Comment by psychoslave
1 year ago
What a surprise, a big corp collected large amount of personal data under some promises, and now reveals actually they will exploit it in completely unrelated manner.
1 year ago
What a surprise, a big corp collected large amount of personal data under some promises, and now reveals actually they will exploit it in completely unrelated manner.
The are valued at $170 Billion. Not quite the same as, but in same order of magnitude as OpenAI - while having only a single digit percent fraction of active users. They probably need to prepare for the eventual user data sellout, as it is becoming increasingly more obvious that none of the big players has a real and persistent tech leadership anymore. But millions and millions of users sharing their deepest thoughts and personal problems is gonna be worth infinitely more than all the average bot bullshit written on social media. That's also why Zuck is so incredibly desperate to get into the game. It's not about owning AI. It's about owning the world's thoughts and attention.
Companies all seem to turn against their users whenever they have revenue/earnings trouble.
Considering every AI company is hemorrhaging money with no end in sight, that doesn't bode well, does it?
remove 'seem to'. it has no place in this sentence anymore. we're not in the stoneage anymore. when has this ever not been the case?
For social media at least it's important to remember that the users are the product, not the customer. Trying to squeeze additional revenue from your product is SOP.
No, it's the Peter Thiel - be a monopoly, and then the inevitable enshittification of the platform when it becomes a monopoly.
The solution is to break up monopolies....
Enshittification. It's a thing.
4 replies →
That's just shareholder capitalism, dude.
It seems to me like some fundamental/core technologies/services just shouldn't be run by for-profit entities, and if come across one doing that, you need to carefully choose if you want to start being beholden to such entity.
As the years go by, I'm finding myself being able to rely on those less and less, because every time I do, I eventually get disappointed by them working against their user base.
20 replies →
Anthropic enterprise share is pretty significant - on order of 30%. I think at this time it's pretty significant.
I am expecting AI companies to start using ads, it's inevitable as they need to make money at some point and $20 a month won't do it.
For ads the number of users is the main thing - the more users you have the bigger the market and more money you could earn. Google desperately needs to be in this space, that's why they are throwing a ton of money on AI.
30% of ~4% is very little when you think about these valuations.
There is far more money to be made building atop this data than selling this data. Your opening statement seems to disagree with your closing statement.
All of this boils down to selling to advertisers. There is no real difference between doing it yourself or having someone else in the chain. Doing it yourself may be more profitable - if you can scale. But that seems to be off the table here.
is there money to be made? I thought they were all losing money…
1 reply →
It’s worth noting that companies at this scale are usually the ones purchasing user data, not selling it.
Only if they are in the ad selling business.
> while having only a single digit percent fraction of active users.
That doesn't matter when their revenue per user is as high as it is.
They're at $5B ARR and rapidly growing.
The "killer app" isn't here yet. Wait until smart glasses or watches with AI overtake cellphones as the primary method of human interaction with computers and most websites are replaced with API's that only AI's really ever use.
5 replies →
And yet rapidly still no where close to running a profit. Time to push the "Its a bargain at $500/month!!!!" narrative.
Once they admitted they are going to have to take money from folks who chop up journalists that made them feel sad, they proved the current pre token LLM based business model doesn't work. They haven't pulled the ads lever yet but the writing is on the wall.
Which means sadly only business with other revenue streams like M$, the Google, or Amazon can really afford it long term. I'm was rooting for Anthropic but it doesn't look good.
The data is no where near valuable enough without a new high value surface to use it, and so far chat is not it.
Merely selling data is extremely low value compared to also having the surface monopoly to monetize it in a very high engagement and decisioning space.
I feel like you don’t understand the fundamental mechanics of the ad world. Ultimately, the big 4 own such immense decisions surface area it may be a while before any AI model company can create a product the get there.
Claude Sonnet 4 is the best coding model. Period. Nothing else comes close.
Anthropic probably has 80% of AI coding model market share. That's a trillion dollar market.
>That's a trillion dollar market
not if you have to constantly expend enormous sums to stay ahead of your competition or otherwise you lose your edge. It's not the best coding model because they got some mystical treasure in their basement. It's so rapidly becoming a commodity that at some point Microsoft or Google will just offer just as good a model for free and like search they'll just start milking people with ads.
That's likely one of the reasons for the shifting privacy stances, not just for training but because monetization of the product itself is probably looking pretty dim in the long run.
The last time my brother and I were discussing about anthropic, they were worth 90B$, and that was a month ago, he asked chatgpt in the middle of the conversation, either it was a sneaky sabotage from gpt or my memory is fuzzy but I thought that 90b$ was really underrated for anthropic given the scaleAi deal or windsurf/cursor deals.
