.

lelanthran 6mo ago
> Harking back to the old days of buying clock time on a mainframe except you're getting it for free for a while. I submitted this yesterday but it got no traction (I did not write it): https://www.mjeggleton.com/blog/AIs-mainframe-moment https://www.mjeggleton.com/blog/AIs-mainframe-moment

zozbot234 6mo ago

The "real cost" of running near-SOTA models is not a secret: you can run local models on your own infrastructure. When you do, you quickly find out that typical agentic coding incurs outsized costs by literal orders of magnitude compared to the simple Q&A chat most people use AI for. All tokens are very much not created equal, and the typical coding token (large model, large noisy context) costs a lot even under best-case caching scenarios.