The staggering losses anthropic is facing are mostly due to their valuation increasing to just shy of 1T at the beginning of this year. That valuation increase caused the value of what they owe on future stock to triple which is shown as a massive loss on paper but doesn’t represent actual cash leaving their hands. The rules are being rewritten by frontier companies whose revenue growth and proposed spending are outpacing any thing we have seen in the past. Anthropic has committed to spending over 500B over the next 10 years on cloud infrastructure which might be what you are quoting but many project their revenue growth to outpace the 50B a year in spending so that may not even equate to any loss but will certainly be less than 50B/yr. The whole thing is bonkers but and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the breathtaking numbers on their balance sheet.
Paper loss. It's a sort of debt they have on bonds that is tied to their valuation. Because their valuation has grown significantly, so has their debt. It's standard accounting process to put that debt as a "loss", even though they're not paying anything.
Think of it this way. It's as if a public company gives you a certain amount in RSUs that won't vest for a while. A year later, the company is worth 10x more. So they list the increased value of the RSUs they owe you as a loss.
In reality, the fact that this "debt" has ballooned so much is a positive sign - the valuation is high (it's a separate issue whether that valuation is realistic).
If they would be profitable without further spending on R&D they would stop spending, but as you say they are in an R&D race so they can't stop and thus the hypothetical is irrelevant.
I think it's a little early to make that statement. Could be. But at this point I think things like printing press, agriculture, writing ... they're all many times more significant.
I know it’s a hot take, but I disagree. I think the invention of AI (or more specifically, ASI with RSI) will dwarf the printing press, agriculture, writing, etc. in terms of significance.
Now, obviously all these things built on each other, so comparing them like this is a little silly, but in my view, inventing AI is essentially inventing an inventor of fantastical things on par (and beyond) the greatest inventions of humanity, including the ability to self-improve.
To be clear, I don’t think today’s LLMs are there yet, and I take no position on whether they’re a dead end, but in my view ASI has no fundamental barriers that cannot be overcome in time.
"The invention of a magical wish-granting technogenie that has not yet been invented, and may never be invented, and we have no idea how we could get from what we have to inventing it, would be the best thing of all time!"
> I’m buying, this is the greatest invention of all time and Anthropic has garnered a pretty solid lead right now.
Depends on your perspective, but that's definitely true if you're selfish and have been paying people for intellectual labor. Lots of layoffs to fantasize about (even though that represents vast amounts of pain and destruction for many people).
It's a good question. SAT scores correlate with IQ tests as much as they correlate with subsequent administrations of the SAT.
Part of it is just that if you're going to administer a test multiple times a year to millions of people with a lot riding on their score, you need to constantly be developing new questions. IQ tests used by psychologists don't need that much churn, and the stakes are rarely anywhere near as high as on the SAT. Other part is that the SAT is specifically tailored toward the core curriculum of American secondary education, and is not officially supposed to just be a proxy for intelligence, even though it actually is. Colleges like to pretend that the SAT is testing "preparation" and "readiness" for their curriculum, because it's considered kind of crass in current times to admit that you're choosing winners and losers in part based on an innate quality that some people have a lot of and others severely lack.
Expensive as fuck to make chips, only makes sense if you believe whatever model you're creating a chip out of will not become completely irrelevant in 5-10 years.
There’s lots of use cases where the current models do fine though. A chip that can run a current cheap model at 100x would be amazing for things like detecting prohibited content on Facebook. You don’t need the 2030 equivalent of Fable for that, you need something that can cheaply process insane numbers of posts per day.
That’s not what we are empirically seeing though. There is also no way of knowing that things can’t be progressing for the next 5 years. No foundational model company would be spending the amount they are on research if they thought it wasn’t going to pan out
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