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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

Because at the moment they have basically infinite money and it's almost always faster to throw hardware at the problem than optimizing the solution, given infinite money.

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Given infinite money, after buying up the finite amount of hardware available, you'll still have infinite money left to optimize it for maximum efficiency. And at any finite budget, both the optimal amount to spend on hardware and the optimal amount to spend on efficiency grow with the total budget available, although their relative shares may vary. So while an enthusiast may refuse to invest in hardware at all and focus 100% on efficiency, their efforts will still be outclassed by a large company allocating 99% to hardware and 1% to efficiency.

That's simply untrue, they do not have infinite money nor infinite hardware. They have far stricter limits on hardware than they do on development effort to get more out of their finite hardware.

They are acting like they have infinite money (huge annual losses [1], [2], [3]) and infinite hardware (aiming to build a large number of data centres with a lot of GPU hardware [1], [3], [4]) even if that isn't the case.

[1] https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/anthropics-leaked-financi...

[2] https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle...

[3] https://fortune.com/2026/06/16/openai-financials-leaked-loss...

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulocarvao/2025/12/06/why-open...

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