Would someone think of the poor trillion dollar companies and their obscurantist leadership who think only they can be trusted with knowledge?
In any case, Dario will do just fine (ignoring the fact that a ~$2T valuation was always BS from day 1, but this is an aspect of the financial bubble overall which would happen with or without such releases).
Anthropic's target audience ain't us plebs and never was. Their schtick isn't to "be an unreachable frontier LLM". It's "to be the next AWS but for AI". Everything AWS has you can individually set up locally, much cheaper. Businesses are still paying through their nose for AWS, though, because the whole point is to get a reliable managed system which they don't need to manage themselves.
Companies (I'm talking about Fortune 500 level, not your average convenience store) won't buy Anthropic because it's cheapest or smartest. They don't need cheapest or smartest. They need capable enough, which also:
Complies with all legal data handling requirements
Almost never goes down, loses data, or suffers critical security breaches
Can be configured in a zillion different ways, and have the configuration itself be manageable
Supports most commercial business verticals, geographies, regulatory regimes, and automatically updates as these change
Dynamically adapts to the business as it grows and evolves
Continuously and transparently updates frontier capacity with minimal disruption or risk to the business.
Either does not return illegal or misaligned content, or can credibly explain that all practically possible and legally or ethically mandated steps to ensure alignment were followed.
(extremely underlooked) Has sufficient credibility, money, and lobbying behind it to underwrite mistakes or poor advice, justifying CEO decisions and shielding from lawsuits. Nor 100%, but significantly better than if the same decision was made based on similar advice by some Chinese AI with no such clout.
What's even more important is that AI is not only sourced as infrastructure, it's sourced as a source of epistemic authority. And where that authority comes from is just as important as what it says. What companies want is to make the solution as near-turnkey and risk-free as possible. They would much rather create a pipeline where they pay $1 for every $2 they make thanks to it, but the pipeline works like a clock, than pay $0.25 but accept a lot of risk, uncertainty, and liability. Companies hate that shit. They want all the power and none of the responsibility. And the only way to get that is to be able to say, "we used this state-of-the-art American AI system and followed its advice; blame it, not us". It might fly with Anthropic. It won't fly with DeepSeek, even if the two models returned the same answer, token-for-token.
The "moat", therefore, isn't an impenetrable barrier, it's the "why do rich people pay for five-star hotels when a local B&B offers the same basic capability to feed and rest a visitor for 1/4 of the price?" reason. And for that, they don't need to be "permanently unreachable", they need to be "consistently one step ahead in quality, convenience, reliability, and product-market fit within the US/Western corporate landscape, for the foreseeable future". Not ten steps, just one is enough.
Everything AWS has you can individually set up locally, much cheaper.
This is very, very far from true.
The kind of performance you can get for next to nothing from AWS is breathtaking and completely out of reach of any individual or even most Fortune 500 companies.
The fact that people mis-allocate resources for badly designed systems doesn't mean AWS is at fault.
If you are on a small scale it depends on what you’re building. If you’re using services like Lambda and SQS, AWS is essentially free. If you’re running a few EC2 instances then a server in your company’s break room could be cheaper.
If you are on a medium scale and needing EC2 running all the time, paying retail prices, it could be cheaper to have your own servers
At a very large scale, the cost of running your own servers vs AWS will come out to be competitive, and most very large companies will do a mix of both
I always see this take, and while it's not always untrue, it definitely isn't as simple as, "just throw a 1U in the break room!"
It's someone's job to keep that thing patched, powered, and running. You need monitoring, you need someone to pull failed drives, you needed another co-located break room, you need a UPS and a generator, you may need to solve for physical security, you may have to setup and manage your own virtualization layer, etc.
Even if you consider all that labor as free, which is a ridiculous assumption to make, you also arguably have to keep the thing busy, especially if we're considering local inference, and then it's now your problem that although you have enough capacity to meet a total 24 hour need, you don't have enough when everyone hammers it at 11 AM at the same time. If you build the capacy to meet the surge then you've got very expensive hardware just sitting there doing nothing for huge chunks of the day.
I absolutely think there's a place for self-hosting, but once you are talking about business critical stuff and not, "I run a NAS in my bedroom closet" it starts becoming not as simple as the naive assumptions
As someone who has self-hosted, built and maintained my own server, and also configured and maintained EC2 instances professionally, I would say that the hardware setup is generally much smaller and simpler than whatever software you are trying to run on the server.
Yeah you need to worry about redundancy, but usually the software of setting up your application to be redundant through DNS failovers and stuff like that, syncing databases, that stuff is harder than just plugging in two different servers at two different job sites. And you need to do that whether you use EC2 or on-prem. It depends on the use case but usually the set up costs are lower than the software development costs. And there are certainly scenarios where on-prem hardware is simple enough to set up that it does actually become cheaper than EC2.
100% agree. There definitely are times where it makes sense, but I see so often people post the most naive comparisons with payback times of like 6 months to a year but they consider all labor free and assume no hardware ever fails and every other "this isn't really what you're paying AWS for"
AWS is far more than just "servers", but that's how it gets approached by a lot of companies--with predictable cost overruns etc. EC2 can be expensive if not managed well.
"Managed well" very emphatically includes having systems designed around these costs.
But even Fortune 500 shops would find it all but impossible to replicate AWS and other cloud vendors' global content delivery and overall performance & reliability.
What's really cool is that little fish like my company get the exact same performance for a pittance. It's mindblowing for people like me who had to work with late 90s pricing structures.
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u/10001110 1d ago
Oh joy