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Posted by elffjs 15 hours ago

Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic(www.bloomberg.com)
491 points | 487 commentspage 5
alfiedotwtf 6 hours ago|
From a comment below:

> My main job isn't writing code but I try to keep Claude Code and OpenCode busy and churning away on something as close to 100% of the time as I can without getting in the way of my other priorities

I’ve seen many people say this the past few weeks i.e that their daily job now is no longer coding and has flipped to being a full Claude Feeder making sure its always churning.

As someone who uses Claude Code daily, I still find myself reading code and thinking more vs just shoveling coal as fast as I can into the Claude steam train. Am I doing things wrong?

ecommerceguy 7 hours ago||
My AI use is significantly down. I'm sick of following Chat GPT "advise" only to learn how egregiously incorrect it is. Don't ask for DMV advice on registering an out of state car!
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago||
It’s pretty wild how badly Altman siding with Hegseth has backfired. (And how competently Dario has played his hand.)

I don’t think that’s the ultimate cause of the turnaround in fortunes. But it strikes me, at least from the investor and potentially urban-consumer perspectives, as a pivotal moment in both companies’ fortunes.

karmasimida 11 hours ago||
What backfired?

Ant's recent rise has little to none to do with retail subscribers, it is Claude Code with Opus 4.5+, followed by their Mythos stunt

I would say the flood of $20 Claude Subscribers due to news cycle backfired on them, now everyone is getting worse outputs and exposed their shortage on compute, which they can't fix anytime soon.

Pretty much everyone I know has both cc and codex now, just because how unreliable cc has become.

JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago|||
> would say the flood of 20+ Claude Subscribers due to news cycle backfired

This is a good hypothesis. I suspect we are both correct.

The PR boost from Anthropic standing its ground drove signups. That, in turn, drove investors. But the users also drove utilization, which degraded quality across the board.

My hypothesis rests on Anthropic’s user mix having significantly shifted to consumers (versus enterprise) after the mix-up. Whenever we get public numbers it would be interesting to test that.

afavour 10 hours ago||||
> What backfired?

I think it was psychological to a degree. For many consumers OpenAI, or at least ChatGPT was AI. The controversy was enough for folks to be introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.

I agree with OP though that this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point.

karmasimida 10 hours ago|||
> introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.

This is true. OpenAI WAS the story of AI, now it is just 50% of it, at max. Losing the monopoly of imagination towards AGI is bad for them.

One thing I don't agree though, consumers aren't the important part of AI, they are a liability.

AI is too expensive, consumers can't pay for it. Instead they will compete with enterprise for the same tokens, with less money.

JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago|||
> controversy was enough for folks to be introduced to competitors

This is my suspicion. Consumers hadn’t previously heard of Anthropic and Claude. Now they had, particularly in cities.

> this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point

Also agree. Hence why I said “I don’t think” the fight is “the ultimate cause.”

pixl97 10 hours ago||
Anecdotally a whole lot more people around me started using Anthropic models in the last few weeks and seem to like them more than OpenAI. For many of these people it was the second provider they ever used.

Of course this is part of what has lead to such insane demand and outages they've experienced since then.

minimaxir 11 hours ago||||
I use both CC and Codex because one is not enough and 5x for $100 is too much.
enraged_camel 9 hours ago|||
>> followed by their Mythos stunt

"Stunt", eh?

danielbln 11 hours ago|||
Alphabet makes $30 billion profit per quarter.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago|||
> Alphabet makes $30 billion profit per quarter

Sure. Neither OpenAI or Anthropic do. Amazon and Google have followed institutional investors bidding up Anthropic over OpenAI in private markets, all of which—I suspect—followed user-pattern shifts following the fiasco. (Well, fiascos. Altman is a host unto himself.)

sevenzero 11 hours ago|||
Which means they can allow themselves to blast money left and right? Its still a big investment.
kubb 11 hours ago|||
they can't allow themselves NOT to blast money left and right
RobRivera 11 hours ago|||
Yes
luke5441 10 hours ago||
No, they have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to not make obviously bad investments.
keeda 4 hours ago|||
Actually I have the opposite take. This is largely a play to procure compute capacity (and I suspect, distribution via Google Cloud), and I think Dario wildly underestimated the amount of demand they would see.

I always wondered why Anthropic was not out there feverishly scrambling to procure compute like the other big players. While Altman was being laughed at as a "podcasting bro asking for trillions in investment" Dario was on Dwarkesh expounding on how tricky it is to predict the demand for capacity. Now Dario has to give equity to a competitor to get compute. (OpenAI does this too, of course, but I suspect the terms are much better.)

At this point, it's pretty clear that compute is the only moat in this business. Even as an outsider, the extreme demand curves and compute crunch were painfully obvious, so this seems like a serious strategic error on Dario's part.

tomrod 11 hours ago|||
It was enough for me to dig much deeper into OpenAI, where before we almost exclusively used them for services with any form of SLA.
ordinaryradical 11 hours ago||
You're saying it was a turning point for you to get more embedded with them? Way to be killer robot positive, I guess...
tomrod 10 hours ago||
Good call out because I was a little unclear.

