X to Doubt.
This is the Anthropic CEO talking up his company's capital needs to the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund ( Norges Bank Investment Management ) and trying to justify some absurd 100bn valuation.
Well, I guess the question I have is, what exactly does he mean by the "cost to train"? As in, just the cost of the electricity used to train that one model? That seems really excessive.
Or is it the total overall cost of buying TPUs / GPUs, developing infrastructure, constructing data centers, putting together quality data sets, doing R&D, paying salaries, etc. as well as training the model itself? I could see that overall investment into AI scaling into the tens of billions over the next few years.
If you had an extra $100 Billion, some people could think of something better to spend it on, some not.
I could see the US subsidizing most of that $100B, just because they can, and more importantly, it would be the kind of tactical advantage that’s needed to make sure US tech companies stay relevant in a world where there’s a growing desire to breakaway from them in-favor of homegrown solutions.
elmo-arms-up-world-burning.gif
BigTech wants all your sovereign money
What will the benefit be of more expensive models? More facts, because it's consumed more information? More ability to, say, adjust writing style? Or is this all necessary just to filter out the garbage recycled AI content it's now consuming?
All this burn and recruiters and bots still match on keywords in CV.
If only this had came before crypto. We could have had a system that underwrites international finance and pays for training on the cheap.
I wonder which timelines had this scenario…
Wow, this CEO entitlement and wealth pissing contests are laughable.
No company can afford to spend $100B on something that will be obsolete a year later, you just can't recover the investment from sales that quickly.
$100m is manageable, if you've got 100m paying subscribers or companies using your API for a year you can recoup the costs, but there aren't many companies with 100m users to monetise for it. $1B feels like it's pushing it, only a few companies in the world can monetise, and realistically it's about lasting through the next round to be able to continue competing, not about making the money back.
$100B though, that's a whole different game again. That's like asking for the biggest private investment ever made, for capex that depreciates at $50B a year. You'd have to be stupid to do it. The public markets wouldn't take it.
Investing that much in hardware that depreciates over 5+ years and is theoretically still usable at the end, maybe, but even then the biggest companies in the world are still spending an order of magnitude less per year, so the numbers end up working out very differently. Plus that's companies with 1B users ready to monetise.