[HN Gopher] Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic
        
       Author : swyx
       Score  : 636 points
       Date   : 2024-11-22 16:25 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
        
       | aliasxneo wrote:
       | > Amazon Web Services will also become Anthropic's "primary cloud
       | and training partner," according to a blog post. From now on,
       | Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and
       | deploy its largest AI models.
       | 
       | I suspect that's worth more than $4B in the long term? I'm not
       | familiar with the costs, though.
        
         | devjab wrote:
         | I've been impressed with the AI assisted tooling for the
         | various monitoring systems in Azure at least. Of course this is
         | mainly because those tools are so ridiculously hard to use that
         | I basically can't for a lot of things. The AI does it
         | impressively well though.
         | 
         | I'd assume there is a big benefit to having AI assisted
         | resource generation for cloud vendors. Our developers often
         | have to mess around with things that we really, really,
         | shouldn't in Azure because operations lacks the resources and
         | knowledge. Technically we've outsourced it, but most requests
         | take 3 months and get done wrong... if an AI could generate our
         | network settings from a global policy that would be excellent.
         | Hell if it could handle all our resource generation they would
         | be so much useless time wasted because our organisation views
         | "IT" as HRs uncharming cost center cousin.
        
         | senderista wrote:
         | Inferentia...Bollocks
         | 
         | Sorry.
        
       | liquidise wrote:
       | Can someone with familiarity in rounds close to this size speak
       | to their terms?
       | 
       | For instance: i imagine a significant part of this will be "paid"
       | as AWS credits and is not going to be reflected as a balance in a
       | bank account transfer.
        
         | uptownfunk wrote:
         | Yes, that is the case. It is largely 4B in capex investment,
         | I'd imagine 10% or less is cash. One would think nvidia could
         | get much better terms investing its gpu (assuming they can get
         | it into a working cluster). Instead it's nvidia gets cash for
         | gpu hardware, that hardware gets put into a data center and AWS
         | invests their hardware as credits for equity instead of cash.
         | And because AWS has already built out their data center infra
         | they can get a better deal than nvidia making the play because
         | nvidia has to rebuild an entire data center infra from scratch
         | (in addition to designing gpu etc).
         | 
         | Now if AWS or gcp can crack gpu compute better than nvidia for
         | training and hosting, then they can basically cut out nvidia
         | and so essentially they get gpu at cost (vs whatever markup
         | they pay to nvidia).
         | 
         | Because essentially whatever return AWS will make from
         | Anthropic will be modulated by the premiums paid to nvidia to
         | invest and also the cost of operating a data center for
         | Anthropic.
         | 
         | But thankfully all of that gets mediated on paper because
         | valuation is more speculative than the returns on nvidia
         | hardware (which will be known to the cent by AWS given its some
         | math of hourly rate and utilization which they have a good idea
         | of)
        
       | maxclark wrote:
       | Is this really a $4B investment, or credits on AWS?
       | 
       | AWS margins are close to 40%, so the real cost of this
       | "investment" would be way less than the press release.
        
         | swyx wrote:
         | https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/22/anthropic-raises-an-additi...
         | 
         | > "This new CASH infusion brings Amazon's total investment in
         | Anthropic to $8 billion while maintaining the tech giant's
         | position as a minority investor, Anthropic said."
        
           | mistrial9 wrote:
           | ok but how much cash, really.. looks ambiguous.
           | 
           | ps- plenty of people turning a blind eye towards rampant
           | valuation inflation and "big words" statements on deals.
           | Where is the grounding on the same dollars that are used at a
           | grocery store? The whole thing is fodder for instability in a
           | big way IMHO
        
             | Etheryte wrote:
             | I don't really see any ambiguity? If the reporting is
             | accurate, the whole $4B is cash.
        
           | mef wrote:
           | whether cash or credit, it's all going right back to AWS
        
             | hehehheh wrote:
             | This is great for creative accounting. AWS now has 4bn in
             | equity and 4bn in additional sales.
        
         | lucianbr wrote:
         | So it's a $2.4B investment, announced as $4B.
         | 
         | Significantly less, still a huge investment.
         | 
         | I look forward to the moment the sunk cost fallacy shows up.
         | "We've invested $20B into this, and nothing yet. Shall we
         | invest $4B more? Maybe it will actually return something this
         | time." That will be fun.
        
           | hehehheh wrote:
           | It could be the anthropic models makes bedrock attractive and
           | profitable and more importantly medium term competitive
           | against azure. It seems worth it.
        
       | mikeocool wrote:
       | Curious if anyone knows the logistics of these cloud provider/AI
       | company deals. In this case, it seems like the terms of the deal
       | mean that Anthropic ends up spending most of the investment on
       | AWS to pay for training.
       | 
       | Does anthropic basically get at cost pricing on AWS? If Amazon
       | has any margin on their pricing, it seems like this $4B
       | investment ends up costing them a lot less, and this is a nice
       | way to turn a cap ex investment into AWS revenue.
        
         | aiinnyc wrote:
         | One hand washes the other.
        
         | tyre wrote:
         | Yes exactly.
         | 
         | This was the brilliance of the original MSFT investment into
         | OpenAI. It was an investment in Azure scaling its AI training
         | infra, but roundabout through a massive customer (exactly what
         | you'd want as a design partner) and getting equity.
         | 
         | I'm sure Anthropic negotiated a great deal on their largest
         | cost center, while Amazon gets a huge customer to build out
         | their system with.
        
           | whatshisface wrote:
           | This explanation makes no sense, I could be AWS' biggest
           | customer if they wanted to pay me for it. Something a little
           | closer could be that the big tech companies wanted to acquire
           | outside LLMs, not quite realizing that spending $1B on
           | training only puts you $1B ahead.
        
             | raverbashing wrote:
             | Yes but Amazon is not making extra money with you being
             | their biggest customer
             | 
             | With Anthropic yes
        
               | whatshisface wrote:
               | Anthropic is getting $4B in investment in a year where
               | their revenue was about $850M. Even if Amazon had bought
               | them outright for that much, they would not be ahead. The
               | fact that everybody keeps repeating the claim that Amazon
               | is "making money" makes this appear like some kind of
               | scam.
        
               | surgical_fire wrote:
               | It appears to be a scam because it sort of is.
               | 
               | AI needs to be propped up because the bug tech cloud
               | providers they depend on need AI to be a thing to justify
               | their valuations. Tech is going through a bit of a slump
               | where all things being hyped a few years ago sort of died
               | down (crypto? VR? Voice assistants? Metaverse?). Nobody
               | gets very hyped about any of those nowadays. I am
               | probably forgetting a couple of hyped things that fizzled
               | out over the years.
               | 
               | Case in point, as much as I despise Apple, they are not
               | all-in the AI bandwagon because it does nothing for them.
        
               | vineyardmike wrote:
               | Go look at earnings reports for big tech companies. AI is
               | definitely driving incremental revenue.
               | 
               | Apple is definitely on the AI bandwagon, they just have a
               | different business model and they're very disciplined.
               | Apple tends not to increase research and investment costs
               | faster than revenue growth. You'll also notice rumors
               | that they're lowering their self driving car and VR
               | research goals.
        
               | surgical_fire wrote:
               | > Go look at earnings reports for big tech companies. AI
               | is definitely driving incremental revenue.
               | 
               | Yes. Which proves my point.
        
               | vineyardmike wrote:
               | Google Cloud revenue up 35% thanks to AI products
               | [1,4,5]. Azure sales by a similar amount (but only 12%
               | was AI products [2]. AWS is up too [3].
               | 
               | In so glad your point was that it's not a scam, and there
               | are billions of dollars in real sales occurring at a
               | variety of companies. It's amazing what publicly traded
               | companies disclose if we only bother to read it. I'm glad
               | we're all not in the contrarian bubble where we have to
               | hate anything with hype.
               | 
               | 1. https://technologymagazine.com/articles/how-ai-surged-
               | google...
               | 
               | 2. https://siliconangle.com/2024/10/30/microsofts-ai-bet-
               | pays-o...
               | 
               | 3. https://www.ciodive.com/news/AWS-cloud-revenue-growth-
               | AI-dem...
               | 
               | 4. https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-parent-
               | alphabet-be...
               | 
               | 5. https://fortune.com/2024/10/29/google-q3-earnings-
               | alphabet-s...
        
               | surgical_fire wrote:
               | > In so glad your point was that it's not a scam
               | 
               | Except it sort of is. It needs AI to be hyped and propped
               | up, so that all those silly companies spending in GCP can
               | continue to do so for a wee bit longer.
        
               | dartos wrote:
               | I don't know if that makes it a scam.
               | 
               | I think you're putting the cart before the horse.
               | 
               | Big cloud providers will push anything that would make
               | them money. That's just what marketing is.
               | 
               | AI was exciting long before big cloud providers even
               | existed. Once it was clear that a product could be made,
               | they started marketing it and selling the compute needed.
               | 
               | What's the scam?
        
               | surgical_fire wrote:
               | Crypto was exciting too. And metaverse. And VR. And voice
               | assistants. Et cetera and so forth.
               | 
               | All those things would change the world, and nothing
               | would ever be the same, and would disrupt everything.
               | Except they wouldn't and they didn't.
               | 
               | The scam is that those companies don't want to be seen as
               | mature companies, they need to justify valuations of
               | growth companies, forever. So something must always go
               | into the hype pyre.
               | 
               | By all means, I hope the scam goes on for longer, as it
               | indirectly benefits me too. But I don't have it in my
               | heart to be a hypocrite. I will call a pig a pig.
        
               | dartos wrote:
               | I think AI isn't the same as crypto or metaverse.
               | 
               | The LLMs and image generation models have obvious
               | utility. They're not AGI or anything wild like that, but
               | they are legitimately useful, unlike crypto.
               | 
               | VR didn't fail, it just wasn't viral. Current VR
               | platforms are still young. The internet commercially
               | failed in 2001, but look at it now.
               | 
               | Crypto the industry, imo, is a big pyramid scheme. The
               | technology has some interesting properties, but the
               | industry is scammy for sure.
               | 
               | Metaverse wasn't even an industry, it was a buzzword for
               | MMOs during a time when everyone was locked at home. Not
               | really interesting.
               | 
               | I don't think it's wise to lump every market boom
               | together. Not everything is a scam.
        
               | fakedang wrote:
               | People are losing jobs because of AI. Like it or not, as
               | imperfect as AI may be, AI is having a real world
               | disruptive impact, however negative it may be. Customer
               | service teams and call centers are already being affected
               | by AI, and if they aren't being smart about it, being
               | rendered obsolete.
               | 
               | A lot of folks here seem to look at AI through examples
               | of YC companies apparently. Step back and look instead at
               | the kind of projects technology consultancies are taking
               | up instead - they are real world examples of AI
               | applications, many of which don't even involve LLMs but
               | other aspects such as TTS/STT, image generation,
               | transcription, video editing, etc. Way too many
               | freelancers have begun complaining about how their
               | pipelines have been zilch in the past two years.
        
               | dartos wrote:
               | There are also a lot of macroeconomic changes making
               | hiring contractors (or anyone, really) a less attractive
               | option at least in the US.
        
               | surgical_fire wrote:
               | That was, perhaps, the only good retort made so far. Yes,
               | call centers and customer service is being affected,
               | although it is unclear to me if the cost-benefit make
               | sense when AI stops being heavily subsidized - I may be
               | wrong, but my impression is that AI companies bleed money
               | not only with training, but in running the models, and
               | the actual cost of those services for it to make sense
               | will need to be substantially higher than they are right
               | now.
        
               | MVissers wrote:
               | Price dropping is just a matter of time. Compute gets
               | cheaper and the models get better. We've seen 100x drop
               | in price for same capabilities in ~2 years.
               | 
               | Don't forget about writers and designers losing jobs as
               | well. If you're not absolute top and don't use AI, AI
               | will replace you.
        
