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Garbage. You can't include training by the companies that develop an llm in the comparison against companies that merely use the same llm. Apples and potatoes.
by geon 2mo ago
Garbage. You can't include training by the companies that develop an llm in the comparison against companies that merely use the same llm. Apples and potatoes.
- peppevignanello 2mo agoExactly, it's like saying Shell is spending a fortune on fuel compared to what they spend on employees, if you count oil extraction costs as 'fuel'.
- general1465 2mo agoSo where are these training costs getting paid from?
- ssivark 2mo agoIt'll get paid from revenue, not by redirecting employee salaries. All that AI+compute is literally what customers pay Anthropic for. Big AI labs are not software companies where payroll dominates expenses. They're capex-heavy industrial entities; it just so happens that the "machines" (whose output they sell) are nominally the same category as the devices that their knowledge worker employees use on their desks.
- seasox 2mo agoVC mostly, since Anthropic is not profitable.
- arjie 2mo agoThat's about to change: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-propel-anthropic-into-its-first-profitable-quarter-7edbf2f4 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-... Anthropic was profitable last quarter.
- debugnik 2mo agoxAI is discounting the first few months of their rental to Anthropic, which will help them seem profitable for a bit longer. We'll need to see if that lasts.
- surgical_fire 2mo agoHello kind sir, may I interest you in some bridges I have for sale?
- littlecranky67 2mo agoI wonder if they ever will be. If the chinese open source models are only 3-6 months behind every major frontier model release, I can't see the business model. GLM-5.2 is supposedly on par to Opus depending on the case. And everybody and their mother can run that model in their datacenter and charge Dollars for tokens.
- tryagainian 2mo ago[dead]
- est31 2mo agoThere is distillation going on where chinese providers give the model lots of outputs. We don't live in a world where chinese providers are not doing this so we can't compare the advantage of this distillation, but there is some advantage to it otherwise they wouldn't do it. If Anthropic can block distillations somehow (which are fair game imo given that Anthropic et al did the same with the written works of mankind), then they might stop or slow down the chinese from catching up. Chinese also have like 40% of the AI researchers of the world, plus they have access to a lot of cheap labour for writing training data. I'm sure an hour of training data creation from one of China's 162 million university educated people is much cheaper than an hour of work from one of US's 97 million. Probably still cheaper than someone from the grand area. China is behind in AI chips/GPUs but they are catching up. One thing where they have a hard dependence on outside is their energy imports: they have to import a lot of stuff from third party countries. The US on the other hand is energy self sufficient.
- littlecranky67 2mo agoStopping distilation is a condradiction to growth: The more active users Anthropic gets, the easier it will be for chinese companies to distile the model. Heck, I can see a paid browser extension being issued that does nothing but send copies of your AI chatbox prompts+results to China - with a "hidden" feature that creates distillation prompts every now and then. Give each 5$ a month for installing the browser extension, and you got an unstoppable distillation botnet.
- 2mo ago
- mrweasel 2mo agoCompute (and IP theft) is the raw materials being used by the AI companies to build their products (the models). It doesn't make sense to compare OpenAIs or Anthropics compute spend to that of our average software company, because different products require different raw materials. Dropbox also use way more storage than Snapchat, that's an equally silly comparison.
- jonatron 2mo agoApples and oranges, or chalk and cheese. Why would you say apples and potatoes?
- nerbert 2mo agoGrape and aspergus, we all get it
- inigyou 2mo agowe all get aspergus down here at HN
- arrowsmith 2mo agoMaybe an ESL thing? "Potatoes" are literally called "earth apples" in some languages (e.g. pommes de terre in French; Erdäpfel in some German dialects.)
- danaris 2mo agoI read it as trying to indicate that it's even more different than apples and oranges. Not sure it succeeds in that, but I think that's the intent.
- geon 2mo agoCorrect
- HappMacDonald 2mo agoI'd have probably gone with "Apples and Orangutans"
- geon 2mo agoClever. Wish I had thought of that.
- klibertp 2mo agoI came to appreciate typos, slightly ungrammatical sentences, and creative plays on common phrases. They are completely absent in LLM output without a specialized prompt (and they seem to struggle to make believable language mistakes even when prompted), so they can serve as a signal when judging whether the text I'm reading was written by a human. As an aside, I observed my stance on proper English use changing in real time over the past 2-3 years. I used to be proud of writing clinically correct prose, and found mistakes in grammar and vocabulary grating. Now, I kind of welcome them and have stopped caring at all about committing such language crimes. I used to cringe when someone didn't capitalize the first words in their sentences - not anymore. I think we're years away from LLMs convincingly faking human-like mistakes (since all the work currently goes into avoiding them), so it's going to remain a useful signal for a while.
