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It's amazing that it "works", but viability is another issue. It cost $20,000 and it worked, but it's also totally possible to spend $20,000 and have Claude sh

It's amazing that it "works", but viability is another issue. It cost $20,000 and it worked, but it's also totally possible to spend $20,000 and have Claude shit out a pile of nonsense. You won't know until you've finished spending the money whether it will fail or not. Anthropic doesn't sell a contract that says "We'll only bill you if it works" like you can get from a bunch of humans. Do catastrophic bugs exist in that code? Who knows, it's 100,000 lines, it'll take a while to review. On top of that, Anthropic is losing money on it. All of those things combined, viability remains a serious question.

deleted 7mo ago
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tumdum_ 7mo ago
> On top of that, Anthropic is losing money on it. It seems they are *not* losing money on inference: https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3mdirf7tj5s2e https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3mdirf7tj5s2e
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- byzantinegene 7mo ago
  no, and that is widely known. the actual problem is that the margins are not sufficient at that scale to make up for the gargantuan training costs to train their SOTA model.
  - aurareturn 7mo ago
    Source on that? Because inference revenue is outpacing training cost based on OpenAI’s report and intuition.
    - cma 7mo ago
      Net inference revenue would need to be outpacing to go against his think about margins.
  - JamesBarney 7mo ago
    They are large enough to cover their previous training costs but not their next gen training costs. i.e They made more money on 3.5 than 3.5 cost to train, but didn't make enough money on 3.5 to train 4.0.
- quikoa 7mo ago
  That's for the API right? The subs are still a loss. I don't know which one of the two is larger.
bdangubic 7mo ago
> On top of that, Anthropic is losing money on it This has got to be my favorite one of them all that keeps coming up in too many comments… You know who also was losing money in the beginning?! every successful company that ever existed! some like Uber were losing billions for a decade. and when was the last time you rode in a taxi? (I still do, my kid never will). not sure how old you are and if you remember “facebook will never be able to monetize on mobile…” - they all lose money, until they do not
- PostOnce 7mo ago
  Are we forgetting that sometimes, they just go bankrupt?
  - bdangubic 7mo ago
    name one with comparable number of users and revenue? not saying you are wrong but I would bet against the outcome
    - svieira 7mo ago
      Enron
      - bdangubic 7mo ago
        I should have guessed someone would answer this question in this thread with Enron :) I did not ask for random company that went under for any reason but specific question related to users and revenue.
        grey-area 7mo ago
        Well there are lots and lots of examples that don't end in bankruptcy, just a very large loss of capital for investors. The majority of the stars of the dotcom bubble just as one example: Qualcomm, pets.com, Yahoo!, MicroStrategy etc etc. Uber, which you cite as a success, is only just starting to make any money, and any original investors are very unlikely to see a return given the huge amounts ploughed in. MicroStrategy has transformed itself, same company, same founder, similar scam 20 years later, only this time they're peddling bitcoin as the bright new future. I'm surprised they didn't move on to GAI. Qualcomm is now selling itself as an AI first company, is it, or is it trying to ride the next bubble? Even if GAI becomes a roaring success, the prominent companies now are unlikely to be those with lasting success.
qarl 7mo ago
> It cost $20,000 I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code??? You should look it up. :)
- sarchertech 7mo ago
  You wouldn’t pay a human to write 100k LOC. Or at least you shouldn’t. You’d pay a human to write a working useful compiler that isn’t riddled with copyright issues. If you didn’t care about copying code, usefulness, or correctness you could probably get a human to whip you up a C compiler for a lot less than $20k.
  - qarl 7mo ago
    Are you trolling me? Companies (made of humans) write 100,000 LOC all the time. And it's really expensive, despite your suspicions.
    - sarchertech 7mo ago
      No, companies don’t pay people to write 100k LOC. They pay people to write useful software. We figured out that LOC was a useless productivity metric in the 80s.
      - qarl 7mo ago
        [flagged]
        rezonant 7mo ago
        I can't stress enough how much LOC is not a measure of anything.
        qarl 7mo ago
        OK, well, the people in MY software industry use LOC as an informal measure of complexity. LIKE THE WHOLE WORLD DOES. But hey, maybe it's just the extremely high profile projects I've worked on.
chamomeal 7mo ago
That's a good point! Here claude opus wrote a C compiler. Outrageously cool. Earlier today, I couldn't get opus to replace useEffect-triggered-redux-dispatch nonsense with react-query calls. I already had a very nice react-query wrapper with tons of examples. But it just couldn't make sense of the useEffect rube goldberg machine. To be fair, it was a pretty horrible mess of useEffects. But just another data point. Also I was hoping opus would finally be able to handle complex typescript generics, but alas...
ryanjshaw 7mo ago
> You won't know until you've finished spending the money whether it will fail or not. How do you conclude that? You start off with a bunch of tests and build these things incrementally, why would you spend 20k before realizing there’s a problem?
- friendzis 7mo ago
  Because literally no real-world non-research project starts with "we have an extremely comprehensive test suite and specification complete down to the most finite detail" and then searches for a way to turn it into code.
  - galdauts 7mo ago
    Precisely. Figuring out what the specification is supposed to look like is often the hardest part.
    - mastermage 7mo ago
      100% agreed i use Claude often to just bounce ideas back and forth on specs i would like to create which I know will never gain traction because its either way too ambitious or too niche. And the amount of times Claude proposes something thats completely contradictory in the same response. Or completely does a 180 after two more responses. Is ridiculous.
  - ryanjshaw 7mo ago
    I’ve spent nearly 20 years working as a consultant writing software, I know that. How do you think humans solve that problem?
    - friendzis 7mo ago
      Typically by putting cost caps on deliverables.
      - 7mo ago
RA_Fisher 7mo ago
Progress can be reviewed over time, and I'd think that'd take a lot of the risk out.
georgeven 7mo ago
it's 20,000 in 2026, with the price of tokens halving every year (at a given perf level), this will be around 1,000 dollars in 2030
nly 7mo ago
Also, heaven knows if the result in maintainable or easy to change.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

tumdum_ 7mo ago

> On top of that, Anthropic is losing money on it. It seems they are *not* losing money on inference: https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3mdirf7tj5s2e https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3mdirf7tj5s2e