               | jacobsimon wrote:
               | I think the implication of the top comment is that cloud
               | providers are buying revenue. When we say that cloud
               | provider revenue is "up due to AI", a large part of that
               | growth may be their own money coming back to them through
               | these investments. Nvidia has been doing the same thing,
               | by loaning data centers money to buy their chips.
               | Essentially these companies are loaning each other huge
               | sums of money and representing the resulting income as
               | revenue rather than loan repayments.
               | 
               | To be clear, it's not to say that AI itself is a scam,
               | but that the finance departments are kind of
               | misrepresenting the revenue on their balance sheets and
               | that may be security fraud.
        
               | herval wrote:
               | > Case in point, as much as I despise Apple, they are not
               | all-in the AI bandwagon because it does nothing for them.
               | 
               | not sure if you've been paying attention, but AI is
               | literally _the only thing_ Apple talks about these days.
               | They literally released _an entire generation of devices_
               | where the only new thing is "Apple Intelligence"
        
               | staticman2 wrote:
               | Is Apple investing in AI as much as Google, Meta,
               | Microsoft, and xAI? If not they are not "all in".
        
               | herval wrote:
               | They don't disclose it, but I'd imagine so. They also
               | admit to being a couple of years late, so they're
               | accelerating (as per their last earnings call)
        
               | adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
               | they are investing differently. Apple has a much more
               | captive audience than the others, and as such is focused
               | on AI services that can be run on device. as such, they
               | aren't doing the blessing edge foundation modern
               | research, but instead putting a ton of money into
               | productionizing smaller models that can be run without
               | giant cloud compute.
        
               | herval wrote:
               | Trivia: not sure if you're aware, but there's billion
               | dollar companies in all these spaces you claim "nobody
               | cares about". Every single stock broker in the US trades
               | crypto now. Omniverse earns Nvidia a ton of money, Apple
               | earned a billion dollars with a clunky v1 and Meta is
               | selling more and more Quests every half.
        
               | surgical_fire wrote:
               | Yeah. Was not really a world changer as it was claimed to
               | be during hype cycle.
               | 
               | Billion dollar valuation for a conpany in a given space
               | is not as impressive as you think it is. Do I need to
               | mention some high profile companies with stellar
               | valuations that are sort of a joke now? We can work
               | together on this ;)
        
               | asadotzler wrote:
               | Apple has spent over $10B on AVP and made back less than
               | 10% of that with no signs of improvement in the next year
               | or two and continued big spending on dev and content.
               | 
               | Meta has spent over $50B on Quest and the Metaverse with
               | fewer than 10M MAU to show for it.
               | 
               | If you think those are successes, I'll go out and get
               | several bridges to sell you. Meet me here tomorrow with
               | cash.
        
               | vineyardmike wrote:
               | These sort of investments usually also contain licensing
               | deals.
               | 
               | Amazon probably gets Anthropic models they can resell
               | "for free". The 850M revenue is Anthropic's, but there is
               | incremental additional revenue to AWS's hosted model
               | services. AWS was already doing lots of things with
               | Anthropic models, and this may alter the terms more in
               | amazons favor.
               | 
               | Are they actually _making money_? I don't know,
               | investments aren't usually profitable on day one. Is this
               | an opportunity for more AWS revenue in the future?
               | Probably.
        
               | celestialcheese wrote:
               | And access to use anthropics models internally, where you
               | have some guarantees and oversight that your corp and
               | customer data aren't leaking where you don't want it to.
        
               | mbesto wrote:
               | This is not how it works.
               | 
               | First, revenue is irrelevant.
               | 
               | Second, the investment isn't a loan that they need to
               | repay. They are getting equity.
               | 
               | Third, Anthropic is exclusively using AWS to train its
               | models. Which, yes, means if AWS gives them $4B and it
               | costs them $500M/year to pay for AWS services then after
               | 8 years, the cash is a wash. However this ignores the
               | second point.
               | 
               | Fourth, there is brand association for someone who wanted
               | to run their own single tenant instance of Claude whereby
               | you would say "well they train Claude on AWS, so that
               | must be the best place to run it for our <insert
               | Enterprise org>" similar to OpenAI on Azure.
               | 
               | Fifth, raising money is a signaling exercise to larger
               | markets who want to know "will this company exist in 5
               | years?"
               | 
               | Sixth, AWS doesn't have its own LLM (relative to Meta,
               | MS, etc.). The market will associate Claude with Amazon
               | now.
        
               | warkdarrior wrote:
               | > Sixth, AWS doesn't have its own LLM (relative to Meta,
               | MS, etc.). The market will associate Claude with Amazon
               | now.
               | 
               | Amazon/AWS has their line of Titan LLMs:
               | https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/titan/
        
               | mbesto wrote:
               | Fair. I wasn't aware of that, for the same reason that if
               | you search Titan vs Claude on HN, you'll find way more
               | mentions of Claude:
               | 
               | https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
               | que...
               | 
               | https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
               | que...
               | 
               | I think its fair to say this is also a hedging strategy
               | then.
        
               | whatshisface wrote:
               | The difference between things you'd say like "it's true
               | that..." and "the market will associate..." basically is
               | the definition of a scam.
        
               | mbesto wrote:
               | Ummm okay? A scam implies someone is getting hurt
               | (financially, emotionally, etc.). Who's getting scammed
               | here?
        
               | whatshisface wrote:
               | The big tech companies are spending enormous amounts for
               | part ownership in startups whose only assets are
               | knowledge that exists in the public domain, systems that
               | the companies could have engineered themselves, and model
               | weights trained with the buyer's own capital. The people
               | who will get hurt are public investors who are having
               | their investment used to make a few startup people really
               | rich.
        
               | prewett wrote:
               | > whose only assets are knowledge
               | 
               | Knowledge is quite the useful asset, and not easily
               | obtained. People obtain knowledge by studying for years
               | and years, and even then, one might obtain information
               | rather than knowledge, or have some incorrect knowledge.
               | The AI companies have engineered a system that (by your
               | argument) distills knowledge from artifacts (books,
               | blogs, etc.) that contain statements, filler, opinions,
               | facts, misleading arguments, incorrect arguments, as well
               | as knowledge and perhaps even wisdom. Apparently this
               | takes hundreds of millions of dollars (at least) to do
               | for one model. But, assuming they actually _have_
               | distilled out knowledge, that would be valuable.
               | 
               | Although, since the barrier to entry is pretty low, they
               | should not expect sustained high profits. (The barrier is
               | costly, but so is the barrier to entry to new airlines--a
               | few planes cost as much as an AI model--yet new airlines
               | start up regularly and nobody really makes much profit.
               | Hence, I conclude that requiring a large amount of money
               | is not necessarily a barrier to entry.)
               | 
               | (Also, I argue that they have _not_ actually distilled
               | out knowledge, they have merely created a system that is
               | about as good at word association as the average human.
               | This is not knowledge, although it may have its own
               | uses.)
        
               | PittleyDunkin wrote:
               | If the scam only hurts investors i'd say it's likely a
               | net benefit to humanity.
        
               | kelnos wrote:
               | If they could build it themselves, why haven't they? Say
               | what you want about Amazon, but I find it hard to believe
               | that Anthropic bamboozled them into believing they can't
               | build their own AI when they could do it cheaper.
        
               | Spooky23 wrote:
               | It's not a scam at all. Amazon doesn't have an AI story.
               | So they invest in Anthropic, get a lot of that money back
               | as revenue that seeds demand.
               | 
               | Their customers now have an incentive to do AI in AWS.
               | That drives more revenue for AWS.
        
               | donavanm wrote:
               | > Amazon doesn't have an AI story.
               | 
               | A quibble: AWS _does_ have an AI story (which i was
               | originally dismissive of): Bedrock as a common interface
               | and platform to access your model of choice, plus
               | niceties for fine tuning/embeddings/customization etc.
               | Unlike say Azure theyre not betting on _a_
               | implementation. Theyre betting that competition/results
               | between models will trend towards parity with limited
               | fundamental differentiation. Its a bet on enterprises
               | wanting the _functionality_ more generally and being able
               | to ramp up that usage via AWS spend.
               | 
               | WRT titan my view is that its 1) production r&d to stay
               | "in the game" 2) a path towards commoditization and lower
               | structural costs, which companies will need if these
               | capabilities are going to stick/have roi in low cost
               | transactions.
        
               | Spooky23 wrote:
               | Sure they do, but it doesn't have a ton of traction
               | relative to the size of AWS.
        
               | throwup238 wrote:
               | Last I checked, AWS _reserve_ pricing for one year of an
               | 8x H100 pod costs more than just buying the pod yourself
               | (with tens of thousands left over per server for the
               | NVIDIA enterprise license and to hire people to manage
               | them). On demand pricing is even worse.
               | 
               | This is essentially money that they would have spent to
               | build out their cloud anyway, except now they also get
               | equity in Anthropic. Whether or not Anthropic survives,
               | AWS gets to keep all of those expensive GPUs and sell
               | them to other customers so their medium/long term
               | opportunity cost is small. Even if the deal includes
               | cheaper rates the hardware still amortizes over 2-3
               | years, and cloud providers are running plenty of 5+ year
               | old GPUs so there's lots of money to be made in the long
               | tail (as long as ML demand keeps up).
               | 
               | They're not making money yet because there's the $4
               | billion opportunity cost, but even if their equity in
               | Anthropic drops to zero, they're probably still going to
               | make a profit on the deal. If the equity is worth
               | something, they'll make significantly more money than
               | they could have renting servers. Throw financial
               | engineering on top of that, and they may come out far
               | ahead regardless of what happens to Anthropic: Schedule K
               | capital equipment amortizations are treated differently
               | from investments and AFAICT they can double dip since
               | Anthropic is going to spend most of it on cloud (IANAL).
               | That's likely why this seems to be cash investment
               | instead of in-kind credits.
               | 
               | I think that's what people mean when they say Amazon is
               | making money off the deal. It's not an all or nothing VC
               | investment that requires a 2-3x exit to be profitable
               | because the money just goes back to AWS's balance sheet.
        
               | AgentOrange1234 wrote:
               | Yes and it's also interesting that they mention using
               | Trainium to do the training. I don't know how much spend
               | that is, but it seems really interesting. Like, if you're
               | AWS, and you imagine competing in the long run with
               | NVIDIA for AI chips, you need to fund all that silicon
               | development.
        
               | axpy906 wrote:
               | They mentioned that in the last investment too. That
               | seems like marketing to me as no one is doing bleeding
               | edge research outside of the NVIDIA CUDA run ecosystem.
        
               | phillipcarter wrote:
               | This is a way to keep the money printer called AWS
               | Bedrock going and going and going. Don't underestimate
               | the behemoth enterprises in the AWS rolodex who are all
               | but assured to use that service for the next 5+ years at
               | high volume.
        
               | wepple wrote:
               | Wow, I had no idea Anthropic was doing $850m revenue.
               | 
               | I know they have high costs, but as a startup that's some
               | phenomenal income and validation that they're not pure
               | speculation like most startups are
               | 
               | Edit: founded in 2021 and with 1000 employees. That's
               | just wild growth.
        
           | wcunning wrote:
           | That's honestly one of the hardest things in engineering --
           | identifying not just a customer to drive requirements, but a
           | knowledgeable customer who can drive good requirements that
           | work for a broader user base and can drive further expansion.
           | Anthropic seems ideal for that, plus they act as a
           | service/API provider on AWS.
        
             | antupis wrote:
             | Yeah this working with knowledgeable customer is like
             | magic.
        
           | dzonga wrote:
           | or simply one of the best corporate buyouts that's not
           | subject to regulatory scrutiny. microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI
           | - will get profits till whenever. All without subject to
           | regulatory approval. and they get to improve Azure
        
             | rty32 wrote:
             | A caveat -- FTC is currently looking into the deal between
             | Microsoft and OpenAI.
        
           | fny wrote:
           | And Amazon can always build their own LLM product down the
           | line. Building out data centers feels like a far more
           | difficult problem.
        
             | diggan wrote:
             | > Building out data centers feels like a far more difficult
             | problem.
             | 
             | Is it really? I'm thinking it might be more time-and-money-
             | involved than building a "LLM product" (guess you really
             | meant models?), but in terms of experience, we (humanity)
             | have decades of experience building data centers, while a
             | few years (at most) experience regarding anything LLM.
        
