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Unless you're serving Chinese open-weight models - you have to consoder training costs. If you're off my 10x, then the amortization period is 30 months - far longer than the useful lifetimes of SoTA models. Frontier model development is a Red Queens race: you have to run as fast as you can, just to maintain your position.

The discussion was if Anthropic makes money on inference. They do. They lose billions on training.

No, because Anthropic can't serve their models unless they train them.

Training is akin to the cost of building the software/product. Inference is selling the product.


It's quite easy to sell something for a profit if you ignore the costs. Ultimate free money hack. I will start selling canned beans for the price of the beans plus a few cents. I will just ignore the cost of the cans, labor, power, machines, maintenance, distribution, storage and facility space. If I do that the few cents extra are pure profit.

Building ML model training and serving infrastructure is real-world engineering. Nevermind the user-facing apps and supporting services.

> Sure they can build ML models, but I see how they improve upon them after years, and its always some really old "lesson learned" elsewhere in the industry. There's a thousand projects that make things like Claude Code use less tokens, and edit more efficiently, and nobody at Anthropic or Codex implements a single one of these approaches.

They have fully internalized the bitter lesson; the result is they get better returns improving the next model over squeezing out performance from the current one.


> Building ML model training and serving infrastructure is real-world engineering. Nevermind the user-facing apps and supporting services.

Looking at Anthropics status info for the last 90 days only serves to prove that they aren't hiring the right people for the right roles.

> They have fully internalized the bitter lesson; the result is they get better returns improving the next model over squeezing out performance from the current one.

Sure, but there's so many things they could be doing that don't require tweaking the model directly to improve it, the community builds all sorts of tools that improve Claude Code directly, and yet nobody at Anthropic takes any initiative in those directions, it feels like either they don't care about building user-facing software, or they don't have any UX experience.


> Looking at Anthropics status info for the last 90 days only serves to prove that they aren't hiring the right people for the right roles

Look at any[1] dashboard over the past 6 months. It's less about the people working there an more about what leadership is demanding, industry-wide: Productivity* is the only metric that matters now - measured by how quickly teams under them can squirt out new features. Leadership desperately need a win because of the amounts invested, so stability becomes what it is now. Nothing to do with the rank and file, though it's Engineering that will be blamed when the time comes, I hope the multitudes of CTOs are earning enough to justify them being sacrificed to appease shareholders.

1. If your company has a SEV or SLA dashboard, look at it and compare the levels before and after mandated AI-productivity pushes by management.


> Funny when you consider the world owes a lot of AI advancements to both Meta and Google

Funny how ByteDance kicked both their asses so hard at RecSys algos, they had to go back to the drawing board to meet the newly redefined expectations on the quality of short-form video recommendations.


Did they though? That is the lore. You can’t really compare recommender system performance across different populations and products.

Unlike common benchmarks for LLMs.


Also Chinese companies are now single-handedly keeping the future of LLMs open-sourced. DeepSeek being the pinnacle of this. Not only do they publish weights and code, but they publish detailed papers detailing their approach

The European leaders would have have no say in it. If the software from Seattle is designed to covertly exfiltrate information, they won't even know it. Even if they review the individual code changes, it can be an obfuscated attack similar to XZ where the code itself is clean, but not so much for the network fabric firmware binary test data.

The US intelligence machinery spied on Angela Merkel's phone. Do you suppose secretly demanding cooperation for Lawful intercept capabilities in Amazon GmbH is somehow beyond or beneath them?

Also consider that all communication between the European subsidiaries to the HQ is fair game under FISA.


That's a false equivalence. Humans occasionally cause food poisoning at potlucks, and it's self-evident why we should hold McDonald's to a much higher standard due to the sheer scale of harm it can cause. A human, even when hopped up on stimulants, can't do a fraction of what a corporations with whole data centers can do.

It is in no way a false equivalence. Are you saying that if you write a book directly inspired by another you shouldn't be required to pay the author of the book that inspired you, unless you become successful, then you should be held to "higher standards"?

Biological humans are not, and should not be equivalent to corporations. There's a chasm in scale of execution, goals, and functional immortality.

Further case law established that I - a human - can create original work, if you are a non-human entity such as an LLM, or a monkey taking a picture, you cannot.


Remind me again what beings operate corporations.

...and you've moved to the fallacy of composition. You are made of cells (if human), but that doesn't mean you reproduce via mitosis, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

A company is a ship of Theses. Someone can die, and theyre replaced within 3 days. A new hire takes their place within a month (or used to). And legally, the comapny's sole responsibility is "make money for shareholders".

An analysis of 'what a company is', is fair to compare it to the most laser-focused sociopath.

But your false point is trying to say 'Since humans run a company, its human ethics and just humans'. And what we have is demonstrably not human-like.

The 2003 documentary film 'The Corporation' does a deep dive as why you are wrong, in regards to falsely equivocating humans to a corporation. The worst of the worst behaviors of sociopathic humans get selected more and more, all in the name of money.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6v8e7dUwq_Q


> And legally, the comapny's sole responsibility is "make money for shareholders".

"the philosophy of putting shareholder profits over all else is a matter of ideology which is not grounded in American law or tradition"

https://www.salon.com/2012/04/04/the_shareholder_fallacy/

This remains a matter of active debate, and there is no law that requires or enshrines it. It's a legitimate opinion to hold, that a company should maximize shareholder returns, but it is not in any way a requirement to do so.

Here's a recent study on the matter: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/06/12/the-costs-of-weak...

Note that if shareholder primacy were the law of the land, this study could never have even occurred.


it will comprehend it well enough to complicate it further into a rats-nest that only Opus 4.9 can comprehend, and so on. Good luck if you run into a bug before the N+1 version launches.

> [waits for chickens to come home to roost]

"We are writing down X billions over 4 years, and have cancel several ambitious programs related to our AI experiments. We were following standard practice in the industry, so [shareholders] can't blame us for these chickens coming to roost. If everyone is guilty, is anyone really guilty?"


> If they are constantly pushing major changes to the prompts and workings of the tool, without communicating about it

These are all classic symptoms of vibe-induced AI velocitis, sold by AI-peddlers as the future of the industry under the guise of "productivity."

AI can help one generate a lot of code, but the poor engineers approving the deluge of changes are still using their old, unmodified, stock meat-brains. An individual change may look fine in isolation, but when it's interacting with hundreds or thousands of other changes landing the same week , things can go south quickly.

Expect more instability until users rebel, and/or CTOs amd CIOs cry uncle. Amazon reportedly internally sounded the alarm after a couple of AI-tool-induced SEVs. The challenges at Github and the company insisting you don't call it Microslop are also rumored to be AI-related.


People who don't understand the software bloat cycle are doomed to repeat it.

Lean software -> missing features users want -> add features over time -> bloated mess -> we need a smaller rewrite -> Lean software -> ...


True. The solution is to make a different piece of software customised for each person.

We already have the tech for this. It's large! j/k

Ha ha true. It's literally so complicated we don't know how it works.

It's more of a spiral than a loop, usually the reboot either flops or gets something crucial right and progresses to the point where it challenges the incumbent.

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