- cross-posted to:
- usa@midwest.social
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@midwest.social
- usa@lemmy.ml
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The loss, up from $13 billion a year earlier, was driven by $72 billion in accounting charges tied to changes in the value of financial instruments Anthropic issued to raise money
This right here is how all of this will come crashing down. Anthropic and OpenAI, along with several associated companies, are using accounting tricks to hide their debts and obligations. These two are trying to maintain hype for investors so they can cash in on an IPO with total disregard for long-term fiscal sustainability. At some point the bill will come due, and you can bet the C-Suite will have already made out like bandits.
Don’t forget, though, that there’s another cashflow that they’re banking on: total surveillance.
AI can’t do a lot of things, but the thing it’s most suited for is creating a society run like a prison to try and keep the discontented masses in check.
Not enough people realize this. They think the component shortage is a side effect, but it’s to push you towards cloud services on underpowered devices that rely on it.
Imagine the censorship when every service is monitored and controlled by them. Imagine the market capture when they can see everyone’s financials and trade secrets. When they can cut off journalists and activists with one click.
Haven’t heard anything new lately, but there is a push to eliminate physical currency for, what I presume, is a similar reason -> make everything trackable.
People have been trying to eliminate physical currency for decades in not longer. That shit predates computers.
This is quite obvious, it hasn’t happened at a global scale yet because people have to agree on which currency it would be
I think this will backfire too. I think they way underestimate the amount of people already using “underpowered devices” that will just continue to do so without the new cloud services shit.
Basically everyone I know us using a 5-10+ year old laptop, for example. And they just use it fine, sure it’s pokey, and it’s not everyone, but it’s a lot.
The Italian government has just passed an emergency decree that authorizes AI-powered face recognition in public spaces without a judge’s authorization.
I’m not even sure it’s great at that. Is this not a function of any industry struggling to find a usecase eventually ending up with the largest US employer and cash cow: the DoD?
LLMs (‘AI’), not so great, but it can get (probabilistic, but fascists don’t care) descriptions of video feeds into easily searched text. Gobs of GPUs in datacenters paired with surveillance devices all over the place however presents a greater threat, where there’s an (evil) will, a way will be forthcoming. Nice of Ukraine to point out how fragile they are. There’s a deathstar analogy there somewhere.
Yeah, the type of people pushing this don’t even care about the inaccuracy either. If it “catches a black man” with facial recognition, even if it’s the wrong person it won’t matter “they are all criminal thugs anyway.” See also the ICE bull shit and basically deporting anyone even remotely Mexican looking, citizen or not.
Ai is a panopticon
This is my take as well.
Modern companies are only profitable in late stage capitalism if they fall into one of they two categories: scams or gambling.
This right here is how all of this will come crashing down
No, this is pretty normal, and more importantly, doesn’t actually cost the company cash. They gave lenders bonds that can be converted to stock, so this loss on their books is pure paper loss, the same way wealth in owning stock in this money losing company is pure paper wealth.
These numbers are just illustration for simplicity, but imagine a company borrowing $20 billion and telling the lender that you’ll either pay back the $20 billion plus interest, or they can opt to convert it into stock worth 10% of the company. When the company is worth $100 billion, the bondholders won’t convert to stock. But if the value of the company shoots up on paper to where that same stock would be worth $100 billion, the lenders would rather take the stock than the cash repayment. And because it’s worth $80 billion more, the company will have to record that on the books as replacing $20 billion in bonds for $100 billion in stock, and an $80 billion loss compared to their last statement.
But look at the underlying financial cash flow. When that happens, the company actually takes $20 billion in debt off their books. They don’t have to repay that loan anymore. So it improves their cash flow position at exactly the same time that they’re booking a loss.
The whole thing will come crashing down for totally different reasons, relating to operational cash flow, not the actual accounting shenanigans where one kind of paper number gets converted to another kind of paper number.