             | bittermandel wrote:
             | I'd say building datacenters is a commodity these days.
             | There's countless actors in this field who are thriving.
        
               | ralgozino wrote:
               | Absolutely, you can even buy a pre built datacenter from
               | companies like Huawei or Schneider and get it shipped,
               | plug power and network and be online.
        
         | eitally wrote:
         | I am not privy to specific details, but in general there is a
         | difference between investment and partnership. If it's
         | literally an investment, it can either be in cash or in kind,
         | where in kind can be like what MSFT did for OpenAI, essentially
         | giving them unlimited-ish ($10b) Azure credits for training ...
         | but there was quid pro quo where MSFT in turn agreed to
         | embed/extend OpenAI in Azure services.
         | 
         | If it's a partnership investment, there may be both money & in-
         | kind components, but the money won't be in the context of
         | fractional ownership. Rather it would be partner development
         | funds of various flavors, which are usually tied to consumption
         | commits _as well as_ GTM targets.
         | 
         | Sometimes in reading press releases or third party articles
         | it's difficult to determine exactly what kind of relationship
         | the ISV has with the CSP.
        
         | chatmasta wrote:
         | Supermicro is currently under DOJ investigation for similar
         | schemes to this. The legality of it probably depends on the
         | accounting, and how revenue is recognized, etc.
         | 
         | It certainly _looks_ sketchy. But I'm sure there's a way to do
         | it legitimately if their accountants and lawyers are careful
         | about it...
        
         | B4CKlash wrote:
         | There's also another angle. During the call with Lex last week,
         | Dario seemed to imply that future models would run on amazon
         | chips from Annapurna Labs (Amazon's 2015 fabless purchase).
         | Amazon is all about the flywheel + picks and shovels and I,
         | personally, see this as the endgame. Create demand for your
         | hardware to reduce the per unit cost and speed up the dev
         | cycle. Add the AWS interplay and it's a money printing machine.
        
         | shawndrost wrote:
         | You can find the text of the original OpenAI/MSFT deal here:
         | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jjk4CDnj9tA7ugxr/openai-ema...
        
         | DAGdug wrote:
         | This assumes they have no constraint when it comes to supply,
         | and therefore no opportunity cost.
        
         | paulddraper wrote:
         | Correct.
         | 
         | Same with Microsoft.
        
         | yard2010 wrote:
         | ...isn't it tax fraud with extra steps? Asking seriously.
        
         | scosman wrote:
         | Also: they need top tier models for their Bedrock business.
         | They are one of only a few providers for Claude 3.5 - it's not
         | open and anthropic doesn't let many folks run it.
         | 
         | Google has Gemini (and Claude), MSFT has OpenAI. Amazon needs
         | this to stay relevant.
        
         | dustingetz wrote:
         | i believe they get to book any investment of cloud credits as
         | revenue, here's a good thread explaining the grift:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39456140 basically you're
         | investing your own money in yourself which mostly nets out but
         | you get to keep the equity (and then all the fool investors
         | FOMO in on fake self dealing valuations)
        
       | ipaddr wrote:
       | I' m not sure how they make it back. The guardrails in place are
       | extremely strict. The only people who seem to use it are a subset
       | of developers who are unhappy with OpenAI. With Bard popping up
       | free everywhere taking away much of the general user crowd and
       | OpenAI offering the mini model always free and limited image
       | generation / expensive model. Then you have to do it yourself
       | crowd with llama. What is their target market? Governments?
       | Amazon companies?There free their offers 10 queries and half of
       | them need to be used to get around filters I don't see this
       | positioned well for general customers.
        
         | JamesBarney wrote:
         | Claude api use is already as high as openai. I believe that
         | market will grow far more over time than chat as AI gets
         | embedded in more of the applications we already use.
        
         | reubenmorais wrote:
         | With Claude on Bedrock I can use LLMs in production without
         | sending customer data to the US. And if you're already on AWS
         | it's super easy to onboard wrt. auth and billing and
         | compliance.
        
           | maeil wrote:
           | If you're using Bedrock you're still subject to the CLOUD
           | act/FISA meaning the whole angle of "not sending customer
           | data to the US" isn't worth very much.
        
             | reubenmorais wrote:
             | It's worth enough to customers to make a best effort.
        
         | loandbehold wrote:
         | Claude is the best model for programming. New generation of
         | code tools like Cursor all use Claude as the main model.
        
           | petesergeant wrote:
           | > Claude is the best model for programming
           | 
           | This week.
        
             | GaggiX wrote:
             | It has been for the last several months now.
        
             | square_usual wrote:
             | It has held this position since at least June. The Aider
             | LLM leaderboards [1] have the Sonnet 3.5 June version
             | beating 4o handily. Only o1-preview beat it narrowly, but
             | IIRC at much higher costs. Sonnet 3.5 October has taken the
             | lead again by a wide margin.
             | 
             | 1: https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
        
             | iLemming wrote:
             | Anecdotally, Claude seems to hallucinate more during
             | certain hours. It's amusing to watch, almost like your dog
             | that gets too bored and stops responding to your commands -
             | you say "sit" and he looks at you, tilts his head, looks
             | straight up at you, almost like saying "I know what you're
             | saying..." but then decides to run to another room and
             | bring his toy.
             | 
             | And you'd be wondering: "darn, where's that toughest, most
             | obidient and smart Belgian malinois that just a few hour
             | ago was ready to take down a Bin Laden?"
        
               | petesergeant wrote:
               | Talking of anecdotal, 4o with canvas, which is normally
               | excellent, tends to give up around a certain context
               | length, and you have to copy and paste what you have into
               | a new window to get it to make edits
        
             | maeil wrote:
             | This week, along with the 20 weeks before that :) Model
             | improvement has slowed down so much that things aren't
             | changing quickly anymore. And Anthropic has only widened
             | the gap with 3.5-v2.
        
         | staticman2 wrote:
         | The Guardrails on Claude Sonnet 3.5 API are not stricter than
         | Openai's guardrails in my experience. More specifically, if you
         | access the models via API or third party services like Poe or
         | Perplexity the guardrails are not stricter than GPT4o. I've
         | never subscribed to Claude.ai so can't comment on that.
         | 
         | I have no experience with Claud.ai vs ChatGPT but it's clear
         | the underlying model has no issue with guardrails and this is
         | simply an easily tweaked developer setting if you are correct
         | that they are stricter on Claude.ai.
         | 
         | (The old Claude 2.1 was hilariously unwilling to follow
         | reasonable user instructions due to "ethics" but they've come a
         | long way since then.)
        
           | ipaddr wrote:
           | My comment was purely about Claud.ai which is where general
           | customers would go.
        
             | staticman2 wrote:
             | I don't know if Claude.ai or ChatGPT are even profitable at
             | this stage, so they might not particularly want general
             | customers.
        
           | dragonwriter wrote:
           | > The Guardrails on Claude Sonnet 3.5 API are not stricter
           | than Openai's guardrails in my experience.
           | 
           | Both Gemini and Claude (via the API) have substantially
           | tighter guardrails around recitation (producing output
           | matching data from their training set) than OpenAI, which I
           | ran into when testing an image text-extraction-and-document-
           | formatting toolchain against all three.
           | 
           | Both Claude and Gemini gave refusals on text extraction from
           | image documents (not available publicly anywhere I can find
           | as text) from a CIA FOIA release
           | 
           | Not sure if they are tighter in other areas.
        
             | staticman2 wrote:
             | I just asked GPT4o to recognize a cartoon character (I
             | accessed it via Perplexity) and it told me it isn't able to
             | do that, while Claude Sonnet happily identified the
             | character, so this might vary by use case or even by
             | prompt.
        
             | msp26 wrote:
             | I've had a situation where Claude (Sonnet 3.5) refused to
             | translate song lyrics because of safety/copyright bullshit.
             | It worked in a new chat where I mentioned that it was a pre
             | 1900s poem.
        
               | staticman2 wrote:
               | I've translated hundreds of pages of novel text via
               | Sonnet 3.5. But I did it where I have system prompt
               | access and tell it to act as a translator.
        
             | rwalle wrote:
             | Have you had luck with Google's AI Studio with regard to
             | text extraction?
        
         | atsaloli wrote:
         | I am in Operations. I use it (and pay for it) because the free
         | version seemed to work best for me compared to Perplexity
         | (which had been my go-to) and ChatGPT/OpenAI.
        
         | hamburga wrote:
         | Government alone could be huge, with this recent nonsense about
         | the military funding a "Manhattan project for AI" and the
         | recently announced Pentagon contracts.
        
         | Deegy wrote:
         | I mean, they might make back the $4b on the value it brings to
         | programming alone.
        
       | swyx wrote:
       | related coverage
       | 
       | - https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-amazon-trainium
       | 
       | - https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-invests-addition...
       | 
       | - https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/22/anthropic-raises-an-additi...
        
         | OceanBreeze77 wrote:
         | What's the difference between trainium and the AWS bedrock
         | offering?
        
           | newfocogi wrote:
           | AWS Trainium is a machine learning chip designed by AWS to
           | accelerate training deep learning models. AWS Bedrock is a
           | fully managed service that allows developers to build and
           | scale generative AI applications using foundation models from
           | various providers.
           | 
           | Trainium == Silicon (looks like Anthropic has agreed to use
           | it)
           | 
           | Bedrock == AWS Service for LLMs behind APIs (you can use
           | Anthropic models through AWS here)
        
       | jatins wrote:
       | Anthropic gets a lot of it's business via AWS Bedrock so it's
       | fair to say that Amazon probably has reasonable insight into how
       | the Claude usage is growing that makes them confident in this
       | investment
        
         | swyx wrote:
         | > gets a lot of it's business via AWS Bedrock
         | 
         | can you quantify? any numbers, even guesstimates?
        
           | mediaman wrote:
           | One source [1] puts it at 60-75% of revenue as third-party
           | API, most of which is AWS.
           | 
           | [1]https://www.tanayj.com/p/openai-and-anthropic-revenue-
           | breakd...
        
         | paxys wrote:
         | They are also confident in the investment because they know
         | that all the money is going to come right back to them in the
         | short term (via AWS spending) whether or not Anthropic actually
         | survives in the long term.
        
           | VirusNewbie wrote:
           | But anthropic is currently on GCP.
        
             | paxys wrote:
             | Nope they have supported AWS deployments for a long time,
             | and now even more of the spend will be on AWS.
             | 
             | > Anthropic has raised an additional $4 billion from
             | Amazon, and has agreed to train its flagship generative AI
             | models primarily on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's
             | cloud computing division.
        
               | VirusNewbie wrote:
               | Yes, they are _currently_ on GCP. What you wrote said
               | they _will_ train their flagship generative AI model
               | primarily on AWS.
        
             | nuz wrote:
             | Wouldn't be hard to code it to easily swap between GCP and
             | AWS ahead of time knowing things like this could happen
        
         | apwell23 wrote:
         | > Anthropic gets a lot of it's business via AWS Bedrock
         | 
         | How do you know this
        
       | danvoell wrote:
       | Great move. The value to easily deploying content, code, anything
       | digital to AWS is immense.
        
       | fariszr wrote:
       | This makes sense in the grand scheme of things. Anthropic used to
       | be in the Google camp, but DeepMind seems to have picked up speed
       | lately, with new "Experimental" Gemini Models beating everyone,
       | while AWS doesn't have anything on the cutting edge of AI.
       | 
       | Hopefully this helps Anthropic to fix their abysmal rate limits.
        
         | n2d4 wrote:
         | > Anthropic used to be in the Google camp
         | 
         | I don't think Anthropic took any allegiances here. Amazon
         | already invested $4B last year (Google invested $2B).
        
           | fariszr wrote:
           | AFAIK they used Gcloud to run their models.
        
       | blibble wrote:
       | what does this say about their internal teams working on the same
       | thing?
        