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
byzantinegene 7mo ago
no, and that is widely known. the actual problem is that the margins are not sufficient at that scale to make up for the gargantuan training costs to train their SOTA model.
- aurareturn 7mo ago
  Source on that? Because inference revenue is outpacing training cost based on OpenAI’s report and intuition.
  - cma 7mo ago
    Net inference revenue would need to be outpacing to go against his think about margins.
- JamesBarney 7mo ago
  They are large enough to cover their previous training costs but not their next gen training costs. i.e They made more money on 3.5 than 3.5 cost to train, but didn't make enough money on 3.5 to train 4.0.
quikoa 7mo ago
That's for the API right? The subs are still a loss. I don't know which one of the two is larger.

bdangubic 7mo ago

> On top of that, Anthropic is losing money on it This has got to be my favorite one of them all that keeps coming up in too many comments… You know who also was losing money in the beginning?! every successful company that ever existed! some like Uber were losing billions for a decade. and when was the last time you rode in a taxi? (I still do, my kid never will). not sure how old you are and if you remember “facebook will never be able to monetize on mobile…” - they all lose money, until they do not

PostOnce 7mo ago
Are we forgetting that sometimes, they just go bankrupt?
- bdangubic 7mo ago
  name one with comparable number of users and revenue? not saying you are wrong but I would bet against the outcome
  - svieira 7mo ago
    Enron
    - bdangubic 7mo ago
      I should have guessed someone would answer this question in this thread with Enron :) I did not ask for random company that went under for any reason but specific question related to users and revenue.
      - grey-area 7mo ago
        Well there are lots and lots of examples that don't end in bankruptcy, just a very large loss of capital for investors. The majority of the stars of the dotcom bubble just as one example: Qualcomm, pets.com, Yahoo!, MicroStrategy etc etc. Uber, which you cite as a success, is only just starting to make any money, and any original investors are very unlikely to see a return given the huge amounts ploughed in. MicroStrategy has transformed itself, same company, same founder, similar scam 20 years later, only this time they're peddling bitcoin as the bright new future. I'm surprised they didn't move on to GAI. Qualcomm is now selling itself as an AI first company, is it, or is it trying to ride the next bubble? Even if GAI becomes a roaring success, the prominent companies now are unlikely to be those with lasting success.

qarl 7mo ago

> It cost $20,000 I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code??? You should look it up. :)

sarchertech 7mo ago
You wouldn’t pay a human to write 100k LOC. Or at least you shouldn’t. You’d pay a human to write a working useful compiler that isn’t riddled with copyright issues. If you didn’t care about copying code, usefulness, or correctness you could probably get a human to whip you up a C compiler for a lot less than $20k.
- qarl 7mo ago
  Are you trolling me? Companies (made of humans) write 100,000 LOC all the time. And it's really expensive, despite your suspicions.
  - sarchertech 7mo ago
    No, companies don’t pay people to write 100k LOC. They pay people to write useful software. We figured out that LOC was a useless productivity metric in the 80s.
    - qarl 7mo ago
      [flagged]
      - rezonant 7mo ago
        I can't stress enough how much LOC is not a measure of anything.
        qarl 7mo ago
        OK, well, the people in MY software industry use LOC as an informal measure of complexity. LIKE THE WHOLE WORLD DOES. But hey, maybe it's just the extremely high profile projects I've worked on.

chamomeal 7mo ago

That's a good point! Here claude opus wrote a C compiler. Outrageously cool. Earlier today, I couldn't get opus to replace useEffect-triggered-redux-dispatch nonsense with react-query calls. I already had a very nice react-query wrapper with tons of examples. But it just couldn't make sense of the useEffect rube goldberg machine. To be fair, it was a pretty horrible mess of useEffects. But just another data point. Also I was hoping opus would finally be able to handle complex typescript generics, but alas...

ryanjshaw 7mo ago

> You won't know until you've finished spending the money whether it will fail or not. How do you conclude that? You start off with a bunch of tests and build these things incrementally, why would you spend 20k before realizing there’s a problem?

friendzis 7mo ago
Because literally no real-world non-research project starts with "we have an extremely comprehensive test suite and specification complete down to the most finite detail" and then searches for a way to turn it into code.
- galdauts 7mo ago
  Precisely. Figuring out what the specification is supposed to look like is often the hardest part.
  - mastermage 7mo ago
    100% agreed i use Claude often to just bounce ideas back and forth on specs i would like to create which I know will never gain traction because its either way too ambitious or too niche. And the amount of times Claude proposes something thats completely contradictory in the same response. Or completely does a 180 after two more responses. Is ridiculous.
- ryanjshaw 7mo ago
  I’ve spent nearly 20 years working as a consultant writing software, I know that. How do you think humans solve that problem?
  - friendzis 7mo ago
    Typically by putting cost caps on deliverables.
    - 7mo ago

RA_Fisher 7mo ago

Progress can be reviewed over time, and I'd think that'd take a lot of the risk out.

georgeven 7mo ago

it's 20,000 in 2026, with the price of tokens halving every year (at a given perf level), this will be around 1,000 dollars in 2030

nly 7mo ago

Also, heaven knows if the result in maintainable or easy to change.