Comment by bikeshaving
4 days ago
Must be nice to have unquota’ed tokens to use with frontier AI (is this the case for Anthropic employees?). One thing I think is fascinating as we enter the Intellicene is the disproportionate access to AI. The ability to petition them to do what you want is currently based on monthly subscriptions, but will it change in the future? Who knows?
> (is this the case for Anthropic employees?)
It would be funny if the company paying software engineers $500K or more along with gold-plated stock options was limiting how much they could use the software their company was developing.
Especially when the software they're developing is supposed to speed up the speed at which the software they are developing is developed.
It is a long-standing policy at Netflix for employees to pay for their own subscriptions. It ensures that employees "live the member experience".
That’s for personal use at home.
I guarantee the engineers at Netflix who develop and test video streaming aren’t doing so on their family’s home Netflix plan.
Why is that funny? What company gives you unlimited resources? That doesn’t scale. Google employees can’t just demand a $10,000 workstation. It’s reasonable to assume they have some guardrails, for both financial and stability reasons. Who knows… if it’s unlimited now, will it stay that way forever? Probably unlimited in the same sense as unlimited pto.
> Why is that funny? What company gives you unlimited resources?
Anthropic has raised tens of billions of dollars of funding.
Their number of employees is in the thousands. This isn't like Google.
Claude Code is what they're developing. The company is obviously going to encourage them to use it as much as possible.
Limiting how much the Claude Code lead can use Claude Code would be funny because their lead dev would have to stop mid-day and wait for his token quota window to reset before he can continue developing their flagship coding product. Not going to happen.
I'm strangely fascinated by the reaction in the comments, though. A lot of people here must have worked in oddly restrictive corporate environments to even think that a company like this would limit how much their own employees can use the company's own product to develop their own product.
I can't get a $10k workstation but if I used $10k/month on cloud compute it'd take a few months for anyone to talk to me about it and as long as I was actually using it for work purposes I wouldn't run into any consequences more severe than being told to knock it off if I couldn't convince people it was worth the cost.
If an employee has a business need for a $10k workstation, I'm fairly certain they'll get a $10k workstation.
Yes, accounting still happens. Guardrails exist. But quibbling over 2% of a SWEs salary if it's clear that the productivity increase will be significantly more than 2% would be... not a wise use of anybody's time.
Folks in MEGACORP cloud env can spend > 5 digits a month and not get noticed.
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Google gives most of their engineers access to machines that would cost that much. If you’re working on specific projects (e.g. Chrome) you can request even more expensive machines.
If it takes a lot of back and forth it between lots of people it is more like a $12000 workstation or more after the labor for requesting and approving.
well, not only their software but also hardware resources they're renting, but I agree they don't.
Tokens aren’t free.
When you work for the company supplying those tokens and you're working on the product that sells those tokens at scale, the company will let you use as many tokens as you want.
Pretty sure I have seen them imply in one of the panel discussions on their YouTube channel (can't remember which) that they get unlimited use of the best models. I remember them talking about records for the most spent in a day or something.
Owning the means of cognition is going to be more and more importan as it allows one to scale more than linearly.
Outsiders will be tied to limited or pay per use because owning the means of cognition will be a massive extractive economy
> is this the case for Anthropic employees?
Not sure about all Anhropic employees, but that must definitely be the case for Boris Cherny.
Its not unlimited, the compute allocation was one of the reason for the coup at OpenAI
Pretty sure that was scientists competing for 6 month training runs of new 100B+ parameter models, not coders burning through a couple of million tokens.
It is the case that Anthropic employees have no usage limits. Some people do experiments where they spawn up hundreds of Claude instances just to see if any of them succeed.
Are they using these tests as a form of RLHF?