Hacker News Reader

Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

Of course it is for profit. Tokens cost money. Just the energy cost alone.

I don't understand this "analysis". Why would it not be about profit?

"Features for internal users" makes no sense here, as it does not apply to the case. "Useful features" is also debatable - LLMs providing user data upstream to Anthropic is a use case for Anthropic, but less so for downstream users and token burners.

View on HN

I don’t feel like reality is so interesting that CC devs are sitting in a room theorizing how to extract the most profit from their users.

I’m much more inclined to believe they just don’t _care_ about cost, and profit is an ancillary benefit to their functionality above all else.

Just recently they released auto idle-compaction for large sessions about to miss the cache window. If they were so profit driven I can’t imagine they’d have built this to begin with, that’s free tokens from your perspective.

A smart company would A/B test changes and choose based on lifetime value vs. average session value. The compaction is going to happen anyway, does idle compaction increase the length of a session or the amount of sessions per user?

> I don’t feel like reality is so interesting that CC devs are sitting in a room theorizing how to extract the most profit from their users.

Do you really think this is so interesting, or something that people who work jobs have a responsibility to do?

You’re making a straw man argument out of the nature of what jobs are for, of course they are to help a company make a profit.

I don’t think the CC’s teams have hidden motives to optimize for token inefficiency as the OP I replied to implies.

A reality where a secret cabal of CC engineers are trying to find the most token inefficient ways to build the best harness on the market sounds quite interesting to me, but not realistic.

Somebody in the chain is likely getting profit sharing and, if so, definitely thinks about it (because that’s the whole point of such arrangements).

Is doesn't even make sense, the limiting factor for Anthropic is GPU count, not profitability. They want more adoption at fixed GPU count which demands higher token efficiency.

I highly doubt it's the case that it was purely driven by profit motives. I think it's much more likely that Anthropic engineers treat tokens in a similar manner to how we treat memory and compute.

Older programs were MUCH more memory and compute conscious because memory and compute were actively limiting factors. Anthropic engineers probably don't feel the token efficiency requirements nearly as much as we do because they are working with the equivalent of a super beefy dev machine.

Not about profit in the sense that nobody sat down to say "let's add a feature that looks useful and burns more tokens so we make more money". For status update thing I can believe that.

> Of course it is for profit. Tokens cost money. Just the energy cost alone.

That only counts if people wouldn't find some other way to spend tokens anyway. I regularly have to pace my usage to avoid hitting the weekly limit on the 20x plan; I have plenty of things I could automate.

Jeavon's Paradox means that until all possible uses are saturated, the cheaper frontier AI becomes, the more of it they can sell.

an inteligent summary is a user feature, that is not a matter of opinion

Reply on news.ycombinator.com