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Comment by eightysixfour | Hacker News Reader

In a compute starved world, big ass data centers are an advantage.

yes, but it's only advantage if one is compute-strained and the other isn't. if they both have lots then there's no advantage. if one doesn't fully utilise their compute then it's not an advantage either

Well, it appears all their competitors are compute starved so…

I mean. they're selling it to a competitor so it's not really an advantage

can you elucidate what that advantage is, that isnt renting it out for the highest price to somebody that really needs it?

Well, other than your ability to turn that into cash by renting it out for the highest price to someone who needs it, you can promise prospective employees that are supposed to use that infra to train models that they won’t be compute starved.

You can kick off more model training runs and experiments than your competitors.

You can kick off a $1-2t IPO claiming you are going to capture a large portion of the largest TAM the world has ever seen.

Could have (past tense). They now have rented the capacity out, presumably with a multi-year contract.

A rental deal, even at a premium price, actually makes great sense for Anthropic. Rather than building themselves, they are de-risked by renting instead, and they don't own the depreciating asset. They've also compute-starved X.ai as a potential competitor as a marginal added bonus.

They have neither the most resources nor the best models. They are mediocre at everything except the CSAM generation market, they've got that one cornered

Training a model that is larger than your competitor's.

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