This could be the most cringe main-character-syndrome thing I've ever seen produced by a company in the history of silicon valley.

And the people treating this as serious economic forecasting rather than a marketing puff post are even more cringe.

If Anthropic truly believed LLMs were going to raise GDP growth to 8% permanently (or even just a few percent), instead of going public to raise capital they could just go massively leveraged long on the S&P 500 and get funding for eternity.

They are not doing that, because AI is largely only good at coding, their models barely have a 6-12 month lead over free ones, and software is only 1% of GDP.

And by making software cheaper and easier to produce, they might increase the amount of software in the world by 10X or even 100X, but it will become a smaller percentage of GDP as AI models become autonomously good at creating it. Things that are abundant and cheap don't raise GDP.

Hey Anthropic: before we worry about raising GDP growth to 20%, maybe we focus on making blog posts that don't crash your browser window if you try to resize it?

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ummonk 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How would going leveraged on the S&P 500 because they expect long term rapid GDP growth help them with short term cash flow to invest in AI training that will enable that rapid GDP growth?

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pembrook 31 minutes ago | parent [-]

Because the market is forward-looking, and brings all future cashflows to the present.

If it became clear by 2027 that GDP growth would permanently reach 15% (I didn't make that absurdly stupid chart, they did), S&P 500 valuations would immediately 100X or more.

They could take out a credit line against those gains and have unlimited money.

Wait...are you suggesting those predictions might be so unrealistic that its stupid to even publish them? I'm shocked!

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ummonk 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

Are you saying that instead of investing in training right now they'll get higher ROI by pausing training for a year, and investing their money into taking out long positions on the stock market, all on the hope that what they label the "Extreme scenario" comes to pass?

	▲	pembrook 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If even their modest scenario becomes consensus by next year, the market will 2X or more. They could easily leverage that to 10X returns. Their business is not going to 10X cash flows next year, so yes, that would be the smart move if they thought even the short term modest scenario was happening. They don't think that though. Hence why this blog post is stupid to even publish. It's like me publishing a "What will our future look like?" blog post where I think I'm the center of the universe and draw a chart that says: Modest scenario: I take a bowel movement so big it opens a wormhole and destroys humanity

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zahlman 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Hey Anthropic: before we worry about raising GDP growth to 20%, maybe we focus on making blog posts that don't crash your browser window if you try to resize it?

Have you tried disabling JavaScript? The simulations won't work of course, and there are some random large blank spaces; but the main content is completely readable and handles resizing without issue[0] even on my mid-range office PC from 2014.

[0]: Just like almost anything else would without JavaScript. Though maybe the people who enjoy proving the Turing-completeness of CSS could come up with something…

	▲	pembrook 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		"We're confident our technology will 10X GDP growth, we just need you to disable javascript first. That one we couldn't figure out."