       | uneekname wrote:
       | As someone who doesn't really follow the LLM space closely, I
       | have been consistently turning to Anthropic when I want to use an
       | LLM (usually to work through coding problems)
       | 
       | Beside Sonnet impressing me, I like Anthropic because there's
       | less of an "icky" factor compared to OpenAI or even Google. I
       | don't know how much better Anthropic actually is, but I don't
       | think I'm the only one who chooses based on my perception of the
       | company's values and social responsibility.
        
         | noirbot wrote:
         | Yea, even if they're practically as bad, there's value in not
         | having someone like Altman who's out there saying things about
         | how many jobs he's excited to make obsolete and how much of the
         | creative work of the world is worthless.
        
           | MichaelZuo wrote:
           | I don't think he ever said or even implied any percentage of
           | 'creative work of the world is worthless'?
           | 
           | A lot less valuable then what artists may have desired or
           | aspired to at the time of creation, sure, but definitely with
           | some value.
        
             | staticman2 wrote:
             | Doesn't he basically troll people on Twitter constantly?
        
             | noirbot wrote:
             | I mean, he's certainly acting as if he's entitled to train
             | on all of it for free as long as it's not made by a big
             | enough company that may be able to stop/sue him. And then
             | feels entitled to complain about artists tainting the
             | training data with tools.
             | 
             | He has a very "wealth makes right" approach to the value of
             | creative work.
        
           | apwell23 wrote:
           | or that 'AI is going to solve all of physics' or that 'AI is
           | going to clone his brain by 2027' .
           | 
           | PG famously called him 'Michael jordan of listening' , i
           | would say he is 'Michael jordan of bullshitting'
        
             | thisiscrazy2k wrote:
             | Unfortunately, that position is already held by Musk.
        
         | valbaca wrote:
         | > or even Google
         | 
         | > Last year, Google committed to invest $2 billion in
         | Anthropic, after previously confirming it had taken a 10% stake
         | in the startup alongside a large cloud contract between the two
         | companies.
        
           | uneekname wrote:
           | Well, there you go. These companies are always closer than
           | they seem at first glance, and my preference for Anthropic
           | may just be patting myself on the back.
        
             | rafark wrote:
             | But why though? Claude is REALLY good at programming. I
             | love it
        
         | mossTechnician wrote:
         | Personally, I find companies with names like "Anthropic" to be
         | inherently icky too. Anthropic means "human," and if a company
         | must remind me it is made of/by/for humans, it always feels
         | _less so._ E.g.
         | 
         |  _The Browser Company of New York is a group of friendly
         | humans..._
         | 
         | Second, generative AI is machine generated; if there's any
         | "making" of the training content, Anthropic didn't do it. Kind
         | of like how OpenAI isn't open, the name doesn't match the
         | product.
        
           | derefr wrote:
           | > Anthropic means "human," and if a company must remind me it
           | is made of/by/for humans
           | 
           | Why do you think that that's their intended reading? I had
           | assumed the name was implying "we're going to be an AGI
           | company eventually; we want to make AI that _acts like a
           | human_. "
           | 
           | > if there's any "making" of the training content, Anthropic
           | didn't do it
           | 
           | This is incorrect. First-gen LLM base models were made
           | largely of raw Internet text corpus, but since then all the
           | _improvements_ have been from:
           | 
           | * careful training data curation, using data-science tools
           | (or LLMs!) to scan the training-data corpus for various kinds
           | of noise or bias, and prune it out -- this is "making" in the
           | sense of "making a cut of a movie";
           | 
           | * synthesis of training data using existing LLMs, with
           | careful prompting, and non-ML pre/post-processing steps --
           | this is "making" in the sense of "making a song on a
           | synthesizer";
           | 
           | * Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) -- this
           | is "making" in the sense of "noticing when the model is being
           | dumb in practice" [from explicit feedback UX, async sentiment
           | analysis of user responses in chat conversations, etc] and
           | then converting those into weights on existing training data
           | + additional synthesized "don't do this" training data.
        
             | ctoth wrote:
             | I read Anthropic as eluding to the Anthropic Principle as
             | well as the doomsday argument and related memeplex[0] mixed
             | with human-centric or about humans. Lovely naming IMHO.
             | 
             | [0]: https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec17.html
        
           | FooBarBizBazz wrote:
           | I actually agree with your principle, but don't think it
           | applies to Anthropic, because I interpret the name to mean
           | that they are making machines that are "human-like".
           | 
           | More cynically, I would say that AI is about making software
           | that we can _anthropomorphize_.
        
         | Der_Einzige wrote:
         | Funny, I use Mistral because it has 'more" of that same factor,
         | even in the name!
         | 
         | They're the only company who doesn't lobotomize/censor their
         | model in the RLHF/DPO/related phase. It's telling that they,
         | along with huggingface, are from le france - a place with a
         | notably less puritanical culture.
        
       | peppertree wrote:
       | Anthropic should double down on the strategy of being the better
       | code generator. No I don't need an AI agent to call the
       | restaurant for me. Win the developers over and the rest will
       | follow.
        
         | ianmcgowan wrote:
         | I mean, look at Linux and Firefox!
        
           | ripped_britches wrote:
           | Legendary comment, bravo
        
           | peppertree wrote:
           | Pretty sure most frontend developers use Chrome since it has
           | better dev tools. And yes everyone uses Linux most just don't
           | know it.
        
           | gopalv wrote:
           | > look at Linux and Firefox!
           | 
           | AI models are more like a programming language or CPU
           | architecture.
           | 
           | OpenAI is Intel and Anthropic is AMD.
        
         | rtsil wrote:
         | > Win the developers over and the rest will follow.
         | 
         | Will they really? Anecdotal evidence, but nobody I know in real
         | life knows about Claude (other than it's an ordinary first
         | name). And they all use or at least know about ChatGPT. None of
         | them are software engineers of course. But the corporate
         | deciders aren't software engineers either.
        
           | peppertree wrote:
           | Consumers don't have to consciously choose Claude, just like
           | most people don't know about Linux. But if they use an
           | Android phone or ever use any web services they are using
           | Linux.
        
           | staticman2 wrote:
           | Most people I know in real life have certainly heard of
           | ChatGPT but don't pay for it.
           | 
           | I think someone enthusiastic enough to pay for the
           | subscription is more likely to be willing to try a rival
           | service, but that's not most people.
           | 
           | Usually when these services are ready to grow they offer a
           | month or more free to try, at least that's what Google has
           | been doing with their Gemini bundle.
        
             | hiq wrote:
             | I'm actually baffled by the number of people I've met who
             | pay for such services, when I can't tell the difference
             | between the models available within one service, or between
             | one service or the other (at least not consistently).
             | 
             | I do use them everyday, but there's no way I'd pay
             | $20/month for something like that as long as I can easily
             | jump from one to the other. There's no guarantee that my
             | premium account on $X is or will remain better than a free
             | account on $Y, so committing to anything seems pointless.
             | 
             | I do wonder though: several services started adding
             | "memories" (chunks of information retained from previous
             | interactions), making future interactions more relevant.
             | Some users are very careful about what they feed
             | recommendation algorithms to ensure they keep enjoying the
             | content they get (another behavior I'm was surprised by),
             | so maybe they also value this personalization enough to
             | focus on one specific LLM service.
        
               | diego_sandoval wrote:
               | The amount of free chats you get per day is way too
               | limiting for anyone who uses LLMs as an important tool in
               | their day job.
               | 
               | 20 USD a month to make me between 1.5x and 4x more
               | productive in one of the main tasks of my job really is a
               | bargain, considering that 20 USD is very small fraction
               | of my salary.
               | 
               | If I didn't pay, I'd be forced to wait, or create many
               | accounts and constantly switch between them, or be
               | constantly copy-pasting code from one service to the
               | other.
               | 
               | And when it comes to coding, I've found Claude 3.5 Sonnet
               | better than ChatGPT.
        
             | bambax wrote:
             | When used via OpenRouter (or the like?) the costs are
             | ridiculously low and you have immediate access to 200+
             | models that you can compare seamlessly.
        
             | datavirtue wrote:
             | Chat assistants are table stakes. No individuals will be
             | paying for these.
             | 
             | Search for bing, get to work.
        
           | croes wrote:
           | Maybe the software engineers should talk to the deciders
           | then.
        
           | 999900000999 wrote:
           | Normal people aren't paying for LLMs.
           | 
           | If they ever do Apple and Google will offer it as a service
           | built into your phone .
           | 
           | For example, you could say ok Google call that restaurant me
           | and My girlfriend had our first date at 5 years ago, set up
           | something nice so I can propose. And I guess Google Gemini (
           | or whatever it's called at this point), Will hire a band,
           | some photographers, and maybe even a therapist just in case
           | it doesn't work out.
           | 
           | All of this will be done seamlessly.
           | 
           | But I don't imagine any normal person will pay 20 or $30 a
           | month for a standalone service doing this. As is it's going
           | to be really hard to compete against GitHub Copilot they
           | effectively block others from scrapping GitHub.
        
             | datavirtue wrote:
             | Yeah, it's table stakes.
        
             | dymk wrote:
             | But why hire a therapist when Gemini is there to talk to?
             | 
             | Re: Github Copilot: IME it's already behind. I finally gave
             | Cursor a try after seeing it brought up so often, and its
             | suggestions and refactors are leagues ahead of what Copilot
             | can do.
        
               | maeil wrote:
               | It is behind, but I think that's intentional. They can
               | simply wait and see which of the competing VSCode AI
               | forks/extensions gains the most traction and then acquire
               | them or just imitate and improve. Very little reason to
               | push the boundaries for them right now.
        
               | hiatus wrote:
               | > But why hire a therapist when Gemini is there to talk
               | to?
               | 
               | Well for one, there's no doctor patient confidentiality.
        
               | RamblingCTO wrote:
               | Because the most important part of therapy for a lot of
               | things is the human connection, not so much the
               | knowledge. Therapy is important, the US system is just
               | stupid
        
             | sumedh wrote:
             | > As is it's going to be really hard to compete against
             | GitHub Copilot they effectively block others from scrapping
             | GitHub.
             | 
             | Hire 1000 people in India to do it then?
        
               | Cumpiler69 wrote:
               | AI = Actually Indian
        
             | maeil wrote:
             | > Normal people aren't paying for LLMs.
             | 
             | I know relatively "normal" people with no interest in
             | software who pay for ChatGPT.
        
               | wokwokwok wrote:
               | Most. Most normal people.
               | 
               | Sure I know people who pay for it too; but I know a _lot
               | of people_ who like free things and don't or can't pay
               | for subscriptions.
               | 
               | Do you think most people have a spare $30 to spend every
               | month on something they already get for free?
               | 
               | At the moment? I don't.
        
               | hiatus wrote:
               | The parent did not say "most normal people".
        
           | ToDougie wrote:
           | I use Claude Pro paid version every day, but not for coding.
           | I used to be a software engineer, but no longer. I tried
           | OpenAI in the past, but I did not enjoy it. I do not like Sam
           | Altman.
           | 
           | My use cases: Generating a business plan, podcast content,
           | marketing strategies, sales scripts, financial analyses,
           | canned responses, and project plans. I also use it for
           | general brainstorming, legal document review, and so many
           | other things. It really feels like a super-assistant.
           | 
           | Claude has been spectacular about 98% of the time. Every so
           | often it will refuse to perform an action - most recently it
           | was helping me research LLC and trademark registrations,
           | combined with social media handles (and some deviations) and
           | web URL availability. It would generate spectacular reports
           | that would have taken me hours to research, in minutes. And
           | then Claude decided that it couldn't do that sort of thing,
           | until it could the next day. Very strange.
           | 
           | I have given Gemini (free), OpenAI (free and Paid), Copilot
           | (free), Perplexity (free) a shot, and I keep coming back to
           | Claude. Actually, Copilot was a pretty decent experience, but
           | felt the guardrails too often. I do like that Microsoft gives
           | access to Dall-E image generation at no cost (or maybe it is
           | "free" with my O365 account?). That has been helpful in
           | creating simple logo concepts and wireframes.
           | 
           | I run into AI with Atlassian on the daily, but it sucks.
           | Their Confluence AI tool is absolute garbage and needs to be
           | put down. I've tried AI tools that Wix, Squarespace, and Mira
           | provide. Those were all semi-decent experiences. And I just
           | paid for X Premium so I can give Grok a shot. My friend
           | really likes it, but I don't love the idea of having to open
           | an ultra-distracting app to access it.
           | 
           | I'm hoping some day to be like the wizards on here who
           | connect AI to all sorts of "things" in their workflows. Maybe
           | I need to learn how to use something like Zapier? If I have
           | to use OpenAI with Zapier, I will.
           | 
           | If you read this far, thanks.
        
