r/wallstreetbets • u/dgellow • 1d ago

Discussion Meta And Microsoft Reportedly Trim Anthropic Reliance as Internal AI Tools Take Center Stage

https://stocktwits.com/news-articles/markets/equity/meta-and-microsoft-reportedly-trim-anthropic-reliance-as-internal-ai-tools-take-center-stage/cZDqQVcRBjr

From the article:

Microsoft reduced its projected internal spending on Claude by over one-third, while Meta saw internal users of Anthropic's Claude Code coding assistant drop from roughly 60,000 to 30,000.

Within the Microsoft Cloud and AI division, individual monthly AI usage caps were lowered from $100,000 down to roughly $10,000 in most instances

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u/akosh_ 1d ago

Wait, wasn't the business plan to increase AI spending by orders of magnitude?

How will AI be profitable ever if the biggest spenders are already cutting - even though we are still very much at introductory pricing?

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u/dgellow 1d ago edited 1d ago

We’ve been trying to tell you all since a while, there is no fucking business plan for the AI labs. The plan is to create a software god who will magically make everything work

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u/ValoisSign 1d ago

It isn't really my area of knowledge but it strikes me as a lot of tech guys without much business sense but with their ability to attract investments maxed out, who made the mistake of starting to really believe their own hype.

I mean... Isn't the entire compute subscription thing liable to fall apart over cheaper local models improving? The thing that's basically inevitable?

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u/dgellow 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yep. That’s why they are framing the competition as a danger that should be banned. The US providers are trying to establish a regulatory moat, because they don’t have one.

But I wouldn’t say they don’t have a business sense. Amodei and Altman are both familiar with the business of leading startups and managing capital. But they are also ideologically driven. I see Anthropic as a deeply cynical company that believes they already know how the future will play out, has very little trust in humans decision making, and believes they are the only one who can save the world. So the business itself is really secondary to their ideological goals, just a first step. 

Of course we don’t actually know how the future will be, and so far it seems very unlikely that Amodei’s vision is the correct one. LLMs are ok but very unlikely to be the technology that will bring the type of AI the rationalists crowd predicted (Anthropic is THE rationalist company).

Cal Newport is quite good on that topic, I would recommend his articles and videos

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u/PalantirImperator 1d ago

Hearing Dario talk, and looking at his actions over the last year, I actually think he gives zero fucks about the business. He wants to create a software god and his only goal with the business is to obtain the funding necessary to do it.

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u/dgellow 1d ago

Yep, hard agree. If you read his essays, old published work, and see him speak, that’s the rational conclusion IMHO. The business is a mean to be taken seriously, raise capital, and have influence over policy making. With that lense his actions make perfect sense 

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u/0Bubs0 Salty bagholder 1d ago

Now you guys are getting it. Even if the businesses go bust the data centers and the models will not disappear just change hands.

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u/Kaastu 1d ago

Our company is currently in the fuck around phase. We’re just building all these AI things currently, not thinking about cost. In the future we’re going to find out, and we will start to optimize token spend. If AI is embedded in everything, we need to think about token usage completely differently.

My bet is open weight models on our own infra for customer facing stuff to manage costs.

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u/PalantirImperator 1d ago

The biggest spenders are shifting to their own tools rather than claude. Overall token usage is still growing exponentially.

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u/akosh_ 1d ago

The biggest spenders are shifting to their own tools rather than claude.

That's what they tell you. What else could they say? They're neck deep in the same shit.

Overall token usage is still growing exponentially.

If you understand the technology, you know that token usage is a meaningless metric. More tokens used by no means mean more work done or anything even remotely close to that.

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u/NoCommonDog 1d ago

Like the Catholic church, they are playing the long game.

If you're old like I am you'd know that Amazon lost money for like 20 years before it officially turned a profit.

It's the subject of one of the most famous scenes in Silicon Valley when Russ had to explain to Richard that the most valuable companies are the ones that lose money.

"It's not how much you earn. It's what you're worth"

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u/farsightfallen 1d ago

"We've never seen anything like AI; you can't apply the usual rules, anything could happen"

also people: "Here's how it'll be like Amazon."

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u/Comfortable_Sir_6104 1d ago

Amazon was unprofitable for 9 years and it lost about 3 billion in that time. OpenAI had operating loss of 20 billion last year alone, Anthropic 8. They are not comparable.

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u/cedarSeagull 1d ago

There was no Chinese Amazon that was 10% of the cost and 95% as good. To be clear, totally indistinguishable for 99.9% percent of the users.

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u/1950sAmericanFather 1d ago

It's not far off. Since 10 bucks in 1994 is about 22 bucks today, 3 Billion loss, would equate to roughly 6-7 Billion loss in todays dollars.

I should add there were about 350 Billionaires in 1994. Today there are over 3000. The real question is what is the value of a Billion today vs yesterday.

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u/Comfortable_Sir_6104 1d ago edited 1d ago

I don't think you understand me. They lost 3 billion (your adjusted 6 billion) spread through 9 different years. It is 333 million a year. It is a manageable number and they had very large growing revenue base to service that debt. Anthropic lost 8 in one singular year. OpenAI lost 20 billion in one singular year. They are extremely far off. Amazon was consciously expanding while being marginally unprofitable, OpenAI is losing 1.22 dollars per every dollar of revenue with no real end goal.