Item — HN Reader

He will be back at Google after the Anthropic IPO.

Seems like everyone here is easily fooled by the Anthropic hype. After the IPO, Anthropic won't be like the daycare it is today.

Their main competitors are the chinese labs which are racing all their prices down close to $0.

2 comments

Can you go into a bit more detail about what exactly it is that you are predicting? This is interesting, and definitely cuts against the grain that the rest of these comments are going with.

A lot depends on whether the z.ai CEO, who just released the first freely-available Opus-class model weights, is blowing smoke when he claims he's less than a year away from achieving Fable-level performance.

If he walks the talk, I really do not understand how either OpenAI or Anthropic is going to justify the twelve-digit valuations they are hoping for. They will just be some people who bought a domain name and rented some GPUs.

I would expect he's 6 months behind. That's exactly how much lag the open models have versus the frontier models, and have consistently the last 2-3 years.

The question is, how far ahead will the frontier models be in 6 months? if it's still 6 months, open weights might have a fable equivalent model, and the frontier models will be on upwards towards ... essay, or novel, or bibliography, or whatever the next name is.

After a point, does it matter? Even assuming that models can keep getting smarter indefinitely, it's not like you need to use the smartest model to get the job done.

Moore's law is dead now, so at some threshold purchasing the GPUs to run the biggest and newest model hurts you more than whatever rent you could've extracted from it.

When we get there, why would you want to run a closed model that you can't control, with restrictions you can't remove, that a company can take from you or silently nerf without telling you?

Seems like what Shazeer did with Character AI. He started it and then Google licensed to bring him and some of the team back after some time.

Not a bad playbook. If you’re important to the company, leave and start your own company. Then play the M&A game and you can clean up nicely.

I'm just not sure that Google, or anyone for that matter, really has the capital to do that with Anthropic. This is a near trillion dollar company.

With Anthropic going public, I wonder how long until enshittification sets in for LLMs. I guess as soon as they have figured out a way to lock-in users and growth slows down.

Might never happen since these are paid services. Maybe for the free tier, if that even continues to exist which I'm betting it won't. Even Gemini has already started paywalling features that used to be free.