- avaer 2mo agoI don't know, compute is compute. Arguably making complex software with LLMs isn't all that different from training a model to do a thing. You're throwing a lot of compute at the problem and hoping for a stochastic solution. The distinction will become even blurrier with time. Though I agree it might be informative to split it by industry sector.
- alexjurkiewicz 2mo agoAI training uses wildly more compute than most companies, who are generally building domain specific CRUD apps. Compare AI costs per-engineer-salary-dollar, because more expensive engineers probably need more expensive AI.
- eru 2mo ago> Compare AI costs per-engineer-salary-dollar, because more expensive engineers probably need more expensive AI. Let's see how this works out in the long run. For a historical analog, more expensive engineers don't use more expensive computers (by and large).
- ThunderSizzle 2mo agoWhich is probably a backwards anti-pattern companies have built. Your most expensive engineer's time is most valuable, so if you give them standard issue which is half the speed, you are throttling the value you can get from your engineer. Not to mention the mental drain of your cursor barely being able to move due to all the bloated virtual networking systemization. It would seem to make sense to give more valuable employees faster equipment, so that their time isn't spent toiling with the slow machine, but rather actually producing value.
- eru 2mo agoEh, computers are so (comparatively) cheap, that you can give all your employees top-of-the-line equipment by that logic. (Well, for this to make sense, you need good computers to be cheap, but the returns to diminish quickly after that. Which used to be the case until fairly recently: single core performance was pretty much capped, and after your whole compile is parallelised adding more cores to a machine didn't really help your best engineer either. Similarly for RAM.)
- psychoslave 2mo agoApples and potatoes are both something people will need to eat if we want to see it from the human utility perspective, and they both require some land space to be allocated for their culture (though one can of course conjugate both culture). If you want to take the DDG LLM summary at fate value, apples are lower in calories and sugar but higher in fiber compared to potatoes, which are richer in vitamins and minerals like potassium and vitamin B6. Overall, apples provide more dietary fiber, while potatoes offer more protein and essential nutrients. Comparison rarely lead to one obvious all superior option that discard every other considerations.
- croisillon 2mo agothe saying "comparing x and y" implies that you compare something that one of them can't compete ; if people praise the softness of the skin first and foremost, comparing apples and potatoes won't lead interesting results
- psychoslave 2mo agoYes, that’s certainly what people mean generally. Now if we consider perspectives like the one elaborated by Marcel Detienne in Comparer l'incomparable[1], we can go a bit further. The comparison no longer starts with the goal to assess distinct objects in the frame of a given more or less established framework, and instead our attention is framed toward challenging ourself. That is, anchored toward finding what frameworks would allow to assess anything meaningful. And latter on, what does frameworks and framework creation reveals about ourself. [1] https://archive.org/details/comparerlincompa0000deti https://archive.org/details/comparerlincompa0000deti
- iLoveOncall 2mo agoOpenAI and Anthropic aren't charities, so whatever cost they inccur for training will be passed down to the companies using the models. So you absolute should include it.
- zaphirplane 2mo agoWell … one was a non profit and I still can’t figure out how it kept the donations the tax benefits and because a trillion for profit company
- ErroneousBosh 2mo agoWhy can't we pass on the costs of OpenAI and Anthropic's training back to OpenAI and Anthropic? Bandwidth isn't free, and all my life I've been told that piracy is theft.
- stavros 2mo agoBecause the money that OpenAI and Anthropic have to pay those costs with comes from the users who pay for the service. There is no "passing the cost" of anything. The consumer always pays all costs.
- ErroneousBosh 2mo agoRight, but I'm not a consumer. Who do I pass my costs for dealing with OpenAI and Anthropic on to?
- onion2k 2mo agoOpenAI and Anthropic aren't charities, so whatever cost they inccur for training will be passed down to the companies using the models You should, but with two important caveats. First, you don't know what their amortization schedule is like so you don't know what the impact on the pricing will be (are they going to pass the cost on over 5 years or over 20 years?), and second they may go bust before paying the cost down so they may not get a chance to pass it all on. If someone buys the company then they'll get a discount on the value, which means the training costs are just eaten by the investors.
- niyikiza 2mo agoI guess they should include tuition cost as well.
- mazurnification 2mo agoIn a way in US it is - _IF_ ppl were rational economic agents and free market allocation worked student loans should reflect on the wages too.
- tryagainian 2mo ago[dead]
- ThunderSizzle 2mo agoLuckily we're not, because then your tip to a waiter/waitress would be dependent on their student loans remaining, especially considering how many expensive liberal arts majors struggle to find a sufficient career.
- rh94 2mo agoExcatly, further more it really depends on who is using it and how value is compared not $. Senior engineers growing without ai will probably deliver 10x in value then ppl who just found out about ai yesterday. Doesn’t matter how much you spent dolar wise