alt Hacker NewsI don't get one thing, if agents are so great at developing software at massive scale, why wouldn't Anthropic, instead of just selling tokens to other companies to use its agents, let those agents develop highly profitable services for Anthropic to support their IPO valuation or not require raising money at all? For example, a competitor to Google search.
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If investment managers are so good at investing why don’t they just make money for themselves instead of trying to get people to invest with them?
Because creating a successful company takes a lot more than writing code.
Anthropic could easily build a CRM equivalent to or better than salesforce but they still wouldn’t be able to compete with salesforce. It makes a lot more sense to sell salesforce tokens instead.
Lack of focus can kill you, too. OpenAI learnt this the hard way: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-shuts-down-sora-ipo-ai-su...
> For example, a competitor to Google search
What do you think Claude (chatbot web interface) is?
There is more money in selling shovels than you can ever win by having a monopoly on really effective shovels. They don't need to build a competitor to Google there's 300 companies throwing money at them while they build the "next google" and even if they all fail Anthropic still wins.
In a gold rush you want to sell the shovels, and in this case the AI is the shovel.
Well both Microsoft and Google are part owners of Anthropic, and Anthropic uses their data centers. I think those companies would use that leverage to prevent Anthropic from directly competing with them
Probably because the shovel Anthropic is selling may not be as good as they claim it to be.
> a competitor to Google search
Fielding a web index takes a massive amount of compute and storage of a very different kind than what Anthropic is using. AI is extremely heavy on GPU, maybe somewhat on storage but (comparatively) light on CPU. They need CPU to train coding agents, obviously, but scaling to a billion user web search is a whole different thing.
Writing code is less than 10% of the average business.
Because creating a successful software product is more than just writing code.
Same reason banks sell mortgages rather than just buying all the homes.
Anthropic already has their own WebSearch tool in Claude
If farmers are so good at farming, why don't they grow every crop there is and just live for free instead of selling 1-2 crops?
One word: focus.
That’s kinda like asking why does any company make and sell any tool rather than just using the tool to make money? Why does Milwaukee sell power tools to contractors rather than keeping those tools to themselves to profit from contracting work?