reticulates
reticulates on Hacker News
Lots of people making the financial case against Anthropic are not anti-LLM. I think the technology is great, interesting, powerful, innovative etc etc etc my issue is with the garbage business that Anthropic and OpenAI are building and the nonsensical ideas people have about business in general. Technology is exciting, business is not, business is boring. Money come in, money go out. Selling technology, no matter how exciting it is, does not change the nature of business.
> fears that they were excluding Q3 because it was a disaster were definitely wrong
That's a very generous reading. Anthropic's entire growth narrative is the rapid growth over the previous 12 months, from near-enough zero to $100bn+ this year. Now we see that actually growth is levelling off and that their revenue was ~$5bn/month over the last quarter, which is barely over their compute commitments, and nothing close to the $100bn+ leaked.
I guess if people thought Q3 would show negative growth rate, sure, it isn't a disaster, but their growth rate slowing so much is surely very bad and matches all the concerns commenters had.
And this is Anthropic! Anthropic are the financial success compared to OpenAI. OpenAI are doing much worse, so this does not bode well for OpenAI either.
I didn’t mean your topics of interest are trivial, I meant that LLMs reproduce information devoid of human perspective which turns it into just a bunch of trivia, facts without substance. A blog post about tungsten’s use in lightbulbs by a lightbulb fanatic is a fascinating insight into the subject built on their years of fanaticism, every word is meaningful. An LLM’s words mean nothing, it is bland, it is soulless, an LLM’s summarization of a blog post is not a more efficient way to consume the blog post, it is something altogether different.
That the answers of an LLM are “sharp” and “specific” is not a good thing. You are only experiencing the subject through your own lens, through your own questions, through your own sycophantic robot. The imperfect way that humans communicate is so important to broadening our horizons. Some of the most influential learnings I’ve experienced came from tangential lines in books and blogs. And when I’m reading, sitting, thinking, letting the words bounce around my head, I am forced to reconcile ideas myself, to consider, to think. Just saying “tell me more about x” or “why is x?” every time I have a thought leaves no room to really learn and grow.
Anyway, we are all different, if your curiosity can be satisfied by LLMs summarizing, great :)
Retail is just a bad business. The ad business is many times more profitable than cloud business because of the margins. Cloud isn’t a money printer when compared to advertising.
Your curiosity is enabled but is it being best served? You are being fed a single perspective on every question, a singular world view. You do not have the serendipitous exposure to a broad range of ideas and opinions we experience as we meander through information.
You Google about why tungsten is in light bulbs, you find yourself on a website about the history of lightbulbs written by a hobbyist that has spent decades thinking about lightbulbs. You click around, link after link, your world is expanded to include this lightbulb fanatic’s.
Personally, I find LLM answers to questions completely devoid of the substance that actually matters to my curious mind. Sure, when I’m working and need a concrete answer to a specific problem, an LLM can be a great help, but for personal curiosity, to expand my world, they suck.
To me, what you’re describing sounds like learning lots of trivia, not expanding your understanding of the world.
The courts eventually ruling against the administration doesn’t undo the harm caused. A Trump tirade against Instacart could be a death sentence for the business.
I am of course very sympathetic to your wife and think it is outrageous that someone should lose their job this way but also given the insane behavior of the Trump administration, it seems like Instacart had no choice. I hope she wins the lawsuit and gets paid out but I can’t hate Instacart for being pragmatic.
They’re inextricably linked. The ceiling is being raised by people at the top pillaging from people at the bottom. Sure, in a vacuum, raising the floor without regard for the ceiling might work but in the real world it does not. Capitalists choose to believe that the floor today is better than the floor 20 years ago because even poor people have iPhones but when you look at the actual life people lead, it is getting worse.
If anything, “raising the floor” is the Trojan horse.
Shorting a company is not a trade against the future of a company, it is a trade against the market. You can know a company is going to zero and the company can go to zero and you can still lose your shirt from shorting it.
