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Comment by urba_ | Hacker News Reader

I consider them competitors… This reminds me of Microsoft in 1997 investing $150 million in Apple, saving it from near bankruptcy

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googles multiple businesses and gemini isn't the largest one.

anthropic is the anchor external customer of tpu's and nvidia is worth more than all of google. If tpu's actually breakout as a viable alternative over the next few years for multiple clients the business could easily be worth as much as search, maybe more.

> If tpu's actually breakout as a viable alternative over the next few years

Why haven't they broken out yet, I wonder, if they're more efficient for inference and LLM costs are now weighted towards inference over training?

Possibly because they just haven't been able to manufacture enough of them yet to be a viable business to others? They're fighting everyone else for foundry space and time.

You essentially have to run in google to use them and that probably limits their ability to breakout. Anthropic might be doing this deal as a way to shore up their supply chain and cost of both inference and training by leveraging Google's hardware and chip manufacturing expertise.

Several customers like Citadel, run TPUs in their own datacenters (closer to Exchanges)

every tpu thats been made is in use and sold at a high margin, demand is not the issue.

there are literally not enough tpu's on earth for them to break out, every tpu thats been made is in use, the spike in demand is recent and google has heavy competition for foundry space.

TPUs are not that portable and easy for both inferencing and training. It has since improved a lot with their effort on the torch backend (XLA/TorchTPU) and JAX though.

But as far as i know it currently supports just that + tensorflow (which nobody uses it anymore, least here). And last we tried, so much of our kernels needs rework that it’s not worth the effort.

This may change since ironwood but we haven’t tried that generation.

Google cloud also need to be able to offer Anthropic models on Vertex otherwise they just won't be competitive.

Microsoft is in the same boat with Azure.

Google Cloud also needs to show constant quarterly growth so what better way than simply buying it and fudging the numbers?

If I remember correctly, Microsoft allegedly did that for the very selfish reason of looking better in terms of being a monopoly.

Rather than for the altruistic reason of saving a struggling fellow company?

Of course this is well known. Everything Microsoft does is for selfish capitalist reasons and everything Apple does is for altruistic philanthropic reasons.

They’re publicly traded for-profit companies, selfishness is literally the definition of both of them and it’s the farthest thing from a secret.

> Microsoft in 1997 investing $150 million in Apple, saving it from near bankruptcy.

If only Apple could pass the favor forward. But no, they can't be bothered to invest even a single million in Asashi Linux to benefit their own hardware.

Well, the way Apple sees it, their hardware ships with a perfectly good OS. And they know their hardware has so far been so good that even if they ruin said OS, they'd still make money. What we (and Apple, as competition) need is a serious macbook-killer with full Linux support.

Google is right (I think) to invest in winning compute share from Nvidia over winning token share from other frontier model builders.

They are, but Google Vertex has been one of the official ways to use Claude since forever.

It just keeps the lights on for the whole industry.

The tech is great but valuations are out of control. It's cheaper to keep valuations high through these circular financing deals, rather than to allow for any deflation.

It was more complicated than that. Microsoft was only kind of a competitor to Apple. Apple was also a platform for them. They shipped software that was popular on the Mac (mainly Word).

Especially in those days Microsoft was both a platform for software to run on, and a maker of software, and being flexible to emphasize one or the other aspect depending on the way the market is... has been good for them.

They already had a non trivial stake in Anthropic though?

Anthropics erratic behavior is going to get Google regulated. This is "don't rock the boat" money. Google existentially needs AI for advertising.

> Google existentially needs AI for advertising.

What's the explanation behind this? I am sure they use AI in their ad network (matching web sites with ad offerings, maybe generating ads automatically), but is there more to it?

I know AI companies are selling ad training into the models so the models know about your product. I'm not sure if that is what they were referring to, but it could be related.

That was precisely my thought on seeing the news. I did not know about Google's existing entanglements with anthropic, but it seemed like a clear message - Do not panic on the money, do the work.

"Do not panic on the money, do the work." - sorry what do you mean by that?

If you look at their recent actions, they all seem financial as if they have become the monopoly already and can do anything. Maybe it is driven by fear of going bankrupt

Example. Them doing a AB test where they remove Claude CLI from the 20$ pro plan ... they rolled it back now. Other rate limits where they publicly double your quota at NON peak times but lower it during peak quietly. These are tacky and signs of panic.

One such issue is experimentation. But when you see back to back issues, it looks odd.

To me it seems clear a long time ago that senior leadership at Anthropic are getting high on their own supply.

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