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ASalazarMX 6 hours ago

TL;DR: We like money, and Anthropic should stay in a position to make loads of it despite any competition.

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combobyte 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> We like money, and Anthropic should stay in a position to make loads of it despite any competition.

In a position to lose loads of money, maybe.

Even without China eating their lunch, there's zero reason to believe Anthropic will ever be profitable.

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throwaway63467 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They might just merge with OpenAI. Right now it seems they are still working out who might come out on top but they are both burning tons of money and essentially offer the exact same product up to some minor differences, economically it makes much more sense for them to collude instead of compete for the same market. They might be colluding already for all we know. If they manage to push out foreign competitors they can probably divvy up the Western market quite profitably as their domestic competitors would have less than 20 % (?) market share together?

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combobyte an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't see how merging or colluding fixes their problems, though. Both companies burn cash at historic rates because inference costs a lot more than people want to pay for it. Even if they somehow manage to crowd out any competitors and fix the price of AI, that price can't be much higher than it is today or people will just decide to stop paying for it.

No amount of collusion can solve the core economics problem of compute.

	▲	bizzletk 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They could ~halve their training costs with collusion. Instead of each paying full price to generate a SOTA model in competition, they could share the result and split the cost. This gets even simpler if they merge.

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a34729t 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The hammer is open weight models, and the anvil is Apple's m7 chips with higher memory bandwidth

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lenerdenator 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's more or less how China has historically treated its competition. The CCP has routinely intervened to give their country's corporate interests an advantage.

Up until a few years ago, if you wanted to sell a car as a non-Chinese company in China, you had to hand over pretty much everything to a local company and go into business with them.

When Google wanted to operate an uncensored search engine in China, they found themselves hacked.

It's not altogether unusual for IP to be transferred to Chinese manufacturers for production under a license agreement, then to find goods made with that IP to be for sale for far cheaper without payment made through the licensing agreement. Or maybe they just don't bother with a licensing agreement at all and do counterfeit products straight-up.

There are more examples but turnabout is ultimately fair play.