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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

(www.anthropic.com)
585 points meetpateltech | 1 comments | 02 Sep 25 16:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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llamasushi ◴[02 Sep 25 16:29 UTC] No.45105325[source]▶
The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models.

What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the world but if you can't get 100k H100s and a dedicated power plant, you're out.

Wonder how much of this $13B is just prepaying for compute vs actual opex. If it's mostly compute, we're watching something weird happen - like the privatization of Manhattan Project-scale infrastructure. Except instead of enriching uranium we're computing gradient descents lol

The wildest part is we might look back at this as cheap. GPT-4 training was what, $100M? GPT-5/Opus-4 class probably $1B+? At this rate GPT-7 will need its own sovereign wealth fund

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AlexandrB ◴[02 Sep 25 18:38 UTC] No.45107239[source]▶
The whole LLM era is horrible. All the innovation is coming "top-down" from very well funded companies - many of them tech incumbents, so you know the monetization is going to be awful. Since the models are expensive to run it's all subscription priced and has to run in the cloud where the user has no control. The hype is insane, and so usage is being pushed by C-suite folks who have no idea whether it's actually benefiting someone "on the ground" and decisions around which AI to use are often being made on the basis of existing vendor relationships. Basically it's the culmination of all the worst tech trends of the last 10 years.
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1. awongh ◴[02 Sep 25 19:13 UTC] No.45107685[source]▶
> All the innovation is coming "top-down" from very well funded companies - many of them tech incumbents

What I always thought was exceptional is that it turns out it wasn't the incumbents who have the obvious advantage.

Take away the fact that everyone involved is already at the top 0.00001% echelon of the space (Sam Altman and everyone involved with the creation of OpenAI), but if you had asked me 10 years ago who will have the leg up creating advanced AI I would have said all the big companies hoarding data.

Turns out just having that data wasn't a starting requirement for the generation of models we have now.

A lot of the top players in the space are not the giant companies with unlimited resources.

Of course this isn't the web or web 2.0 era where to start something huge the starting capital was comparatively tiny, but it's interesting to see that the space allows for brand new companies to come out and be competitive against Google and Meta.