At the same time, an S-1 does not necessarily represent how the company thinks. Risk factors often get reported as “x thinks that y will happen” but the company is actually just describing things they have an obligation to describe, they’re not the risks they’re worried about internally.
Also this is being released under Trump’s SEC, who knows whether being caught lying in an S-1 matters any more.
when they start removing biscuits from the Anthropic offices, that’ll confirm their WeWork-like death spiral
Can you explain how the trap works? The exploit gives you access to the machine which you can then use to wipe the evidence of your intrusion - right? There is nothing to leak by taking control of the machine.
Is the trap theory that this server isn’t really running a vulnerable version of php, and is instead recording all traffic?
Chloë Grace Moretz was huge as a child star but she is basically retired now, the likelihood that she continues to appear in any major movies is very slim. Her career's early start was beneficial to this ranking but is not representative. The likelihood that she ever overtakes Samuel L Jackson is... nothing, nada, because Samuel L Jackson is more active than her.
Presumably based on the numbers in the article?
“A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.”
0.4 x 17,000 = 6,800g, a fairly typical estimate for the co2 emissions of a burger.
Trained on a very small portion of what has been written, heavily biased by what is available to American companies to acquire. You could argue that LLMs are somewhat representative of their training data (with some consideration to the way that they are trained) but to say it’s anything like a representation of what humans think is nonsense.
It is a simulacrum, the end.
There are thousands of these already, many have raised a lot of money. If your product and cold outreach is generated slop (as half your post is) it is doomed to fail. The easiest next step is to look at what your competitors are doing and copy them.
I am a nerd on Hacker News. My preference for technology and robots is obvious and an assumption that my disagreement with you is based on personal preference is brainless.
I have spent time in China and Korea where attitudes towards artificial intelligence are much more positive than the west. I have interacted with robots in these countries.
You are making the fundamental mistake all nerds make. You’re thinking about what is possible and concluding that it is what will happen. Just as nerds believe that someday it will be possible for us to live on mars and therefore we are going to live on mars.
Humans are humans. Humans are interacting with artificial intelligence as if it is human because they crave human contact and are so desperate they settle for the best they can get.
The houses filled with robots future goes hand in hand with the robots will be doing all our work future. And if robots are doing all our work, what do humans have? Time. So much time. Humans become creatures of leisure. No longer is there a too little time to build relationships, there is only time, so much time. Human relationships become abundant, humans spend all their time being human.
The idea that people will have 50-100 artificial friends is so batshit crazy that I could totally believe your comment is parody.
this is tech fart sniffing self-aggrandization. You’re saying words that mean nothing. Tens of billions of robots? To do what, exactly? Have you ever interacted with people, not nerds, real human people? Real people don’t crave a future filled with robots, real people want real people.
The world will be filled with robots is not the inspired forward-thinking of a visionary it is the uninspired regurgitated science fiction of someone who doesn’t care to understand that the world is people, a society.
The lack of a “moat” is mostly irrelevant because success is not decided by who can or can’t be cloned. TypeSafe invented[1] a new approach that became wildly popular almost immediately, if they can do that once, they can probably do it again. Venture capital is big bets, of course TypeSafe is going to fail, that’s inevitable, but if it has even a 10% chance of capturing 1/10th the market cap of OpenAI then it is a great investment! Plus, money means nothing any more, they’ve raised less at a lower valuation than Instinct, a personal assistant.
[1] not really but they did some innovative things and popularized a concept
They’re raising from a position of strength for capital they don’t need. As far as I know, they haven’t published their valuation, but it is very possible they’re giving up little equity. Plus, giving up some equity to meet customer demand is generally a good idea as more revenue means higher valuation.
You’re almost right but missing an entire category of startup: “egocentric” data. A lot of the most high revenue startups right now are, essentially, recruitment agencies for frontier labs to get video of skilled workers. OpenAI and others are spending billions per year with the various startups. We aren’t witnessing specialized startups training for specific sectors, we are witnessing training startups trying to hoover as much video as possible.