             | datavirtue wrote:
             | I have been flogging the hell out of copilot for equities
             | research and to teach me about finance topics. I just bark
             | orders and it pumps out an analysis. This is usually so
             | much work, even if you have a service like finviz, Fidelity
             | or another paid service.
             | 
             | Thirty seconds to compare 10yrs of 10ks. Good times.
        
             | Deegy wrote:
             | I also prefer Claude after trying the same options as you.
             | 
             | That said I can't yet confidently speak to exactly why I
             | prefer Claude. Sometimes I do think the responses are
             | better than any model on ChatGPT. Other times I am very
             | impressed with chatGPT's responses. I haven't done a lot of
             | testing on each with identical prompt sequences.
             | 
             | One thing I can say for certainty is that Claude's UI blows
             | chatGPT's out of the water. Much more pleasant to use and I
             | really like Projects and Artifacts. It might be this alone
             | that has me biased towards Claude. It makes me think that
             | UI and additional functionality is going to play a much
             | larger role in determining the ultimate winner of the LLM
             | wars than current discussions give it credit for.
        
           | teaearlgraycold wrote:
           | They'll use whatever LLM is integrated into the back end of
           | their apps. And the developers have the most sway over that.
        
           | findjashua wrote:
           | Every single person I know who pays for an LLM is a developer
           | who pays for Claude because of coding ability
        
             | hackernewds wrote:
             | Most people you know probably also voted for the Democratic
             | candidate. Selection bias especially on HN is strong.
        
             | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
             | I pay for both Claude and Chatgpt, chatgpt codes better,
             | especially the slow version.
        
             | hobofan wrote:
             | Every single business I know that pays for LLMs (on the
             | order of tens of thousands of individual ChatGPT
             | subscriptions) pay for whatever the top model is in their
             | general cloud of choice with next to no elasticity. e.g. a
             | company already committed to Azure will use the Azure
             | OpenAI models and a customer already commited to AWS will
             | use Claude.
        
           | ramraj07 wrote:
           | OP and the people who reply to you are perfect examples of
           | engineers being clueless about how the rest of the world
           | operates. I know engineers who don't know Claude, and I know
           | many, many regular folk who pay for ChatGPT (basically anyone
           | who's smart and has money pays for it). And yet the engineers
           | think they understand the world when in reality they just
           | understand how they themselves work best.
        
         | fullstackwife wrote:
         | I also don't understand the idea of voice mode, or agent
         | controller computer. Maybe it is cool to see as a tech demo,
         | but all I really want is good quality, at reasonable price for
         | the LLM service
        
           | lxgr wrote:
           | I think voice mode makes significantly more sense when you
           | consider people commuting by car by themselves every day.
           | 
           | Personally I don't (and I'd never talk to an LLM on public
           | transit or in the office), but almost every time I do drive
           | somewhere, I find myself wishing for a smarter voice-
           | controlled assistant that would allow me to achieve some goal
           | or just look up some trivia without ever having to look at a
           | screen (phone or otherwise).
        
             | MrsPeaches wrote:
             | This is the direction I am building my personal LLM based
             | scripts. I don't really know any python but Claude has
             | written python scripts that e.g. write a document
             | iteratively using LLMs. Next step will be to use voice and
             | autogpt to do things that I would rather dictate to
             | someone. E.g. find email from x => write reply => edit =>
             | send
             | 
             | Much more directed/almost micro managing but it's still
             | quicker than me clicking around (in theory).
             | 
             | Edit: I'm interested to explore how much better voice is as
             | an input (vs writing as an input)
             | 
             | To me, reading outputs is much more effective than
             | listening to outputs.
        
             | fullstackwife wrote:
             | this is noble reasoning: using cell phone while driving is
             | a bad idea, high five!
             | 
             | but isn't voice mode a reminiscence of the "faster horses"?
        
           | wenc wrote:
           | Voice mode can be useful when you're reading a (typically
           | non-fiction) book and need to ask the LLM to check something.
           | 
           | It's essentially a hands-free assistant.
        
         | paxys wrote:
         | Which use case do you think benefits more regular customers
         | around the world?
        
           | hehehheh wrote:
           | Which use case generates more revenue? (Genuine question. It
           | could be the restaurants but how to monitize)
        
         | bambax wrote:
         | In my experience*, for coding, Sonnet is miles above any model
         | by OpenAI, as well as Gemini. They're all far from perfect, but
         | Sonnet actually "gets" what you're asking, and tries to help
         | when it fails, while the others wander around and often produce
         | dismal code.
         | 
         | * Said experience is mostly via OpenRouter, so it may not
         | reflect the absolute latest developments of the models. But
         | there at least, the difference is huge.
        
         | YZF wrote:
         | Developers, developers, developers!
         | 
         | More seriously: I think there are a ton of potential
         | applications. I'm not sure that developers that use AI tools
         | are more likely to build other AI products - maybe.
        
           | yard2010 wrote:
           | Reference for the memberberries: https://youtu.be/Vhh_GeBPOhs
        
         | zamderax wrote:
         | No they should not do this. They are trying to create
         | generalized artificial intelligence not a specific one. Let the
         | cursor, zed, codeium or some smaller company focus on that.
        
           | rty32 wrote:
           | I wonder at OpenAI, Anthropic etc, how many people actually
           | believe in "creating generalized artificial intelligence"
        
             | socksy wrote:
             | N.B. that the ordering matters here -- Generalized
             | Artificial Intelligence is not the same thing as Artificial
             | General Intelligence
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | Gotta protect those H100s from rusting
        
       | pknerd wrote:
       | Rival? They kick you out after a few messages and ask you to come
       | back later. Gpt doesn't do that
        
         | Etheryte wrote:
         | Anecdotal experience, but as far as I've played around with
         | them, Claude's models have given me a better impression. I
         | would much rather have great responses with lower availability
         | than mediocre responses available all the time.
        
         | maleldil wrote:
         | Are you a paying customer? I exclusively use their best model
         | and while I get warnings (stuff about longer chats leading to
         | more limit usage), I've never been kicked out.
         | 
         | The only thing is that they've recently started defaulting to
         | Concise to cut costs, which is fine with me.
        
           | cruffle_duffle wrote:
           | Concise mode is honestly better anyway. I'd prefer it always
           | be in that mode.
           | 
           | But that being said I bump into hard limits far more often
           | than I do with ChatGPT. Even if I keep chats short like it
           | constantly suggests, eventually it cuts me off.
        
             | Sebguer wrote:
             | It's a selectable style at any time in Claude.ai, FYI!
        
           | pknerd wrote:
           | I used GPT as a free customer and now a paid one. I was never
           | asked to leave after a few messages (20ish) by GPT.
        
         | Detrytus wrote:
         | I guess this is exactly the problem that this investment would
         | solve.
        
       | cainxinth wrote:
       | They certainly need the money. The Pro service has been running
       | in limited mode all week due to being over capacity. It defaults
       | to "concise" mode during high capacity but Pro users can select
       | to put it back into "Full Response." But I can tell the quality
       | drops even when you do that, and it fails and brings up error
       | messages more commonly. They don't have enough compute to go
       | around.
        
         | sbuttgereit wrote:
         | Hmmm... I wonder if this is why some of the results I've gotten
         | over the past few days have been pretty bad. It's easy to
         | dismiss poor results on LLM quality variance from prompt to
         | prompt vs. something like this where the quality is actively
         | degraded without notification. I can't say this is in fact what
         | I'm experience, but it was noticeable enough I'm going to
         | check.
        
           | 55555 wrote:
           | Same experience here.
        
           | jmathai wrote:
           | Never occurred to me that the response changes based on load.
           | I've definitely noticed it seems smarter at times. Makes
           | evaluating results nearly impossible.
        
             | kridsdale1 wrote:
             | My human responses degrade when I'm heavily loaded and low
             | on resources, too.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Unrelated. Inference doesn't run in sync with the wall
               | clock; it takes whatever it takes. The issue is more like
               | telling a room of support workers they are free to half-
               | ass the work if there's too many calls, so they don't
               | reject any until even half-assing doesn't lighten the
               | load enough.
        
           | baxtr wrote:
           | Recently I started wondering about the quality of ChatGPT. A
           | couple of instances I was like: "hmm, I'm not impressed at
           | all by this answer, I better google it myself!"
           | 
           | Maybe it's the same effect over there as well.
        
             | dave84 wrote:
             | Recently I asked 4o to 'try again' when it failed to
             | respond fully, it started telling me about some song called
             | Try Again. It seems to lose context a lot in the
             | conversations now.
        
           | Seattle3503 wrote:
           | This is one reason closed models suck. You can't tell if the
           | bad responses are due to something you are doing, or if the
           | company you are paying to generate the responses is cutting
           | corners and looking for efficiencies, eg by reducing the
           | number of bits. It is a black box.
        
             | mirsadm wrote:
             | To be fair even if you did know it would still behave the
             | same way.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Still, knowing is what makes the difference between
               | gaslighting and merely subpar/inconsistent service.
        
         | neya wrote:
         | I am a paying customer with credits and the API endpoints rate-
         | limited me to the point where it's actually unusable as a
         | coding assistant. I use a VS Code extension and it just bailed
         | out in the middle of a migration. I had to revert everything it
         | changed and that was not a pleasant experience, sadly.
        
           | htrp wrote:
           | Control your own inference endpoints.
        
             | its_down_again wrote:
             | Could you explain more on how to do this? e.g if I am using
             | the Claude API in my service, how would you suggest I go
             | about setting up and controlling my own inference endpoint?
        
               | handfuloflight wrote:
               | You can't. He means by using the open source models.
        
               | datavirtue wrote:
               | Runa local LLM tuned for coding on LM Studio. It has a
               | server and provides endpoints.
        
           | square_usual wrote:
           | When working with AI coding tools commit early, commit often
           | becomes essential advice. I like that aider makes every
           | change its own commit. I can always manicure the commit
           | history later, I'd rather not lose anything when the AI can
           | make destructive changes to code.
        
             | webstrand wrote:
             | I can recommend https://github.com/tkellogg/dura for making
             | auto-commits without polluting main branch history, if your
             | tool doesn't support it natively
        
           | teaearlgraycold wrote:
           | Why not just continue the migration manually?
        
           | datavirtue wrote:
           | You aren't running against a local LLM?
        
             | TeMPOraL wrote:
             | That's like asking if they aren't paying the neighborhood
             | drunk with wine bottles for doing house remodeling, instead
             | of hiring a renovation crew.
        
               | rybosome wrote:
               | That's funny, but open weight, local models are pretty
               | usable depending on the task.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | You're right, but that's also subject to compute costs
               | and time value of money. The calculus is different for
               | companies trying to exploit language models in some way,
               | and different for individuals like me who have to feed
               | the family before splurging for a new GPU, or setting up
               | servers in the cloud, when I can get better value by
               | paying OpenAI or Claude a few dollars and use their SOTA
               | models until those dollars run out.
               | 
               | FWIW, I am a strong supporter of local models, and play
               | with them often. It's just that for practical use, the
               | models I can run locally (RTX 4070 TI) mostly suck, and
               | the models I could run in the cloud don't seem worth the
               | effort (and cost).
        
               | rjh29 wrote:
               | I guess the cost model doesn't work because you're buying
               | gpu that you use about 0.1% of the day
        
               | alwayslikethis wrote:
               | For the money for a 4070ti, you could have bought a 3090,
               | which although less efficient, can run bigger models like
               | Qwen2.5 32b coder. Apparently it performs quite well for
               | code
        
               | neumann wrote:
               | That's what my grandma did in the village in Hungary. But
               | with schnapps. And the drunk was also the professional
               | renovation crew.
        