It’s not entirely transparent though. It’s a paper loss in terms of cash but they did have to give the stock. At their crazy valuations, even 1% is a big deal.
I dunno, isn’t this the same scheme that the ride share companies and food delivery services?
With the difference that all those services mostly outsource their asset costs to their drivers or have very little investment there. Unlike anthropic who have billions in costs related to all the compute they need to service their customers (obligations to other companies, datacenters and, not to forget, ever rising interest on all their debt).
Definitely, the cost of doing business for these AI companies is orders of magnitude higher than Uber or Lyft
You mean the ones who had to massively pivot their entire business model, because they were relying on self-driving cars being practical in 2019?
That’s a lot of money that could have been spent on healthcare, food security, housing, transit, climate change problems…
That’s not how that works… the money “lost” isn’t going down the drain. It is… going somewhere, doing something useful. That’s why it is a loss to the company.
If it’s going to make LLMs it’s not as useful as the other things I listed. Paying a bunch of software engineers $300k each to work on LLM nonsense instead of something useful is a shame. Sure, the money isn’t set on fire, but the opportunity cost is large.
I mean… A lot of the money is being spent on compute, which is just consuming electricity, which is many times made from coal or gas. So a lot literally is on fire.
Your confusing fact with opinion.
Factually yes it’s useful to the company.
Your opinion is that the usefulness doesn’t justify it and this isn’t useful.
The real question is, is it useful enough. Which is likely no.
That’s at least 3 "your"s in this thread when it should be “you’re”. If you’re wondering why you’re getting down voted…
I’m not wondering nor do I see the point of downvotes? I will never understand the weird fixation with down votes.
Also I don’t even see these downvotes your talking about in the first place. My post appears to have no downvotes and one upvote to me.
So either something is broken here or your bullshiting for a reason I don’t understand.
All those loans are getting hot. They’re starting to toss them around and trying to hide them.
I have strong doubts they can ever make this particular approach to AI work at all, let alone in time to cover their bets.
This path looks like a dead end. But, I don’t know jack about shit.
I hope it pops
Why haven’t they just asked Claude how to make money with their business model? /s
They have.
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Wait for excited CEOs to fire all their staff.
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Crank up the prices.
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Please don’t make the tax payer pay for it. The tax payer is gonna pay for it, right?
The rich know the poor will cushion their fall
Sucks to be US American.
Indeed. But we are also known for dragging the rest of the world down with us. So brace yourselves.
I mean, we cut basically all of our external aid style programs so it sucks for non Americans too.
Personally, I would MICH rather my tax dollar go to teaching African kids about LGBTQ+ topics than being given to some stupid AI company.
This IPO is going to be one of the biggest rug pulls in history.
Yes. If you follow the money, investors in OpenAI are the usual suspects, a Kushner in there (admittedly the “best” kushner) and the early investors were guaranteed returns of up to 18% (bank CD currently around 5.3%) which stemmed from a $500B injection from the US government. Not only will it be a rug pull, but a government built one. Truly appaling, we let the fox in the henhouse.
Cant have Healthcare for our people, but can pump and dump the world economy.
So far
Sound investment. Sounds like the echo down a dark tunnel.
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“we lose money on every sale but we make it up in volume!”
Yup, because they’re still losing hundreds of dollars for every dollar spent. Their economics still rely on a delusion that the hardware outlay is a fixed cost that can be recovered after model training by selling cheaper compute. Instead, models continue to be released not only to match competition, but because models still do not do a fraction of what they are promised and being sold to do. So capital costs are not fixed.
So AI hyperscalers have a lose/lose/lose/lose choice of either growing at a rate that requires unsustainable subsidies, stopping growth and admitting models can’t do what they and a thousand other startups have been selling them for, charging actual costs, or any combination of the three.
If people were charged anything near the actual costs, much less with a profit margin, demand would implode fast enough to create a sonic boom.
