This isn't the government subsidizing a private venture, it's a private venture offering a discount to the government. What does profitability have to do with whether or not the government should purchase their services?

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computably 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If the service provider goes under, the govt wasted their money.

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ameliaquining 9 hours ago | parent [-]

...no? Whatever value they got from inference they already did is still there? Of course the government still needs to worry about vendor lock-in, but they'd have to do that no matter what, and also general-purpose LLMs are relatively replaceable for most use cases.

	▲	bagacrap 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If the company has a sustainable business model it will be profitable and hang around without jacking up prices. If not, you wasted time and money setting up the anthropic tool chain.
	▲	iAMkenough 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Given the statements in their SEC filing, it's not outlandish to consider the possibility of a long-term plan to make Anthropic models a nationalized, public utility before they go bankrupt. If GSA is already considering vendor lock-in as they establish new public services across multiple agencies, the natural move is to build them to eventually transition to a federally-owned and operated provider. Especially with how involved the U.S. government is in limiting capabilities Anthropic provides to consumers today.
	▲	roosterIllusi0n 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Except that work would be cheaper to set up and the cost would drop over time if they were using local llms. Every dollar paid to a 3rd party rental service is a dollar that is burned in the fireplace. We are paying more for the right to be stuck paying more forever, it's ridiculous.

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roosterIllusi0n 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not a discount at all. Every dollar for a rented service is being flushed down the toilet. Industry is moving to local llms, the government should have been ahead of them.