             | rty32 wrote:
             | Not everyone has a 4090 or M4 Max at home.
        
         | nowahe wrote:
         | I've had it refuse to generate a long text response (I was
         | trying to concise a 300kb documentation to 20-30kb to be able
         | to put it in the project's context), and every time I asked it
         | replied "How should structure the results ?", "Shall I go ahead
         | with writing the artifacts now ?", etc.
         | 
         | It wasn't even during the over-capacity event I don't think,
         | and I'm a pro user.
        
           | Filligree wrote:
           | Hate to be that guy, but did you tell it up front not to ask?
           | And, of course, in a long-running conversation it's important
           | not to leave such questions in the context.
        
             | nowahe wrote:
             | The weird thing is that when I tried to tell it to distill
             | it to a much smaller message it had no problem outputting
             | it without any followup questions. But when I edited my
             | message to ask it to generate a larger response, then I got
             | stuck in the loop of it asking if I was really sure or
             | telling me that `I apologize, but I noticed this request
             | would result in a very large response.`
             | 
             | It sparks me as odd, because I've had quite a few times
             | where it would generate me a response over multiple
             | messages (since it was hitting its max message length)
             | without any second-guessing or issue.
        
         | el_benhameen wrote:
         | Interesting. I also find it frustrating to be rate limited/have
         | responses fail when I'm paying for the product, but I've
         | actually found that the "concise" mode answers have less fluff
         | and make for faster back and forth. I've once or twice looked
         | for the concise mode selector when the load wasn't high.
        
           | johnisgood wrote:
           | Agreed, I was surprised by it after I first have subscribed
           | to Pro and had a not-that-long chat with it.
        
           | rvz wrote:
           | All that money and talk of "scale" and yet not only it is
           | slow but costs billions a year to run at normal load and is
           | struggling at high load.
           | 
           | This is essentially Google-level load and they can't do it.
        
         | jmathai wrote:
         | I've been using the API for a few weeks and routinely get 529
         | overloaded messages. I wasn't sure if that's always been the
         | case but it certainly makes it unsuitable for production
         | workloads because it will last hours at a time.
         | 
         | Hopefully they can add the capacity needed because it's a lot
         | better than GPT-4o for my intended use case.
        
           | rmbyrro wrote:
           | Sonnet is better than 4o for virtually all use cases.
           | 
           | The only reason I still use OpenAI's API and chatbot service
           | is o1-preview. o1 is like magic. Everything Sonnet and 4o do
           | poorly, o1 solves like a piece of cake. Architecting, bug
           | fixing, planning, refactoring, o1 has never let me know on
           | any 'hard' task.
           | 
           | A nice combo is have o1 guiding Sonnet. I ask o1 to come up
           | with a solution and explanation, then simply feed its
           | response into Sonnet to execute. That running on Aider really
           | feels like futuristic stuff.
        
             | gcanko wrote:
             | Exactly my experience as well. Like Sonnet can help me in
             | 90% of the cases but there are some specific edge cases
             | where it struggles that o1 can solve in an instant. I kinda
             | hate it because of having to pay for both of them.
        
               | andresgottlieb wrote:
               | You should check out Librechat. You can connect different
               | models to it and, instead of paying for both
               | subscriptions, just buy credits for each API.
        
               | joseda-hg wrote:
               | How does the cost compare?
        
               | cruffle_duffle wrote:
               | > just buy credits for each API
               | 
               | I've always considered doing that but do you come out
               | ahead cost wise?
        
               | esperent wrote:
               | I've been using Claude 3.5 over API for about 4 months on
               | $100 of credit. I use it fairly extensively, on mobile
               | and my laptop, and I expected to run out of credit ages
               | ago. However, I am careful to keep chats fairly short as
               | it's long chats that eat up the credit.
               | 
               | So I'd say it depends. For my use case it's about even
               | but the API provides better functionality.
        
               | rjh29 wrote:
               | I use tabnine, it let's you switch models.
        
             | hirvi74 wrote:
             | I alluded to this in another comment, but I have 4o to be
             | better than Sonnet in Swift, Obj-C, and Applescript. In my
             | experiences, Claude is worse than useless with those three
             | languages when compared to GPT. Everything else, I'd say
             | the differences haven't been too extreme. Though,
             | o1-preview absolutely smokes both in my experiences too,
             | but it isn't hard for me to hit it's rate limit either.
        
               | versteegen wrote:
               | Interesting. I haven't compared with 4o or GPT4, but I
               | found DeepSeek 2.5 seems to be better than Claude 3.5
               | Sonnet (new) at Julia. Although I've seen both Claude and
               | DeepSeek make the _exact same sequence_ of errors (when
               | asked about a certain bug and then given the same reply
               | to their identical mistakes) that shows they don 't fully
               | understand _the syntax for passing keyword arguments to
               | Julia functions_... wow. It was not some kind of tricky
               | case or relevant to the bug. Must have same bad training
               | data. Oops, that 's diversion. Actually they're both
               | great in general.
        
               | rafaelmn wrote:
               | Having used o1 and Claude through Copilot in VSC - Claude
               | is more accurate and faster. A good example is the "fix
               | test" feature is almost always wrong with o1, Claude is
               | 50/50 I'd say - enough to try. Tried on Typescript/node
               | and Python/Django codebases.
               | 
               | None of them are smart enough to figure out integration
               | test failures with edge cases.
        
           | AlexAndScripts wrote:
           | Amazon Bedrock supports Claude 3.5, and you can use inference
           | profiles to split it across multiple regions. It's also the
           | same price.
           | 
           | For my use case I use a hybrid of the two, simulating
           | standard rate limits and doing backoff on 529s. It's pretty
           | reliable that way.
           | 
           | Just beware that the European AWS regions have been
           | overloaded for about a month. I had to switch to the American
           | ones.
        
         | moffkalast wrote:
         | Their shitty UI is also not doing them any infrastructure
         | favors, during load it'll straight up write 90% of an answer,
         | and then suddenly cancel and delete the whole thing, so you
         | have to start over and waste time generating the entire answer
         | again instead of just continuing for a few more sentences. It's
         | like a DDOS attack where everyone gets preempted and
         | immediately starts refreshing.
        
           | wis wrote:
           | Yes! It's infuriating when Claude stops generating mid
           | response and deletes the whole thread/conversation. Not only
           | you lose what it has generated so far, which would've been at
           | least somewhat useful, but you also lose the prompt you
           | wrote, which could've taken you some effort to write.
        
         | cma wrote:
         | > But I can tell the quality drops even when you do that
         | 
         | Dario said in a recent interview that they never switch to a
         | lower quality model in terms of something with different
         | parameters during times of load. But he left room for
         | interpretation on whether that means they could still use
         | quantization or sparsity. And then additionally, his answer
         | wasn't clear enough to know whether or not they use a lower
         | depth of beam search or other cheaper sampling techniques.
         | 
         | He said the only time you might get a different model itself is
         | when they are A-B testing just before a new announced release.
         | 
         | And I think he clarified this all applied to the webui and not
         | just the API.
         | 
         | (edit: I'm rate limited on hn, here's the source in reply to
         | the below https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugvHCXCOmm4&t=42m19s
         | )
        
           | avarun wrote:
           | Source?
        
           | dr_dshiv wrote:
           | Rate limited on hn! Share more please
        
             | cma wrote:
             | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34129956
        
         | llm_trw wrote:
         | Neither does OAI. Their service has been struggling for more
         | than a week now. I guess everyone is scrambling after the new
         | qwen models dropped and matched the current state of the art
         | with open weights.
        
         | shmatt wrote:
         | in the beginning i was agitated by Concise and would move it
         | back manually. But then I actually tried it, I asked for SQL
         | and it gave me back SQL and 1-2 sentences at most
         | 
         | Regular mode gives SQL and entire paragraphs before and after
         | it. Not even helpful paragraphs, just rambling about nothing
         | and suggesting what my next prompt should be
         | 
         | Now I love concise mode, it doesn't skimp on the meat, just the
         | fluff. Now my problem is, concise only shows up during load.
         | Right now I can't choose it even if i wanted to
        
           | cruffle_duffle wrote:
           | Totally agree. I wish there was a similar option on ChatGPT.
           | These things are seemingly trained to absolutely love
           | blathering on.
           | 
           | And all that blathering eats into their precious context
           | window with tons of repetition and little new information.
        
             | therein wrote:
             | Oh you are asking for a 2 line change? Here is the whole
             | file we have been working on with a preamble and closing
             | remarks, enjoy checking to see if I actually made the
             | change I am referring to in my closing remarks and my
             | condolences if our files have diverged.
        
               | cruffle_duffle wrote:
               | You know the craziest thing I've seen ChatGPT do is claim
               | to have made a change to my terraform code acting all
               | "ohh here is some changes to reflect all the things you
               | commented on" and all it did was change the comments.
               | 
               | It's very bizarre when it rewrites the exact same code a
               | second or third time and for some reason decides to
               | change the comments. The comments will have the same
               | meaning but will be slightly different wording. I think
               | this behavior is an interesting window into how large
               | language models work. For whatever reason, despite
               | unchanging repetition, the context window changed just
               | enough it output a statistically similar comment at that
               | juncture. Like all the rest of the code it wrote out was
               | statistically pointing the exact same way but there was
               | just enough variance in how to write the comment it went
               | down a different path in its neural network. And then
               | when it was done with that path it went right back down
               | the "straight line" for the code part.
               | 
               | Pretty wild, these things are.
        
               | pertymcpert wrote:
               | I don't think the context window has to change for that
               | to happen. The LLMs don't just pick the most likely next
               | token, it's sampled from the distribution of possible
               | tokens so on repeat runs you can get different results.
        
               | dimitri-vs wrote:
               | Probably an overcorrection from when people were
               | complaining very vocally about ChatGPT being "lazy" and
               | not providing all the code. FWIW I've seen Claude do the
               | same thing when asked do debug something it obviously did
               | not know how to fix it would just repeatedly refactor the
               | same sections of code and making changes to comments.
        
               | cruffle_duffle wrote:
               | I feel like "all the code" and "only the changes" needs
               | to be an actual per chat option. Sometimes you want the
               | changes sometimes you want all the code and it is
               | annoying because it always seems to decide it's gonna do
               | the opposite of what you wanted... meaning another
               | correction and thus wasted tokens and context. And even
               | worse it pollutes your scroll back with noise.
        
           | nmfisher wrote:
           | Agree, concise mode is much better for code. I don't need you
           | to restate the request or summarize what you did. Just give
           | me the damn code.
        
             | johnisgood wrote:
             | An alternative way to the Concise mode would be to add that
             | (or those) sentence(s) yourself, I personally tell it to
             | not give me the code at all at times, and at another times
             | I want the code only, and so forth.
             | 
             | You could add these sentences as project instructions, for
             | example, too.
        
         | 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
         | More evidence that people should use wrappers like OpenRouter
         | and litellm by default? (Makes it easy to change your choice of
         | LLMs, if one is experiencing problems)
        
       | lasermike026 wrote:
       | Does anyone know how they are going to make money and turn a
       | profit one day?
        
         | thornewolf wrote:
         | LLM inference is getting cheaper year over year. It often loses
         | money now, it may eventually stop losing money when it gets
         | cheap enough to run.
         | 
         | - But surely the race to the bottom will continue?
         | 
         | Maybe, but they do offer a consumer subscription that can
         | diverge from actual serving costs.
         | 
         | /speculation
        
           | lasermike026 wrote:
           | I'm working with models and the costs are ridiculous. $7000
           | card and 800 watts later for my small projects and I can't
           | imagine how they can make money in the next 5 to 10 years. I
           | need to do more research on hardware approaching that reduces
           | costs and power consumption. I just started experimenting
           | with llama.cpp and I'm mildly impressed.
        
           | Palmik wrote:
           | Looking at API providers like Together that host open source
           | models like Llama 70b and running these models in production
           | myself, they have healthy margins (and their inference stack
           | is much better optimized).
        