Add to this that incremental improvement comes at exponentially more and more cost. So they spend ungodly amounts more in hopes that the next incremental improvement will push them over the magic line beyond where the are.
Some impressive feats but the issues holding it back from the ‘replace the whole economy’ sort of ambition they imagine are very stubborn. Notably it still confidently declares incorrect information (a significant volume of software developement works around by rigging auto-retries until it stumbles into ‘correctness’, and of course the people pumping out slop art/books aren’t bound by ‘correctness’) and they still have no clear path to autonomous control of humanoid robotics (as crazy advanced as the online GenAI experience, they are still struggling to demonstrate even the most basic manual labor tasks).
C’mon. Implode already.
$8B real loss on $16B revenue. ($72B is a bondholder gain (accounting loss) from conversion). $9B in training costs not counted as loss, even though it is worthless whenever next model version is released.
$561B in forced spending on compute over next 10 years, with $750B total compute costs lined up. Structural losses are baked in for a few years.
But, when the word guessing program gains consciousness, it will be capable of doing the job of every worker in the world, and eager to do those jobs, and anybody who owns Anthropic shares will be a trillionaire in an economy that totally works and is healthy. So, better invest now!
Musk giving 1 share (about $160) to all US children with a Trump account, will make the next generation cheer for skynet genocide and oppression. “For a while, it added 10-20% to my net worth.”
even though it is worthless whenever next model version is released.
For most version releases I actually doubt that, I’m pretty sure they just keep training the model and release checkpoints every few months. Architectural changes, however, will indeed invalidate the previously trained models, and occasionally they have to do that to keep up with the competition.
But if you do architectural changes even just once a year, that means you’d have to depreciate those training costs over just that one year to be truthful. Meaning they might as well be losses rather than depreciating capital investments.
There is a genuine “training corpus” that is an accumulated asset and grows and feeds new models. The vast majority of training cost, that should be expensed, is the training time compute. Neither of these are expensed. There was about 13 major US model releases in September. At least 7 of these replaced a 1 month old previous model family. Open AI gpt sol went from 5.6 to 6 to 6.1 in about 2 months.
Fast model releases not only lock in structural losses, they juice revenue growth illusions. Model use rate generally drops by 66% 4 weeks after release, because of competition, and a surge of use on release for evaluation.
New models are trained on older models, so even if the older model is not longer at par, without it the new model couldn’t exists
I’m totally spamming this across the thread with copy/vaste.
Stop_trying_to_make_AI_happen.jpg
It is obvious to me that AI computing is a COMMODITY, in that it will inevitably be something that can not be effectively gate-kept.
These two major US companies (OpenAI and Anthropic) are playing the game of “locking in” a monopoly in a product category that has yet to mature. This is a pretty old capitalist game, of course… Uber, Microsoft, facebook,and many others have played this game in the past.
But, unlike OSes or word processing file compatibility I don’t see a “network effect” in that an open source/weight model can/will do 99% of what a proprietary model can, will do it “transparently,” will eventually become so optimized that it can run locally, etc. etc.
I mean: maybe its name recondition that is worth “trillions” but a race to be “Xerox” or “Kleenex” or even “PC” (as in IBM PC) did not really work out well for these companies.
I think that even the established players (MS, Google, etc.) are biding their time, making sure that they don’t get locked out while non-proprietary solutions become feasible.
I means I know that much of the issues have to do with the limited availability of hardware, but locking down supply is not sustainable for the “big 2” and sooner or later more adequate memory and GPU supply will enter the market…
It will never reach the scale of use they claim unless it becomes a commodity.
And if it does, it won’t ever cost as much as they need it to, to justify their valuations
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The ai crash of 2026 can’t come soon and fast enough
The RAM cartel is figuring out a new excuse for a price hike before allowing it.
Goddamm… This could easily have housed every man, woman, and child in this country. But no, no free housing while we squander wealth with our stupid ideas.
Not to mention using all that land and water resources to prop up their AI ambitions.
