skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I sounds like you think that Anthropic's customers are other AI companies, or something. I'm wondering what evidence there is for that? I did find this Ramp article which suggests that AI spend...

    I sounds like you think that Anthropic's customers are other AI companies, or something. I'm wondering what evidence there is for that?

    I did find this Ramp article which suggests that AI spend per employee and overall token spend may have peaked.

    They also write:

    80% of spend on OpenAI and Anthropic is driven by 1% of firms.

    They do have a much wider customer base (Anthropic has ~40% of all firms in Ramp's data) but the whales are apparently spending a lot more.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Well, sure, Oracle does look shaky. But I’m guessing most if not all of the big tech firms were founded during your lifetime. If you remember the the dot-com era, you should remember that Amazon...

    Well, sure, Oracle does look shaky. But I’m guessing most if not all of the big tech firms were founded during your lifetime. If you remember the the dot-com era, you should remember that Amazon was founded then. Do you think you would recognize another one if you saw it?

    With the revenue numbers they have and alleged profitability, Anthropic’s trajectory looks quite a bit like the rise of another big tech firm to me, for better or worse.

    7 votes

  3. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I suspect this is going to age as poorly as the idea that "run-rate revenue" is suspicious.

    I suspect this is going to age as poorly as the idea that "run-rate revenue" is suspicious.

    5 votes

  4. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Alternatively, subscription pricing might be sold at close to cost and the "API" rate might have massive profit margins? We'd need to know more about their actual costs to know which scenario is true.

    Alternatively, subscription pricing might be sold at close to cost and the "API" rate might have massive profit margins? We'd need to know more about their actual costs to know which scenario is true.

    8 votes

  5. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    Also, Simon Willison comments on a quote from the Financial Times:

    Also, Simon Willison comments on a quote from the Financial Times:

    Anthropic told investors on Wednesday distillation accounted for 5 per cent to 7 per cent of revenue and that they had cut it back “materially” in the third quarter of the year, said four people with direct knowledge of the matter.

    Napkin maths says that if distillation was 5% of their Q2 revenue (before they cut it back in Q3) then unnamed "other labs" spent over half a billion dollars distilling Anthropic's models in that quarter!

    9 votes

  6. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    The S-1 isn't out yet so this isn't the formal "road show" for the IPO. Apparently meeting with investors before filing is called "testing the waters." But it seems unlikely that the numbers...

    The S-1 isn't out yet so this isn't the formal "road show" for the IPO. Apparently meeting with investors before filing is called "testing the waters." But it seems unlikely that the numbers they're giving to investors would be much different from the numbers that show up in the S-1.

    I updated my chart to have a new tab for quarterly revenue. Also, there's a tab comparing the actual quarterly numbers to estimates based on previously leaked run rates. Looks pretty close! (The chart is AI-generated.)

    So, despite some skepticism from cynics, the leaked run rates don't seem to have been misleading after all? Everything's consistent.

    8 votes

  7. Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Anthropic executives told a roomful of investors on Wednesday that the company’s revenue for the third quarter jumped about 45 percent from the prior quarter to $16.8 billion, as it pursues what may become the largest-ever initial public offering, two people with knowledge of the company’s presentation said.

    [...]

    In the meeting with potential investors at its headquarters, Anthropic sought to generate enthusiasm for the upcoming deal. Revenue was up from $11.6 billion in the second quarter. The company also said it was profitable after making certain adjustments, which is not a bottom-line number. And it said its gross margin, or revenue minus direct costs associated with generating that revenue, was 85 percent after making certain adjustments.

    [...]

    Anthropic, which filed to go public in June, has not yet made its prospectus — which lays out its financial performance — public. Wednesday was the first official opportunity for potential I.P.O. investors to get a glimpse into the numbers, which may give insight into the health of the broader A.I. industry and will help determine the valuation Anthropic will get in its listing.

    5 votes

  9. Comment on Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Maybe doing a round-trip test might help align them? That is, translate the Lean proof back into English (and equations) and then convert that back to Lean. If you end up with the same Lean proof,...

    Maybe doing a round-trip test might help align them? That is, translate the Lean proof back into English (and equations) and then convert that back to Lean. If you end up with the same Lean proof, they are probably closer to using the same lemmas to describe the same proof?

    That's not a guarantee, though, given a sufficiently smart translator.

    1 vote

  10. Comment on Yandex outage: data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots went on the move in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Following reported strikes on Yandex data centers, claims circulated on the Internet that Russian bot farms and influence operations had been knocked offline. HTTP traffic charts showed steep drops, fueling speculation that the infrastructure damage had stopped these malicious actors. However, aggregate traffic metrics can easily mislead. There are two autonomous system numbers (ASNs) associated with Yandex: AS13238 is used by Yandex’s search engine, while AS200350 runs its cloud services.

    [...]

    The decline on Yandex Search ASN was almost entirely search crawling. Sampled requests showed that 78.1% belonged to verified YandexBot, 11.5% to YandexRenderResourcesBot, and 1.9% to YandexImages.

    [...]

    Yandex.Cloud displayed a completely different profile. Following the reported strikes, bot traffic from Yandex.Cloud fell about 40%. Several attack-like categories showed especially sharp declines. For example, WordPress plugin probing fell 90% and scanner-identified requests fell 93%. Interestingly (and tellingly), Cloudflare customer blocks on Yandex.Cloud traffic also fell 70% during the event period, suggesting that proportionately less malicious traffic was even hitting the Cloudflare WAF from this ASN.

