Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivraatiems | Hacker News Reader

> If Anthropic is losing a fortune now with $13 billion in costs how are they going to break even spending $100+ billion per year? Don’t worry, their godlike AI will figure that out?

It's wild that this is an accurate summation of their position here. It's equally wild that a company building and selling a technology as actually useful as an LLM - yes, I think they're useful, sue me - can't begin to think about how to make money with one.

I agree with the article - they'd better hope they are messianic super geniuses, because if not, they're gonna seem real stupid when we have all moved in in a few years. The technology will stay, but that doesn't mean they will.

View on HN

Matt Levine's summary of Sam Altman's (and most of AI industry's) business plan remains accurate: "We will create God and then ask it for money."

Matt never fails to deliver

> I agree with the article - they'd better hope they are messianic super geniuses

It sounds remarkable, and I didn't believe it at first. But after more reading, I am convinced an influential part of Anthropic leadership really is something like a religious movement

Surely this is a "hook 'em with low prices, then raise them later" scheme--the biggest one yet.

I wonder where the split between self-hosted LLMs (w new more powerful LLM hardware) and hosted LLMs (big iron from an LLM-provider or at your office) will fall. Will there be a future for both? LLMs and other ML tools just with different levels of capability? etc.

This is what many have been forecasting (myself included), but the open-weights models coming out of China pose a serious problem for that approach

That's precisely the issue. LLMs are replicable technology. There is insufficient special sauce to build any kind of moat here.

No, the demand is effectively infinite at the moment and models are getting cheaper to serve. At least for a while price will go down when keeping capabilities constant.

I think "locally hosted LLMs" and "frontier LLMs hosted by frontier labs" will both end up as less than 1% of "Open Source LLMs hosted remotely by a lowest-bidder commodity compute provider"

We're one well-publicised security pop from locally hosted being a non-negotiable for some large set of buyers.

They've convinced every company in the country, including in previously security or compliance-centric environments (finance, medical, government), to hand them hyper-sensitive data.

We've already seen the leakage scenario, with the academics who found the labs scooping them on the research they were using the LLMs to assist. What's to say they-- or someone who infiltrated their infrastructure-- won't do the same thing with your propriatery business details?

I'm not sure open LLMs are a great play for commodity vendors. A lot of "lowest bidder commodity services" work because they can wildly oversell. That VPS hosting a small-biz website or 1000-messages-a-week internal email can run on a Raspberry Pi 1B, so you can pretty easily sublet a $1000 server to 50 customers at $10 per month each. Current LLM hardware plays tend to need more expensive gear and seem to be running at higher utilization rates, so the price that actually fits the underlying business might not look as appealing.

Their TAM basically presumes a good percentage of businesses will just be defacto subsidiaries of their products and they will essentially own the profit revenue stream, like a drug dealing pimp who gets their hookers addicted to crack to keep them working and inured to their loss of self suffiency.

Just look at palanetirs forward deployed engineers for how that'll start.

Even worse than that, they have to be the only messianic super geniuses.

if they were making profits now, it would set an upper limit on the number they IPO at. Losing money however? Sky's the limit.

> their godlike AI will figure that out?

Maybe it could if they stop crippling it so much

(Opus 5.5 thought a user was trying to hack it because their prompt contained the word "reasoning")

I recently tripped the safeguards by referring to a fake deployment tool. I started referring to it as a virtual one and it was fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com