Anthropic is massively bigger than a studio, Zig is massively smaller than Unity, and it wasn’t a quiet switch, it was a huge publicity event. It’s more like the #1 movie of the year being “The Profound Joy of Finally Leaving Unity”. Sometimes things are big enough to warrant a response.
It was a pull request and a blog post which HN et al. collectively foamed at the mouth about. You’re acting like Anthropic sunk millions into a marketing campaign.
For what we know, probably around $200,000 to run the rewrite and rewiew it, + whatever was involved in writing the blog post and advertise it.
Anthropic produced the tokens. They don’t have pay themselves retail API rates for them.
The cost was only provided as an honest estimate of what it would have cost someone else at time of writing, which I thought was fair.
The number is peanuts relative to the cost of engineers working on the project. I find it odd that so many people think this cost number is some sort of smoking gun.
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Well if the whole thing is a marketing ploy and it did cost them millions...
People were for a few weeks commenting on why Jarred didn't write that Rust blog post.
Here are the comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48251340
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48241734
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48240996
Now he published it; it's a hit piece. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.