somewhereoutth

Rather curious to know what is hiding in the 8.7B 'other expenses'.

Given that this is ~50% of revenue, it would have a huge bearing on how near real profitability Anthropic actually is.

Indeed and don't underestimate the influence you can have by participating in candidate selection (depending on your electoral system). For example in the UK the replacement candidate for a safe seat [i.e. almost guaranteed to be won by the party of the sitting representative] upon retirement of the incumbent may be decided by just a room full of people. Be in that room.

With a top heavy population pyramid, more resources have to be diverted to caring for the elderly, therefore less for raising the young - a self reinforcing mechanism.

When actually given the choice, many women are choosing not to have children, for good reasons. E.g. disruption of careers, physical effects on the body, being tied to a partner, financial drain.

Until we face up to both these issues, demographic collapse will continue - humanity will simply evaporate.

> A financial manager built a purchase request review agent

> An executive assistant, who built a personal assistant agent for scheduling and email triage

Really? We should build our own agents for everything? Sounds a bit token-spendy.

Also, as far as I can make out, the paper was not written by AI (nor even with AI assistance?). You'd think they'd make a song and dance about it if it was. Maybe AI can't do this sort of thing yet (or ever).

Wouldn't it be ironic if, after all this, it was discovered that the most economical way of producing some fundamental 'unit of intelligence' was to feed/clothe/entertain a human?

I like the phrase Work Shaped Objects to describe the output of gen AI (I thank The Tech Report YouTube channel for bringing that to me).

So - prose, code, or image, it appears that some work has been done, but in fact the [actually needed] work has likely not been done.

It sad that it has come to this, but your approach is correct - it is the act of writing (code or prose) that is important, not the finished output itself.

Interestingly, this applies not just for learning, but also to a great extent in production/work contexts too.

I went to buy a new phone about a year ago - all the branding/blurbs etc was "AI this! AI that!"

I didn't end up buying at that point, but 6 months ago my existing phone failed, so I had to return to the shops. Same phones for sale more or less, but not a single word about AI anywhere.

Also, writing, indeed any making activity, forces you to think clearly. Often that is the deepest purpose of prose, even code - forcing the author to confront the problem and sharpen their own understanding of the world we share. That it then communicates something to another person (or to a machine), is a happy bonus.

An awful lot of effort has gone into making LLMs present as human/intelligent. Without that they would just be a prose / code / image generator and/or search assistant, and nobody would be pouring 100s of billions into the technology with the end goal of replacing expensive human labour.

everyone (on all sides!) is losing at AI and we'll see increasingly frantic attempts from all players to paper over the cracks as this extreme resource misallocation bites.

and I suppose the rest of us will have to wait until the grim laws of finance do their work before our own sweet release.

Exactly this. The overall productivity of not doing something should never be underestimated.

However, who will pay for the very expensive training if the ROI isn't there? Absent government subsidization, then likely the frontier models will be sold off to the hyperscalers by the bankruptcy administrators to wring a few more dollars out of them as they become out of date and more and more irrelevant - assuming that inference alone is profitable at a price the market is willing to pay of course, if not then yes the lights will indeed be turned off.