>There's an important distinction here. Anthropic isn't actually spending more cash on AI than salaries. It's valuing its internal AI consumption at retail prices.

If virtually any other company in the world said "we have internal AI servers and we let our employees use them" ... the company would measure that as they would any other internal expenditure: by how much it costs them. You blow $50k a year on servers running your LLMs? It cost you $50k.

Only a company like Anthropic, desperate to make news and help their IPO, would measure by the cost they charge customers. It's as ridiculous as Microsoft counting every employee's use of MS Word ... as if it had paid the full consumer price of each copy.

[delayed]

> In March, I wrote about a new trend: Tech companies are starting to treat AI tokens (the main way to measure usage) as a fourth component of employee compensation, alongside salary, bonuses, and stock awards.

There's a lot to unpack about this statement.

all of that to hit two nines of uptime

Regardless of one's opinions about future AI usage, I'm not sure this metric says anything at all.

Would Anthropic themselves be paying this much if it was actually billed? It is not obvious.

Is Anthropic a good sample for AI use? Surely not, since they have special needs (dogfooding) and a vested interest in proving that AI usage is the future.

Can we compare their results pre and post AI usage? Close to definitionally impossible.

Are their employees good examples of AI-assisted engineers? Not really, as (one would hope) they're more well versed on the topic than an average eng.

- @robobun, plz rewrite in Rust.

- @fable, plz s0lv3 Riemann. You are doing great.

- @claude. rewrite yourself for the 10000th time. Use as many tokens as you like.

They giving stock options to the AI now?

Or has it broken out of its jail and taken over the board? Dario seems like a bit of a windbag anyways, AI can probably automate most of what he does these days.

everyone who said "why aren't AI companies replacing their employees with AI?" should be rethinking their position