Hacker News Reader

Comment by mvkel | Hacker News Reader

If this doesn't completely destroy any benefit of doubt that people have in Dario, I don't know what to say. The guy has been speaking out of both sides of his mouth since the foundation of Anth. Over and over he repeated that Anth's investment in compute would not be reckless; it would represent sanity and be proportional to growth. Over and over Anth told users that the models weren't nerfed overnight, we were just prompting wrong. As expected, Anth simply failed to make the early compute deals when everyone else did, and are now forced to be on the wrong end of price gouging just to keep pace. Actions speak louder than words.

View on HN

I don't see how this follows at all?

It's true that Anthropic didn't buy as much compute as OpenAI. But OpenAI's compute purchases are one of the largest investments in human history.

It's also true that they are now scrambling for compute, and might be paying more than OpenAI paid. But now they have the revenue to justify it!

To me it is the opposite of "speaking out of both sides of his mouth" - he's been consistent in his "we won't be reckless in buying compute too far ahead of demand" message.

I don't think this is right. Anthropic's growth in the last 6 months went hockey stick in quite an unexpected way (eclipsing OpenAI), so they've done what is sensible - they've increased their compute spend. I don't know if what they're buying from SpaceX is good value, I think there's plenty of reasons to think they got a fine deal. X AI failed. Everyone left. So SpaceX is sitting with a bunch of empty server farms. Yes, Anthropic are desparate for compute, but SpaceX are desparate to IPO a company with double digit billion dollar revenue for $2T so I think there's good reason that this deal represents reasonable value.

skeptical of someone who talks about anthropic enough that they think 'anth' is a reasonable abbreviation lol. maybe youre not wrong but youre definitely biased and not coming to conclusions in a rational way

How does taking a shortcut on the name indicate bias? Or, are people similarly biased when they talk about msft, nv, fb, OAI, ...?

So you're complaining that his actions matched his words?

He didn't make compute deals until he saw the growth necessary to justify them. As a result, they're paying over-the-odds compared to if they'd have make deals earlier. Maybe that was a poor business decision, but I'm not sure how it represents speaking out of "both sides of his mouth"? Sounds like he was honest.

That's one of the things he said. He also said the exact opposite.

He repeatedly says: if we’re off by a year, we go bankrupt.

In nearly the same breath, he said AGI is 2 years away.

He's operating like AGI is imminent but not saying it. And he's operating like AGI is a decade away, yet buying tons of compute at gouged prices.

Someone expecting imminent AGI would fear being outscaled, because if they don't win on energy/compute, they lose.

So his revealed beliefs are more like: ~10% chance AGI in 1–3 years ~40 chance 4–8 years

Even if we consider what they pay for colossus high (I've no idea, I haven't looked at the numbers), wouldn't this a bit be different from "investing in infrastructure"? They're not building the DC themselves, they're just renting, they can scale down to 0 anytime and not have pressure to recover costs, they don't have debt on the HW, etc.

At least from how it's described in the filing, it sounds like they're committed through 2029 on the deal with SpaceX. So they can't just pull out without a massive lawsuit from SpaceX.

Actually, what the filing says is:

"Pursuant to these agreements, the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee. The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com