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

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.

As an example, as I understand it, if a hotel chain allows an employee to stay in one of their hotels for free when they go on vacation, the tax value of that benefit is what they would have charged someone for that hotel room, not how much it increased the hotel's costs to have one more hotel room full — which is generally almost nothing.

Of course, the IRS does agree with you when it comes to expenditures that are for the employer's benefit, rather than the employee's. If it didn't, almost all companies would have negative profits from the IRS's point of view.

Plus electricity

In a similar way, internal employees would have also a "standard daily rate" like an external employee.

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)

Especially when I need to plan my next hike up Mount Shasta.

Mythos at the highest thinking level is not the only product from Anthropic though.

I guess kinda put you in a bubble a little, I wonder how the experience of Anthropic eng who left the company would look like, when such eng would go and spend few $K a day in non AI lab, would that be encourage/allowed/taken as example?

Now spend 0.5x their salary on AI, and they become 5x productive compared to no AI.

Now spend 1.1x their salary on AI, and they become 20x productive compared to no AI.

It's still obviously worth it to spend the 1.1x. But it is truly remarkable that the biggest cost of hiring a knowledge worker is no longer their salary, but their AI usage.

There is no implication here that employees are being replaced by AI spend, as long as all of the productivity is generating profit. The AI usage still needs a knowledge worker to direct it in ways that it can't direct itself, so you still need the employees.

By giving hundreds of workers each a powerful desk-sized Alto minicomputer for their own needs, with a high-end graphical display, they gained insight into what desktop personal computing would look like 15 years later, enough insight to shape it profoundly. It's been 55 years, and although multitouch screens are proliferating, I'm still typing this on a keyboard hooked up to a framebuffer-driven display with a mouse hooked up to it, displaying hypertext, festooned with windows, icons, and a mouse that moves an onscreen pointer at the same 135° angle they settled on 55 years ago, positioning a vertical line to indicate the insertion point, with scrollbars. The display has twice as many pixels, the pixels are color, the mouse pointer is white rather than black, the screen is a flat LCD, the scrollbars are on the right, and the cursor blinks, but it's very recognizably descended from https://smalltalkzoo.computerhistory.org/HOPL-St78.html rather than, for example, ITS or GENESYS.

Only people with the luxury of unlimited zero-cost CPU cycles had a chance of seeing what the future looked like, and that allowed them to find out what worked and what didn't work in that environment. Nowadays, the regular workers who don't have the luxury of unlimited zero-cost tokens are manually reviewing voluminous AI code, because, even though that's a lot of slow work, they're still much faster programming that way than they were without it. Anthropic, instead, is doing insane things like eliciting a billion lines of Lean proofs to show that existing open-source libraries can't fail their OSS-FUZZ tests — and fixing all the bugs that effort turned up, in the process.

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".

I haven't seen anyone treating AI tokens as employee compensation. If anyone can show me an article where employees were paying taxes on their token use at work, please share it.

Companies have been treating AI tokens as part of the cost of having employees, like the cost of their office or travel expenses.

Many companies used to brag about about how nice the laptop or office was as a way of convincing people to work there. Often in the same breath as compensation.

But compensation is only one component of cost.

So I think this guy is confused about what it costs to have an employee and what the employee gets out of it. Possibly intentionally.

And I’m sure more than that. But there’s obviously plenty to work on, and they’re not at the point they can just Claude their way through it.

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