>I thought that 90b$ was really underrated for anthropic
That was true when the tech leadership was an open question and it seemed like any one of the big players could make a breakthrough at any moment that would propel them to the top. Nowadays it has pattered out and the market is all about sustainable user growth. In that sense Anthropic is pretty overvalued, at least if you think that OpenAI's valuation is legit. And if you think OpenAI is overvalued, then Anthropic would be a no-go zone as an investor.
1 reply →
From Anthropic communication:
> If you’re an existing user, you have until September 28, 2025 to accept the updated Consumer Terms and make your decision. If you choose to accept the new policies now, they will go into effect immediately. These updates will apply only to new or resumed chats and coding sessions. After September 28, you’ll need to make your selection on the model training setting in order to continue using Claude. You can change your choice in your Privacy Settings at any time.
Doesn’t say clearly it applies to all the prompts from the past.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms
Under the FAQ:
> Previous chats with no additional activity will not be used for model training.
That will be quietly removed later.
1 reply →
* Randomly load up previous chat as the default and just wait for bing pot. * "Tiny oopsie doopsie, our bad."
that "with no additional activity" seems backdoor-ish though. If I said some things in a chat expecting privacy per the agreement, then they change the agreement, does that mean they can collect my data from that chat going forward or does it mean they can collect it retroactively?
2 replies →
they can ... generate activity :)
“These updates will apply only to new or resumed chats and coding sessions.”
https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms
What kind of guarantee do we have this is true?
Meta downloaded copyrighted content and trained their models on it, OpenAI did the same.
Uber developed Greyball to cheat the officials and break the law.
Tesla deletes accident data and reports to the authorities they don't have it.
So forgive me I have zero trust in whatever these companies say.
We're having this discussion on an article about Anthropic changing their privacy policy. If you don't believe Anthropic will follow their privacy policy, then a change to the privacy policy should mean nothing to you.
1 reply →
You have no more guarantees that this is true than you had before that they didn’t do it in the first place.
If you don’t take companies at their word, you need to be consistent about it.
If it were a lie, why take the PR hit of telling the truth about starting to train on user data but lying about the specifics? It'd be much simpler to just lie about not training on user data at all.
If your threat model is to unconditionally not trust the companies, what they're saying is irrelevant. Which is fair enough, you probably should not be using a service you don't trust at all. But there's not much of a discussion to be had when you can just assert that everything they say is a lie.
> Meta downloaded copyrighted content and trained their models on it, OpenAI did the same.
> Uber developed Greyball to cheat the officials and break the law.
These seem like randomly chosen generic grievances, not examples of companies making promises in their privacy policy (or similar) and breaking them. Am I missing some connection?
2 replies →
> Meta downloaded copyrighted content and trained their models on it, OpenAI did the same
Where did these companies claim they didn’t do this?
Even websites can be covered by copyright. It has always been known that they trained on copyrighted content. The output is considered derivative and therefore it’s not illegal.
1 reply →
> What kind of guarantee do we have this is true?
None. And even if it's the nicest goody two shoes company in the history of capitalism, the NSA will have your data and then there'll be a breach and then Russian cyber criminals will have it too.
At this point I'm with you on the zero trust: we should be shouting loud and clear to everyone, if you put data into a web browser or app, that data will at some point be sold for profit without any say so from you.
2 replies →
Nobody could have predicted that someone who worked for Baidu, Google, and OpenAI would found a company like this.
I can only think they have been doing it for a while and now they are trying to be compliant with whatever certificate requires it.
It's an AI company, why wouldn't they use the most precious data they have?
AFAIK, Apple hasn’t done this yet.
If someone had told me 10 years ago that the typical HN front page in 2025 will look like this (and that #8 may be the UK), I'd never have believed it. And I worry we still have further to go before hitting bottom.
1. Anthropic reverses privacy stance, will train on Claude chats
3. Gun Maker Sig Sauer Citing National Security to Keep Documents from Public
4. Tesla said it didn't have key data in a fatal crash. Then a hacker found it
6. Meta might be secretly scanning your phone's camera roll
7. If you have a Claude account, they're going to train on your data moving forward
8. Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
> If someone had told me 10 years ago that the typical HN front page in 2025 will look like
It has always been like this. Sites like Reddit, HN, and Digg and Boing Boing (when they were more popular) have always had a lot of stories under the category of online rights, privacy, and anger at big companies.
10 years ago, would you have believed that AI would have progressed to the point where it can code?
20 years ago (gosh!) at a French University, in the frame of an English course we made a odious flashy pink VB application called "script generator", where you just had to select the kind of movie (action or more action), how many people would die on screen per minute, and that kind of ridiculously sarcastic choice, and you would get your Hollywood script in a second. That was all fake of course, then. Pure valley spirit I guess. But sure this is the kind of thing you not only can see in advance, but even moke in anticipation.