Opposite of what you said. The "dig" was not retrenching to more use, but rather I evaluated what I saw them doing and have migrated our company to much better options.

infecto 11 hours ago|||
Is the simpler explanation that Alpha was already an investor and Anthropic has been making strides in their business model?
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago||
> Is the simpler explanation that Alpha was already an investor

Individually, yes. Anthropic surging in private markets the weekend after the supply-chain risk designation, and raising from not only Google but also Amazon in such short clip (following credibly reports of it turning down $800+ billion valuation cheques from financial investors), all while OpenAI gets pilloried in the press and struggles to hold its $800bn valuation in private markets, collectively—to me—paints a bigger picture.

infecto 11 hours ago||
Please share how OpenAI is struggling in the private markets.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago||
There is more supply than demand flat to OpenAI’s recent raise. That’s simply not the case for Anthropic, at last raise or at comparable valuations.
infecto 11 hours ago||
Citation? Were you working on the deal?
JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago||
Can’t speak to citations, unfortunately, but if you have a banker or broker with secondary flow right now, ask them which they can get you more of and at what valuation: OpenAI or Anthropic.
er2d 10 hours ago|||
"(And how competently Dario has played his hand.)"

lol hes barely done anything, but sometimes that is all that's necessary when a bozo opponent is hell-bent on screwing things up. He didn't get fired the first time for no reason.

JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago||
> hes barely done anything, but sometimes that is all that's necessary when a bozo opponent is hell-bent on screwing things up

An former chess instructor told me most games are won not by brilliant maneuver, but by not screwing up. Repeatedly making the boring play is a winning strategy far more often than any mastermind play.

sourcegrift 11 hours ago||
[flagged]
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago||
> your TDS

Wat?

pjl0 11 hours ago|||
DESPERATELY trying to insinuate that the only possible reason to acknowledge that many people find distasteful the association between OpenAI and the desire for autonomous killbots MUST be that people are being unfair to Trump because of mental illness.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago|||
Oh, Trump Derangement Syndrome. I found a utility in Wisconsin and was really trying to find the connection…

I guess to address the point, having a problem with Hegseth isn’t the same as having a problem with Trump. And given some of Trump’s administration is embracing e.g. Mythos, it seems unfair to characterize Dario v. Hegseth as anything broader.

There was a recent moment when OpenAI went from the uncontested darling of consumer and investing America, to being second place to Anthropic. It happened rapidly, and I saw it at least on the investor side in the weekend after the supply-chain risk designation. (Disclosure: that’s also the week I signed up for Claude, in part out of protest, but mostly to see what the fuss was about.) I think there is a lesson for anyone working with startups or in tech from this example—it may be one of the most violent strategic sea changes I’ve seen in a while.

lovich 11 hours ago||||
He thinks you insulted his daddy somehow and is having a temper tantrum about it.
Forgeties79 11 hours ago||
I feel like there should be a rule on any forum that if somebody non-ironically uses “TDS” they should just get permabanned by a bot with no explanation.
JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago||
> they should just get permabanned by a bot with no explanation

I really like HN's system of flagging versus banning. Like, I genuinely mapped TDS to Trump Derangement Syndrome, something I wasn't doing before because I thought it was a joke versus something his supporters thought of seriously.

Forgeties79 9 hours ago|||
I think we’d all be better off ignorant of it tbh
lovich 9 hours ago|||
Accusing someone of TDS for anything short of complete subservience to Trump is a thought terminating sentence they use to protect their fragile egos and to try and darvo their way out of any legitimate position.
Forgeties79 8 hours ago||
I just can’t imagine reacting that way in the name of someone I don’t even know, let alone a politician.
lovich 6 hours ago||
Its a cult. They are beyond reason at this point and working entirely off of emotions and now view the entire movement as part of their personality. That leads to feeling like they, personally, are being attacked whenever their leader is criticized.
themafia 11 hours ago|||
Hegseth represents existing military priorities. The original comment presents the issue as if it's isolated to a single administrator.

It wouldn't call it TDS but it does project a severe political blind spot.

dev1ycan 7 hours ago||
How many gigantic companies can join this before it crashes?
zackho 6 hours ago||
great move by google
bluecalm 10 hours ago||
I find it crazy that Google considers Anthropic to be worth almost 10% of Google itself (350B valuation mentioned in the article). Anthropic gets traction but has no moat, no infrastructure and relatively small team working for it. I feel for 40B you can get a lot of very smart people and a lot of very good hardware to outcompete it.
hellohello2 2 hours ago||
IMO: you are correct, which is why the valuation is only 350B and not significantly more.
chpatrick 5 hours ago|||
I think the very smart people already work at Google and the 40B buys some of the rest.
GoToRO 9 hours ago|||
the moat is the tool itself. You understand this after you start using it.
sumedh 8 hours ago||
> You understand this after you start using it.

Its just amazing people that people talk about Anthropic and have never used it.

conradkay 9 hours ago|||
> I feel for 40B you can get a lot of very smart people and a lot of very good hardware to outcompete it

Nah, see Meta

siva7 10 hours ago||
25% ;)
mkl 9 hours ago||
No, Google's market cap is $4.1T, over 10 times $350B.
conradkay 4 hours ago||
They mean Anthropic secondaries are trading at more than a trillion (allegedly)
forrestthewoods 10 hours ago||
10B at their valuation from last November is an absolutely killer deal. If Anthropic had sufficient compute supply they could raise at 2x easily if not 3x.
ulfw 5 hours ago||
What a wonderful world our tech overlords are building for us leftover humans
mesonwarrior 2 hours ago||
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laweijfmvo 12 hours ago|
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