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points by bradreaves2 2 days ago | 0 comments
This isn't the government subsidizing a private venture, it's a private venture offering a discount to the government. What does profitability have to do with whether or not the government should purchase their services?
[–] computably 2 days ago
If the service provider goes under, the govt wasted their money.
[–] ameliaquining 2 days ago
...no? Whatever value they got from inference they already did is still there? Of course the government still needs to worry about vendor lock-in, but they'd have to do that no matter what, and also general-purpose LLMs are relatively replaceable for most use cases.
[–] iAMkenough 2 days ago
Given the statements in their SEC filing, it's not outlandish to consider the possibility of a long-term plan to make Anthropic models a nationalized, public utility before they go bankrupt.

If GSA is already considering vendor lock-in as they establish new public services across multiple agencies, the natural move is to build them to eventually transition to a federally-owned and operated provider. Especially with how involved the U.S. government is in limiting capabilities Anthropic provides to consumers today.

[–] bagacrap 2 days ago
If the company has a sustainable business model it will be profitable and hang around without jacking up prices. If not, you wasted time and money setting up the anthropic tool chain.
[–] roosterIllusi0n 2 days ago
Except that work would be cheaper to set up and the cost would drop over time if they were using local llms. Every dollar paid to a 3rd party rental service is a dollar that is burned in the fireplace. We are paying more for the right to be stuck paying more forever, it's ridiculous.
[–] ameliaquining 1 day ago
Why would the government use local LLMs? Compute is a central example of the kind of thing that makes sense to outsource.
[–] roosterIllusi0n 2 days ago
Not a discount at all. Every dollar for a rented service is being flushed down the toilet. Industry is moving to local llms, the government should have been ahead of them.