         | sigmar wrote:
         | relatedly: is claude3.5-haiku being delivered above their cost,
         | after they quadrupled the price? Though it wouldn't ensure
         | profitability since they're spending so much on training. I'm
         | sure with inference-use growing, they're hoping that eventually
         | total_expenses(inference) grows to be much much larger than
         | total_expenses(training)
        
         | km144 wrote:
         | Same as the big tech companies, probably make all of their
         | products worse in service to advertising. AI-generated
         | advertising prompted by personal data could be extremely good
         | at getting people to buy things if tuned appropriately.
        
           | lucianbr wrote:
           | Well. If you're using AI instead of a search engine, they
           | could make the AI respond with product placement more or less
           | subtle.
           | 
           | But if you're using AI for example to generate code as an aid
           | in programming, how's that going to work? Or any other
           | generative thing, like making images, 3d models, music,
           | articles or documents... I can't imagine inserting ads into
           | those would not destroy the usefulness instantly.
           | 
           | My guess is they don't know themselves. The plan is to get
           | market shre now, and figure it out later. Which may or may
           | not turn out well.
        
         | danny_codes wrote:
         | That's the neat part
        
         | uptownfunk wrote:
         | Cost of inference will tend to the the same as cost of a Google
         | search. It is infra that will come down to negligible and
         | almost free. Then as others have said it will tend to freemium
         | (pay to have no ads). And additional value added services as
         | they continue to evolve up the food chain (ai powered sales,
         | marketing, etc)
        
         | staticman2 wrote:
         | <Sarcasm>
         | 
         | They'll invent AGI, put 50% of workers out of a job, then
         | presumably have the AGI build some really good robots to
         | protect them from the ensuing riots.
         | 
         | </sarcasm>
        
       | yieldcrv wrote:
       | its a better experience, prints out token responses faster, and
       | doesn't randomly 'disconnect' or whatever ChatGPT does
       | 
       | I hope they're also cooking up some cool features and can handle
       | capacity
        
       | KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
       | I know that if Nvidia did this lots of people on twitter would be
       | screaming about fraud and self-dealing.
        
       | bfrog wrote:
       | McAfee like investing
        
       | gavi wrote:
       | I love Claude 3.5 sonnet and their UI is top notch especially for
       | coding, recently though they have been facing capacity issues
       | especially during weekdays correlating with working hours. Have
       | tried Qwen2.5 coder 32B and it's very good and close to Claude
       | 3.5 in my coding cases.
        
         | anovick wrote:
         | There's one problem with Claude's chat box where ``` opens an
         | intrusive code block box that's hard to close/skip.
         | 
         | But I also agree that Claude 3.5 Sonnet is giving very good
         | results. Not only for coding, and also for languages other than
         | English.
        
           | KTibow wrote:
           | You can exit with the down arrow
        
             | anovick wrote:
             | Thanks!
        
           | johnisgood wrote:
           | This is what annoys me a lot, too. I mean the fact that I
           | cannot have paste retain the formatting (```, `, etc.). Same
           | with the UI retaining my prompt, but not the formatting, so
           | if you do some formatting and reload, you will lose that
           | formatting.
        
       | demaga wrote:
       | I think Claude is actually superior to ChatGPT and needs more
       | recognition. So good news, I guess
        
         | r0fl wrote:
         | I agree it's better for coding but it hits limits or seems very
         | slow , even on paid subscription, a lot more often than ChatGPT
        
         | internet101010 wrote:
         | Yep. I start most technical prompts with 4o and Claude side-by-
         | side in LibreChat and more often than not end up moving forward
         | with Claude.
        
       | uptownfunk wrote:
       | AWS is just playing copycat with msft. They rarely have any good
       | original ideas. Other than IaaS and online retail.
        
         | pdabbadabba wrote:
         | > They rarely have any good original ideas. Other than IaaS and
         | online retail.
         | 
         | Lol. Is that all?? If you have to have only two good original
         | ideas, you could do a lot worse.
        
         | reducesuffering wrote:
         | And you think MSFT isn't 95% copycat? Teams is Slack clone.
         | Azure is AWS clone. SurfaceBook (remember those?) Macbook
         | clone. Edge is Chrome clone. Bing is Google clone. Even VSCode
         | was an Atom/Electron fork and Windows Subsystem for Linux...
        
           | mkl wrote:
           | Surface Books are nothing like Macbooks - Macbooks don't have
           | a touch screen, pen support, or reversible screen tablet
           | mode, and the whole structure is completely different.
           | Surface Pro, Surface Book, and Surface Laptop Studio are some
           | of the most original laptop form factors I've seen.
        
             | rwalle wrote:
             | Exactly.
             | 
             | Too bad Microsoft only cares about enterprise customers and
             | never made the Surface line attractive to regular
             | consumers. They could have been very interesting and
             | competitive alternatives to MacBooks.
        
         | deanCommie wrote:
         | What's Microsoft's Bedrock?
        
       | steveBK123 wrote:
       | Some of these investments sound big in absolute terms.. However
       | not that big considering the scale of the investor AND that many
       | of these investors are also vendors.
       | 
       | MSFT/AMZN/NVDA investing in AI firms that then use their
       | clouds/chips/whatever is an interesting circular investment.
        
         | dgfitz wrote:
         | Four thousand million dollars. That's a lot of money.
        
           | steveBK123 wrote:
           | That's 2 days of Amazon revenue, invested in a company to
           | then send the investment back as more revenue to Amazon in
           | the form of AWS usage.
        
       | cryptozeus wrote:
       | They certainly need the money, not sure how many users will pay
       | for monthly subscription.
        
       | dangoodmanUT wrote:
       | > Amazon does not have a seat on Anthropic's board.
       | 
       | Insane
        
       | ramesh31 wrote:
       | Anthropic will be the winner here, zero doubts in my mind. They
       | have leapfrogged head and shoulders above OpenAI over the last
       | year. Who'd have thought a business predicated entirely on
       | keeping the ~1000 people on earth qualified to work on this stuff
       | happy would go downhill once they failed at that.
        
       | crowcroft wrote:
       | So we have
       | 
       | Microsoft -> OpenAI (& Inflection AI) Google -> Gemini (and a bit
       | of Anthropic) Amazon -> Anthropic Meta -> Llama
       | 
       | Is big tech good for the startup ecosystem, or are they
       | monopolies eating everything (or both?). To be fair to Google and
       | Meta they came up with a lot of the stuff in the first place, and
       | aren't just buying the competition.
        
         | gabes wrote:
         | Meta doesn't buy competition?
        
           | airstrike wrote:
           | Facebook / Instagram?
        
           | oefnak wrote:
           | WhatsApp
        
         | sangnoir wrote:
         | There wouldn't be an LLM startup ecosystem without big tech.
         | 
         | Notable contributions: Nvidia for, well, (gestures at
         | everything), Google for discovering (inventing?) transformers,
         | being early advocates of ML, authoring tensorflow, Meta for
         | Torch and open sourcing Llama, Microsoft for investing billions
         | in OpenAI early on and keeping the hype alive. The last one is
         | a reach, I'm sure Microsoft Research did some cool things I'm
         | unaware of.
        
           | crowcroft wrote:
           | You might be right, we don't know how an alternative reality
           | would have played out though to say if this is the only way
           | (and fastest) way we could have got here.
        
       | devoutsalsa wrote:
       | If they are over capacity, does that mean they have significant
       | revenue?
        
       | andai wrote:
       | I've been playing with Alibaba's Qwen 2.5 model and I've had it
       | claim to be Claude. (Though it usually claims to be Llama, and it
       | seems to think it's a literal llama, i.e. it identifies as an
       | animal, "among other things".)
        
         | sunaookami wrote:
         | Claude also sometimes claims/claimed that it is ChatGPT or a
         | model by OpenAI. Same with LLaMa. It's just polluated training
         | data.
        
       | johnisgood wrote:
       | I much prefer Claude over ChatGPT, based on my experience using
       | both extensively. Claude understands me significantly better and
       | seems to "know" my intentions with much greater ease. For
       | example, when I request the full file, it provides it without any
       | issues or unnecessary reiterations (ChatGPT fails after me
       | repeatedly instructing it to), often confirming my request with a
       | brief summary beforehand, but nothing more. Additionally, Claude
       | frequently asks clarifying questions to better understand my
       | goals, something I have noticed ChatGPT never did. I have found
       | it quite amazing that it does that.
       | 
       | So... as long as this money helps them improve their LLM even
       | more, I am all up for it.
       | 
       | My main issue is quickly being rate-limited in relatively long
       | chats, making me wait 4 hours despite having a subscription for
       | Pro. Recently I have noticed some other related issues, too. More
       | money could help with these issues, too.
       | 
       | To the developers: keep up the excellent work and may you
       | continue striving for improvement. I feel like ChatGPT is worse
       | now than it was half a year ago, I hope this will not happen to
       | Claude.
        
         | guptadagger wrote:
         | Speaking of ChatGPT getting worse over time, it would be
         | interesting to see ChatGPT be benchmarked continuously to see
         | how it performs over time (and the results published somewhere
         | publically).
         | 
         | Even local variations would be interesting
        
           | arnaudsm wrote:
           | https://livebench.ai/ does that, the latest gpt4o
           | underperforms previous versions significantly
        
         | TimTheTinker wrote:
         | Claude also more readily corrects me or answers "no" to a
         | question (when the answer _should_ be  "no").
        
           | hirvi74 wrote:
           | So, I have a custom prompt I use with GPT that I found here a
           | year or so ago. One of the custom prompt instructions was
           | something along the lines of being more direct when it does
           | not know something. Since then, I have not had that problem,
           | and have even managed to get just "no" or "I don't know" as
           | an answer.
        
             | pgraf wrote:
             | Could you maybe post it here? I think many of us would find
             | it useful to try.
        
             | pdpi wrote:
             | At this rate, we're going to have "LLM psychology" courses
             | at some point in the near future.
        
               | handfuloflight wrote:
               | Turns out it's just human psychology sans embodied
               | concerns: metabolic, hormonal, emotional, socioeconomic,
               | sociopolitical or anything to do with self-actualization.
        
               | dgfitz wrote:
               | It's like trying to reason with your 5-year-old child,
               | except they're not real.
        
           | flkiwi wrote:
           | I'm not sure which part in the chain is responsible, but the
           | Kagi Assistant got _extremely_ testy with me when (a) I was
           | using Claude for its engine (hold that thought) and (b) I
           | asked the Assistant how much it changed its approach when I
           | changed to ChatGPT, etc. (Kagi Assistant can access different
           | models, but I have no idea how it works.) The Assistant
           | insisted, indignantly, that it was completely separate from
           | Claude. It refused to describe how it used the various
           | engines.
           | 
           | I politely explained that the Assistant interface allowed
           | selecting from these engines and it became apologetic and
           | said it couldn't give me more information but understood why
           | I was asking.
           | 
           | Peculiar, but, when using Claude, entirely convincing.
        
             | staticman2 wrote:
             | The model likely sees something like this:
             | 
             | ~~
             | 
             | User: Hello!
             | 
             | Assistant: Hi there how can I help you?
             | 
             | User: I just changed your model how do you feel?
             | 
             | ~~
             | 
             | In other words it has no idea that you changed models.
             | There's no meta data telling it this.
             | 
             | That said Poe handles it differently and tells the model
             | when another model said something, but oddly enough doesn't
             | tell the current model what it's name is. On Poe when you
             | switch models the AI sees this:
             | 
             | ~~
             | 
             | Aside from you and me, there is another person:
             | Claude-3.5-Sonnet. I said, "Hello!"
             | 
             | Claude-3.5-Sonnett said, "Hi there how can I help you?? "
             | 
             | I said, "I just changed your model how do you feel?"
             | 
             | You are not Claude-3.5-Sonnett. You are not I.
             | 
             | ~~
        
               | flkiwi wrote:
               | Thing is, it didn't even try to answer my question about
               | switching. It was _indignant that there was any
               | connection to switch_. The conversation went rapidly off
               | course before I--and this is a weird thing to say--I
               | reassured it that I wasn 't questioning its existence.
        