Personally, I’m not convinced these startups have much life in them. They’re popular right now because they are low effort as there is a huge demand from the frontier labs, but a year from now, there’ll be more than enough data.
There are at least a dozen in YC and probably hundreds in total.
with respect, fuck no. Bankruptcy should be less consequential. A lender or creditor should rely on their own measure of creditworthiness to determine who to lend to, not rely on a borrower’s fear of the state. The punitive nature of bankruptcy served a purpose decades ago but nowadays it is not needed. A lot of creditors nowadays don’t even bother pursuing debts, instead focusing on better checks upfront, hence so much debt being sold for pennies on the dollar. Making bankruptcy catastrophic would give creditors the wrong incentives.
Not the OP but run a high margin service that has customers run up accidental bills often. Customers running up bills intentionally and then not paying is even more common. There is almost no situation where trying to force a customer to pay makes sense, we write off any amount without question. The goodwill is worth it every time. Most SaaS companies don’t even have the processes in place for debt collection anyway.
Yes, this is an important point although it has changed with A.I. Software is traditionally very high margin and so a $10k bill can be written off by the provider without any meaningful loss.
As a customer, the big number is scary and causes panic but for the provider… customers constantly fail to pay bills, providers are constantly writing off bills because it just isn’t worth the cost to chase, if a customer says “hey that usage was a mistake” it’s usually worth it to write it off to save the relationship. If you write off a big bill that wouldn’t have been paid anyway, the customer will perceive you as wonderful and benevolent and be loyal for life when they are ready to spend their money.
With tokens though the actual cost being incurred is much, much higher. If your service is just a wrapper around tokens, and a customer incurs $10k of usage that you paid OpenAI $5k for, it becomes much more difficult to write off.
Google Cloud is one of the few services that actually pursues unpaid bills even on their high margin services.
The article is arguing that a company’s output will be entirely created by AI (via the harness) and only the input (developing the harness) will be human. My take is counter to that. My take is that success in business comes from the small important details, not the volume of output. You can develop a harness to produce 1000x more output than humans but that doesn’t matter because even today, most businesses fail, not because they didn’t produce enough output, but because their output was wrong.
Long before A.I., tiny 10 person startups have been able to revolutionize industries.
We have evidence that this is not true. For years and years you have been able to self-host Zulip and Mattermost but companies still pay Slack millions of dollars per year. GitHub has billions in revenue, why not just use Gitea for free? So on and so forth. The ability to generate a (shitty) clone of software does not magically make the cloned software less valuable. Paying for software isn’t a “tax” when it produces value. If this vision of the future was true, cheap/free alternatives would have already destroyed the SaaS market years and years ago.
> I think in-house AI developer tools (like the ones we’ve seen from Ramp, Stripe, DoorDash, etc.) are the beginning of this.
And on this, these are examples of tech companies filled with nerds who love novel new technology. Of course companies like Ramp and Stripe are spending huge amounts of time and money on taking this new technology to the extremes with “harnesses” and ”factories” because that’s what the nerds want to do. What the nerds want to do is not a sign of how the technology will be used in future, it’s a sign of what is most fun today.
An uninspired vision of the future. We have endless evidence through history that hiring the most engineers, producing the most output, raising the most money is not the path to success. The most successful businesses are those that deeply understand something about their customers, about how to sell to their buyers. The most has never mattered. An army of agents doing endless busywork is not the path to success.
Google isn’t successful because it has the best engineers, it has the best engineers because it is successful. Google is an extremely boring business: show adverts to make money. And they made so much money. The next Google is not going to be the company with the best “harness” it’ll be the company that has an obscenely profitable product.
Founder mode, what was considered a panacea just 12 months ago, is defined by a founder giving a shit about everything. You don’t succeed by handing everything off to an army of ~agents~ consultants.
This vision of the future is nonsense that will not pan out. You can add that to the HN AI predictions. At no point will real businesses be “harnesses” around AI models.
Boogeyman of the meme stocks