Their profit on that was reportedly $559 million. But, this is after you realize that Anthropic got a discount on May/June from their new agreement with xAI's Colossus data center. So their first profit positive quarter happened during the time when their costs were artificially lower than they will be going forward.
Lots of people seem to love to do the simplest extrapolation that benefits their point. It's the same with "AI is improving at rate X, therefore if we linearly extrapolate, we'll hit AGI in a year."
Oh spare me the pedantry. What else are you going to compare? The year-on-year for Q2? That’s certainly going to have a much higher multiplier.
Your guess is as good as mine on whether these companies will continue growing, stall, or decline. Don’t try to pretend your methodology is more sound though.
I could start a business with a similar growth trajectory. We can mail people $100 bills for a low low payment of $10. I just need $500 billion dollars of startup capital and I can show you a 10x yoy growth for a few years.
That sounds fun but this is people paying for real products and services. The demand is there (and it's growing faster than any other commercial technology in history). They just need to work on inference (and potentially training) costs. I think that's clearly achieveable.
For the record, growth plays have been common in Silicon Valley for many decades. It's how we ended up with all the major tech companies we see today. Of course, it's high risk, high reward.
If they, through standard accounting practices, cannot show they are profitable how do we know they are profitable? I assume they can't just say "we are profitable assuming you ignore the costs we paid to build up XYZ". I'm guessing they could pre - rent compute for 10 years or something and maybe that's all on the balance sheet but you'd just amortize that and I think that falls under GAAP?
I greatly prefer this, since it lets me iterate on the plan with Claude for a while without it repeatedly asking if I’m ready to implement the plan.
Once I’m satisfied, I usually start a fresh session and tell it to implement the plan.
For smaller plans, you don’t need the file. Just ask it to come up with a plan. I don’t recall the last time it just started implementing if I only asked for a plan.
Depends on whether the frontier models can keep on offering better performance. The real efficiency is getting work done faster and better.
Compared to a $100k salary, a few hundred dollars a month is insignificant. If you can make the employee even just a few percent more efficient, it’s worth it.
> If you can make the employee even just a few percent more efficient, it’s worth it.
Are/were you in a position to make such decisions or it is a guess? I'm not but given certain evidence I doubt that few percent will cut it. I know some of the richest companies on the planet from SF Bay Area who won't give lunch for free to their engineers. So I'm not sure about "few percent" :-D 10x we were promised, now that is more interesting but we all know that 10x engineers is nonsense.
I don’t think that was a great example since there’s only so many refunds a customer is going to ask for. And it’s saving time that otherwise maybe would have to go through a human. The rate is low enough that a more expensive model makes more sense.
Though for tasks where you are trying to search through billions of documents, social media posts, etc. and extract certain information, where each individual post is of low value and only the data in aggregate is valuable, then that’s where you’d want something cheaper and faster.
Such as if you want to look at all posts on X in the last few months and find how many have a negative or positive sentiment about the economy (or are unrelated).
Of course you could use a special-purpose model for this, but the whole point of something like Jev is to ask whatever questions you want without having to train something new.
What’s wrong with doing different things with an IP?
Halo was originally conceived as an RTS, then turned out to be a successful FPS. Then they made a fairly successful RTS too.
Everything Blizzard does is met with such absurd hostility. Gamers pay $60 for 100+ hours of entertainment and still feel like they’re getting screwed at every turn.
I think that’s going to be one of the biggest impacts of AI in society. We will need to find new ways to occupy our time and find meaning in life once machines can do everything better, faster, and cheaper.
What will it look like? Will everybody spend their time playing sports and games? Or on art? Perhaps exploring the solar system or beyond if our technology advances enough?
Quite a time to be alive to even have to think of such things outside of science fiction.
Super optimistic take, unfortunately. Even I as an economic conservative, have serious reservations about our economic system going into this revolution.
It's not that capitalism, money, etc. is a broken system or something. But I think we're foolish if we assume that our current framework can simply adapt to absolutely any eventuality and any massive change in assumptions. I do believe that it's like the best possible train, where the rails are scarcity and human nature. But massive changes to scarcity will have weird-ass effects on the train, and we've unfortunately gotten here in a time where the West has so much dispute going on that I just can't see an organized and smart reorganization of our lives, or even smart adjustments being made. Two political factions are instead going to be screwing around trying to seize maximum power and sabotaging everything to make the other party look bad.
That's a lot already and growing quickly.
reply