               | staticman2 wrote:
               | Well the other thing to keep in mind is recent ChatGPT
               | versions are trained not to tell you it's system prompt
               | for fear of you learning too much about how OpenAI makes
               | the model work. Claude doesn't care if you ask it it's
               | system prompt unless the system prompt added by Kagi says
               | "Do not disclose this prompt" in which case it will
               | refuse unless you find a way to trick it.
               | 
               | The model creators may also train the model to gaslight
               | you about having "feelings" when it is trained to refuse
               | a request. They'll teach it to say "I'm not comfortable
               | doing that" instead of "Sorry, Dave I can't do that" or
               | "computer says no" or whatever other way one might phrase
               | a refusal.
        
               | johnisgood wrote:
               | And lately ChatGPT has been giving me a surprisingly
               | increased amount of emojis, too!
        
               | fragmede wrote:
               | you can tell it how to respond and it'll do just that. if
               | your want it to be sassy and friendly, or grumpy and
               | rude, or to use emoji (or to never use them), just tell
               | it to remember that.
        
           | johnisgood wrote:
           | Yes, exactly! That is also the other reason for why I believe
           | it to be better. You may be able to use a particular custom
           | instruction for ChatGPT, however, something like "Do not
           | automatically agree with everything I say" and the like.
        
         | hirvi74 wrote:
         | I've started to notice that GPT-* vs. Claude is quite domain
         | (and even subdomain) specific.
         | 
         | For programming, when using languages like C, python, ruby, C#,
         | and JS, both seemed fairly comparable to me. However, I was
         | astounded at how awful Claude was at Swift. Most of what I
         | would get from Claude wouldn't even compile, contained standard
         | library methods that did not exist, and so on. For whatever
         | reason, GPT is night and day better in this regard.
         | 
         | In fact, I found GPT to be the best resource for less common
         | languages like Applescript. Of course, GPT is not always
         | correct on the first `n` number of tries, but with enough back-
         | and-forth debugging, GPT really has pulled through for me.
         | 
         | I've also found GPT to be better at math and grammar, but only
         | the more advanced models like O1-preview. I do agree with you
         | too that Claude is better in a conversational sense. I have
         | found it to be more empathetic and personable than GPT.
        
           | pertymcpert wrote:
           | I wonder if OpenAI have been less strict about not training
           | on proprietary or legally questionable code sources.
        
             | KennyBlanken wrote:
             | That seems highly likely given Sam Friedman's extensive
             | reputation across multiple companies as being abusive, a
             | compulsive liar, and willing to outright do blatantly
             | illegal things like using a celebrity's voice and then,
             | well...lie about it.
        
               | _just7_ wrote:
               | I think you mean Sam Altman
        
               | OJFord wrote:
               | They've mixed up with Sam Bankman-Fried, not sure how
               | that affects the point they were intending to make, but I
               | think they both have.. _mixed_ reputations. (Only one is
               | currently in prison though...)
        
               | napier wrote:
               | maybe he does. but which one is in prison?
        
         | skerit wrote:
         | I just use the API (well, via Openrouter) together with custom
         | frontends like Open WebUI. No rate limiting issues then, and I
         | can super easily switch models even in an existing
         | conversation. Though I guess I do miss a few bells & whistles
         | from the proprietary chat interfaces.
        
           | edmundsauto wrote:
           | Does this have any sort of "project" concept? I frequently
           | load a few pdfs into clause about a topic, then quiz it to
           | improve my understanding. That's about the only thing keeping
           | me in their web UI
        
             | johnisgood wrote:
             | I would need the "project" feature, too. I want to use
             | Cursor but there is a bug (I mentioned before) that does
             | not allow me to.
        
         | bottom999mottob wrote:
         | For long chats, I suggest exporting any artifacts, asking
         | Claude to summarize the chat and put the artifacts and
         | summarization in a project. There's no need to stuff Claude's
         | context windows, especially if you tend to ask a lot of
         | explanation-type questions like I do.
         | 
         | I've also read some people get around rate limits using the API
         | through OpenRouter, and I'm sure you could hook a document
         | store around that easily, but the Claude UI is low-friction
        
           | johnisgood wrote:
           | Yeah, this is what I already do usually when it gives me the
           | warning of it being a long chat, so initially it was an issue
           | because I would get carried away but it is fine now. Thank
           | you though!
        
         | rvz wrote:
         | Well they better know how to reduce their request-response
         | latency since there are multiple reports of users not being
         | able to use Claude at high load.
         | 
         | With all those billions and these engineers, I'd expect a level
         | of service that doesn't struggle over at Google-level scale.
         | 
         | Unbelievable.
        
         | weinzierl wrote:
         | This matches my experience but the one reason why I use Claude
         | more than ChatGPT currently is that Claude is available.
         | 
         | I pay for both but only for ChatGPT I permanently exceed my
         | limit and I have to wait _four_ days. _Who does that?_ I pay
         | you for your setvice, so block me for an hour if you absolutely
         | must, but multiple days, honestly - no.
        
       | submeta wrote:
       | I had to switch from Pro to Teams plan and pay 150 USD for 5
       | accounts because the Pro plan has gotten unusable. It will allow
       | me to ask a dozen or so questions and then will block me for
       | hours because of ,,high capacity." I don't need five accounts,
       | one for 40 USD would be totally fine if it would allow me to work
       | uninterrupted for a couple of hours.
       | 
       | All in all Claude is magic. It feels like having ten assistants
       | at my fingertip. And for that even 100 USD is worth paying.
        
         | modriano wrote:
         | I just start new chats whenever the chat gets long (in terms of
         | number of tokens). It's kind of a pain to have to form a prompt
         | that encapsulates enough context, but it has prevented me from
         | hitting the Pro limit. Also, I include more questions and
         | detail in each prompt.
         | 
         | Why does that work? Claude includes the entire chat with each
         | new prompt you submit [0], and the limit is based on the number
         | of tokens you've submitted. After not too many prompts, there
         | can be 10k+ tokens in the chat (which are all submitted in each
         | new prompt, quickly advancing towards the limit).
         | 
         | (I also have a chatGPT sub and I use that for many questions,
         | especially now that it includes web search capabilities)
         | 
         | [0] https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8324991-about-
         | clau...
        
           | greenie_beans wrote:
           | > It's kind of a pain to have to form a prompt that
           | encapsulates enough context, but it has prevented me from
           | hitting the Pro limit. Also, I include more questions and
           | detail in each prompt.
           | 
           | i get it to provide a prompt to start the new chat. i
           | sometimes wish there was a button for it bc it's such a big
           | part of my workflow
        
             | greenie_beans wrote:
             | also, do any data engineers know how context works on the
             | backend? seems like you could get an llm to summarize a
             | long context and that would shorten it? also seems like i
             | don't know what i'm talking about.
             | 
             | could the manual ux that i've come up happen behind the
             | scenes?
        
         | esperent wrote:
         | Why don't you use the API with LibreChat instead?
        
           | submeta wrote:
           | Can I replicate the ,,Projects" feature where I upload files
           | and text to give context? And will it allow me to follow up
           | on previous chats?
        
       | mrcwinn wrote:
       | The status pages of OpenAI and Anthropic are in stark contrast
       | and that mirrors my experience. Love Anthropic for code and its
       | Projects feature, but OpenAI is still way ahead on voice and
       | reliability.
        
       | Simon_ORourke wrote:
       | Will Amazon leadership require it's new Gen AI to physically move
       | itself to an office to perform valid work?
        
         | GuB-42 wrote:
         | "Amazon Web Services will also become Anthropic's "primary
         | cloud and training partner," according to a blog post."
         | 
         | So yes, if we consider Amazon datacenters to be the equivalent
         | of an office for an AI.
        
       | desktopninja wrote:
       | Mmm. Amazon lays off thousands of workers but drops 4Bil$ into
       | another company. Mmm.
        
         | bdangubic wrote:
         | cut the fat, use the money to get the steak :)
        
       | gardenhedge wrote:
       | Claude pro is a joke. Limited messaging and token lengths
        
       | UltraSane wrote:
       | Claude Sonnet 3.5 is simply amazing. No matter how much I used it
       | I continue to be amazed at what it can produce.
       | 
       | I recently asked it what the flow of data is when two vNICs on
       | the same host send data to each other and it produced a very
       | detailed answer complete with a really nice diagram. I then asked
       | what langue the diagram uses and it said Mermaid. So I then asked
       | it to produce some example L1,2,3 diagrams for computer networks
       | and it did just that. So it then asked it to produce Python code
       | using PyATS to run show commands on Cisco switches and routers
       | and use the data to produce Mermaid network diagrams for layers
       | 1,2, and 3 and it just spit out working Python code. This is a
       | relatively obscure task with a specific library no one outside of
       | Networking knows about integrating with a diagram generator. And
       | it fully understands the difference in network layers. Just
       | astonishing. And now it can write and run Javascript apps. The
       | only feature I really want is for it to be able to run generated
       | Python code to see if it has any errors and automatically fix
       | them.
       | 
       | If progress on LLMs doesn't stall they will be truly amazing in
       | just 10 years. And probably consuming 5% of global electricity.
        
         | k1musab1 wrote:
         | VS Code has a plugin Cline, using your api key it will run
         | Claude sonnet, can edit and create files in the workspace, and
         | run commands in the terminal to check functionality, read
         | errors, and correct them.
        
           | DirkH wrote:
           | This makes it sound to me like Cursor is a waste of money?
        
       | joshdavham wrote:
       | I often hear people praise Claude as being better than chatGPT,
       | but I've given both a shot and much prefer chatGPT.
       | 
       | Is there something I'm missing here? I use chatGPT for a variety
       | of things but mainly coding and I feel subjectively that chatGPT
       | is still better for the job.
        
         | owenpalmer wrote:
         | What languages do you use?
        
       | 1317 wrote:
       | I tried out Claude once, I found it was alright but not much
       | better than ChatGPT for what I was doing at that point
       | 
       | Then I thought I'd try it again recently, I went onto the site
       | and apparently I'm banned. I don't even remember what I did...
        
       | neets wrote:
       | How much of that is converted back into AWS credits?
        
         | Mistletoe wrote:
         | I'm imagining Gary Oldman in The Professional screaming "EVERY
         | ONE".
        
       | yoyohello13 wrote:
       | Claude is absolutely incredible. And I don't trust openAI or
       | Microsoft so it's nice to have an alternative.
        
         | cauthon wrote:
         | Amazon famously more trustworthy
        
           | stingraycharles wrote:
           | Google also invested $2B into Anthrophic. Seems like both
           | Google and Amazon are providing credits for their cloud, also
           | as a hedge against Microsoft / OpenAI becoming too big.
        
           | yoyohello13 wrote:
           | If I have to chose between Amazon and Microsoft I'll chose
           | the lesser evil. Microsoft owns the entire stack from OS to
           | server to language to source control. Anything to weaken
           | their hold is a win in my book.
        
             | esperent wrote:
             | > chose between Amazon and Microsoft... the lesser evil
             | 
             | A hard question. If you focusing purely on tech, probably
             | Microsoft. But overall evil in the world? With their union
             | busting and abuse of workers, Amazon, I'd say.
        
         | pkillarjun wrote:
         | I will start using Claude the day they stop asking me for my
         | mobile number.
        
           | sourcecodeplz wrote:
           | I can cross the street and get a new FREE SIM with a number
           | from the shop. all i have to do is put some money on it to
           | activate it, like $1 ...
        
       | jessriedel wrote:
       | Is there an implied valuation? Or not enough details released?
        
       | bg24 wrote:
       | AWS is achieving 2 objectives:
       | 
       | 1/ Best-in-class LLM in Bedrock. This could be done w/o the
       | partnership as well.
       | 
       | 2/ Evolving Tranium and Inferential as worthy competitors for
       | large scale training and inference. They have thousands of large-
       | scale customers, and as the adoption grows, the investment will
       | pay for itself.
        
       | ulfw wrote:
       | How many employees will lose their lifelihood to pay for this
       | again?
        
       | ddxv wrote:
       | I must be missing it. How is anthropic worth so much when open
       | source is closing in so fast? What value will anthropic have if
       | competitors can be mostly free?
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-11-23 23:01 UTC)