I attended Anthropic’s developer conference this week with Stephen Council, Business Insider’s new AI reporter. He’s a great writer and fun to work with, so give him a follow.
Big news: Anthropic is renting AI computing from a huge data center run by SpaceX. So if you’re using Claude because you think it’s the most ethical AI chatbot out there, and it runs smoothly and fast, you’ll be thanking Elon Musk.
Hence the edited Claude tagline in the photo below. In full disclosure, I used generative AI to modify this image to make newsworthy points and for fun.
Human Developers Conference in San Francisco. This image has been edited using generative AI to highlight newsworthy points. Alistair Barr/Business Insider
Broader takeaway: After subtly criticizing Sam Altman last year for signing too many AI computing deals, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is now copying OpenAI’s strategy.
why? The demand for AI far exceeds the supply of computing. Anthropic has been plagued with outages and imposed usage restrictions in recent months, frustrating developers.
“We had a problem with computing,” Amodei said on stage. “It may take some time, but we will continue to obtain it as much as possible.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco Andrei Sokolov/Photo in association with Getty Images
Shortly after the SpaceX deal was announced, Anthropic eased some rate limits, particularly for its fast-growing AI coding service, Claude Code. This is important because some developers have recently migrated to OpenAI’s Codex, in part because OpenAI’s previous compute contract provided fewer restrictions.
I spent the entire afternoon at the conference listening to different opinions on this topic. Startups, developers, and technology companies all need more AI capabilities.
- The CEO of one startup told me that he recently called a Google executive to beg him for the addition of the Gemini token, a core unit of recent AI use.
- I also encountered Cursor executives anxiously crossing their fingers as they waited for their startup SpaceX to make a computing deal. He said it’s relatively easy to migrate large data center capacity between customers because most facilities use similar Nvidia GPUs. In fact, Anthropic says it will have access to new SpaceX computing within the month.
- Anthropic senior executives privately acknowledged that the company had underestimated demand. This year, they scrambled to respond as usage spiked much faster than expected.
That’s an incredible problem. If Anthropic’s revenue growth continues at its current rate of nearly 80 times per year for another year, the startup will become one of the most profitable companies in the world.
Stephen noticed signs of that rapid growth all over the conference.
”I’ve been covering big tech conferences for many years. It’s almost always an annual event and brings a long-awaited product to market. But for Anthropic, the year-long cycle felt almost meaningless. It is growing and being shipped at an extraordinary speed. I got one demo from someone who had been here for a few weeks. Other employees said they can barely keep up. The feature will move from research preview to public beta soon. If Anthropic doesn’t teach developers and customers week after week, no one will follow.. ”
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