If virtually any other company in the world said "we have internal AI servers and we let our employees use them" ... the company would measure that as they would any other internal expenditure: by how much it costs them. You blow $50k a year on servers running your LLMs? It cost you $50k.
Only a company like Anthropic, desperate to make news and help their IPO, would measure by the cost they charge customers. It's as ridiculous as Microsoft counting every employee's use of MS Word ... as if it had paid the full consumer price of each copy.
This is the world of spend more, get valued more; obviously the investment will be used to spend more and get more, so it must be good. This is investor-think. If you don't have spend, why do you need investment?
(Or it could be bad. Very very bad)
A clear example is Google. They can easily give all compute to Deepmind, yet majority is allocated to be sold at market rate.
So, every compute Deepmind and Googlers get is lost revenue opportunity and must be measured as such.
No other internal tools or servers has this much external demand to be comparable.
Also, Anthropic is showing that to operate at Anthropic level, you need $300,000 compute spend per employee
Or has it broken out of its jail and taken over the board? Dario seems like a bit of a windbag anyways, AI can probably automate most of what he does these days.
All this news says is Company A uses internally the resource they sell externally at ($X) value. It's not saying how much it cost the company to generate said consumed resource
- @fable, plz s0lv3 Riemann. You are doing great.
- @claude. rewrite yourself for the 10000th time. Use as many tokens as you like.
There's a lot to unpack about this statement.
Including the fact that it's probably not true.
If something is compensation, it can often be negotiated and traded off against other compensation components. How many people have successfully negotiated AI tokens away in favour of salary/bonus/stock? I'm going to guess "approximately zero".
Would Anthropic themselves be paying this much if it was actually billed? It is not obvious.
Is Anthropic a good sample for AI use? Surely not, since they have special needs (dogfooding) and a vested interest in proving that AI usage is the future.
Can we compare their results pre and post AI usage? Close to definitionally impossible.
Are their employees good examples of AI-assisted engineers? Not really, as (one would hope) they're more well versed on the topic than an average eng.
You have confused necessary and sufficient.
They have never claimed that the API rates are the "real cost" of the compute spend.
In a similar way, internal employees would have also a "standard daily rate" like an external employee.
Anthropic isn’t booking it as GAAP revenue, they’re just using the number for marketing.
If Anthropic had revealed their internal cost, there comments would be complaining that they were hiding something and giving useless, unrelatable data.
The expenditure is most interesting when compared to retail rates, because that's the rate the rest of us have to compare against.
InsidiousWombat•32m ago
margalabargala•29m ago
lenerdenator•21m ago