$165k won't get you far on salaried engineers. There's every chance that 1 engineer, assuming Anthropic employs them, is on $500k or more. Assuming average of $336k in that pool of 50 engineers, then for 11 days for 50 engineers you've spent $710k[0].

Salary info: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/anthropic/salaries/software...

[0]The maths I used (posting because I'm tired and prone to mistakes):

    $336,000 / 260 (working days of the year) = ~$1,292.
    $1,292 * 11 * 50 = ~$710,769

▲ bhaak 4 hours ago | parent [-]

You don't need top engineers to port a program from one language to the other. Outsource it to India.

Of course, then you can also ask, could it have been done with a cheaper model. Probably yes. But then you wouldn't get free marketing.

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minimaltom 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree you probably don't need top-dollar bay-area engineers for this, but hardcore outsourcing to a LCOL probably isnt going to work either due to novelty and generally being setup to do the more rote thing (generalizing a ton here obvi). This feels like something in the middle.

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internet2000 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Outsourcing to India would actually be the disaster the naysayers were saying this would be.

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simonw 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you seen the "rewrite by outsourcing to India" thing work?

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duhhhhh1212 an hour ago | parent [-]

What a weird thing to say. The phrase “outsourcing to India” being used as shorthand for “you don’t need top engineers.” The nationality stereotypes are mean and degrading.

	▲	simonw 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's fair, I shouldn't have commented that. I don't like the national stereotypes at all - I see "outsource to India" as being more about less expensive engineers than not needing "top engineers". That said, I don't think "rewrite from one language to another" with inexpensive engineers is a pattern that works. Happy to be proven wrong.