Dylan Patel: commitment

Transcript context

…Can I ask a question about that? If Anthropic was not on track to have five gigawatts by the end of this year, but it needs that to serve both the revenue that’s gone crazier than expected—and maybe it’s going to be even more than that—plus the research and training to make sure its models are good enough for next year: Where is that capacity going to come from? Dario, when he was on your podcast, was very conservative. He said, “I’m not going to go crazy on compute because if my revenue inflects at a different rate, at a different point… I don’t want to go bankrupt. I want to make sure that we’re being responsible with this scaling.” But in reality, he’s screwed the pooch compared to OpenAI, whose approach was, “Let’s just sign these crazy fucking deals.” OpenAI has got way more access to compute than Anthropic by the end of the year. What does Anthropic have to do to get the compute? They have to go to lower-quality providers that they would not have gone to before. Anthropic historically had the best quality providers, like Google and Amazon, the biggest companies in the world. Now Microsoft is expanding across the supply chain, and they’re going to other newer players. OpenAI has been a bit more aggressive on going to many players. Yes, they have tons of capacity from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, but they also have tons with CoreWeave and Oracle. They’ve gone to random companies, or companies one would think are random, like SoftBank Energy, who has never built a data center in their life but is building data centers now for OpenAI. They’ve gone to many others, like NScale, to get capacity. There’s this conundrum for Anthropic because they were so conservative on compute, because they didn’t want to go crazy. In some sense, a lot of the financial freakouts in the second half of last year were because, “OpenAI signed all these deals but they didn’t have the money to pay for them…” Okay, Oracle’s stock is going to tank, CoreWeave’s stock is going to tank. All these companies’ stocks tanked, and credit markets went crazy because people thought the end buyer couldn’t pay for this. Now it’s like, “Oh wait, they raised a ton of money. Okay, fine, they can pay for it.” Anthropic was a lot more conservative. They were like, “We’ll sign contracts, but we’ll be principled. We’ll purposely undershoot what we think we can possibly do and be conservative because we don’t want to potentially go bankrupt. ” The thing I want to understand is, what does it mean to have to acquire compute in a pinch? Is it that you have to go with neoclouds? Do they have worse compute? In what way is it worse? Did you have to pay gross margins to a cloud provider that you wouldn’t have otherwise had to pay because they’re coming in at the last minute? Who built the spare capacity such that it’s available for Anthropic and OpenAI to get last minute? What is the concrete advantage that OpenAI has gotten if they end up at similar compute numbers by 2027? Are they just going to end this year with different gigawatts? If so, how many gigawatts are Anthropic and OpenAI going to have by the end of this year?…

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