    [...]

    The majority of traffic from the Yandex.Cloud ASN fell into two industry buckets: computer software and gambling. The computer software bucket was predictable for an ASN meant to host third-party applications and software integrations. In fact, we even saw that api.cloudflare.com is a top hostname for Yandex.Cloud request traffic. An overall majority of that traffic succeeded (requests returned 200s) both before and during the event, pointing to legitimate usage.

    The gambling sector offers the clearest evidence that malicious automation relocated rather than disappeared. Nearly all of Yandex.Cloud’s bot requests were targeted at one gambling customer account, with traffic shifting among its hostnames. Immediately following the October 8 disruption, bot requests from Yandex.Cloud to this account dropped to zero. Simultaneously, identical requests began appearing from other Russian hosting ASNs, including Radist and Selectel. The incoming traffic maintained an identical fingerprint across providers:

    [...]

    Overall, Russian bot traffic targeting gambling accounts remained essentially flat over the week, moving from 167.7 million to 170.1 million requests (+1.4%). The automation never stopped running; the operators simply migrated their workloads to alternate cloud providers once Yandex.Cloud became unavailable.

    [...]

    Finally, when we analyzed social media traffic, we found no unexpected changes in traffic either from Russian-origin IPs (0.6% decrease in total traffic over the event period) or globally (1.2% increase in total traffic over the event period). We repeated the analysis on bot traffic hitting the “post”, “reply”, and “like” endpoints for a specific social media platform and similarly did not find an unexpected shift before or during the event period from either Russian-origin IPs (5.7% decrease in total traffic over the event period) or globally (1.1% increase in total traffic over the event period). Based on our assessment, the data does not appear to support the claims that the strikes crippled social media manipulation, though without further analysis with data outside of Cloudflare, we cannot conclusively say there is no connection.

    [...]

    Our analysis here is a reminder that client ASN traffic volume is an unreliable proxy for interpreting automated bot behavior. Defending against automated threats requires inspecting request behavior, such as identifying shared JA4 fingerprints, monitoring anomalous request rates, and applying WAF rules to sensitive endpoints, regardless of which network the request originates from. Physical infrastructure is static, but malicious automation is built to move.

    21 votes

  12. Comment on Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    From the paper: When they write about "mistranslations," they seem to be showing that the intermediate lemmas don't match? This wouldn't invalidate either proof, necessarily. They could have...

    From the paper:

    We do not make claims about the correctness of OpenAI’s NL proof, we only make statements
    about mistranslations into Lean.

    When they write about "mistranslations," they seem to be showing that the intermediate lemmas don't match? This wouldn't invalidate either proof, necessarily. They could have reached the same destination by different routes. Both could have correct lemmas, but different.

    Since they take different routes, the Lean proof being correct doesn't guarantee that the NL proof is correct. For example, a "mistranslation" might be a correction! Perhaps the translator noticed a mistake and fixed it by changing the proof?

    Since it's very likely that the Lean proof is correct (it's been checked automatically), that means that if the NL proof is wrong, its mistakes somehow didn't matter. This reminds me of a joke:

    that the mathematical literature as a whole is so reliable comes down to the fact that, over time, we have made an even number of sign errors

    2 votes

  13. Comment on Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I'm not a mathematician, but I think they do check that the Lean proof is proving the correct problem, and the rest gets verified automatically. This is a lot easier than reviewing the entire...

    I'm not a mathematician, but I think they do check that the Lean proof is proving the correct problem, and the rest gets verified automatically. This is a lot easier than reviewing the entire proof. So that shows that it's true.

    For the natural language proof, it's a bit odd that mathematicians can be somewhat casual about it, but my impression is that it's sort of like how you wouldn't consider a spelling error to invalidate someone's entire argument, provided that you otherwise understand the argument. It's assumed that minor mistakes can be corrected by the reader and are unlikely to make the proof invalid. Also, maybe it's okay if some statements in the proof are proven in a slightly different way? The goal is to understand the journey well enough to get to the same place, rather than to repeat the journey exactly.

    2 votes

  14. Comment on MIT class project turns into an US Food and Drug Administration-cleared treatment for tremors in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The three founders of Encora who are still with the company are Carballo, Allison Davanzo ’18, and Kyle Pina ’18. They were each seniors in 2017 when they enrolled in 2.009, MIT’s popular product-design class.

    The semester began with a brainstorming session in which groups of about 17 students were asked to come up with dozens of potential product ideas. Carballo proposed a wearable device that used mechanical vibration to send signals to the brain to reduce tremors. The initial idea was to help patients with Parkinson’s disease.

    “It was one of hundreds of throwaway ideas,” Carballo recalls. “The initial concept was inspired by classes I had taken in robotics around neural control of movement. I had a preliminary understanding of how an electromechanical device might interact with the body’s control systems and feedback loops that control movement to relieve pathological control of movement.”

    The team eventually whittled their long list of ideas down to a few. Carballo’s idea was finally selected by a vote of 16-1 — with Carballo the only dissenting vote.

    “I tried to explain to the team that this was so far-fetched that there was no way, in one semester, we would be able to make anything,” Carballo recalls. “Thankfully, I got outvoted.”

    [...]

    One current approach to target those signals is surgery that involves drilling holes in the skull to insert electrodes that drive new electrical patterns in the brain. Encora’s watch-like product targets the same brain regions with mechanical vibrations at the wrist.

    “We’re applying mechanical stimulus, basically vibration, to stretch receptors in the wrist, which tell your body where it is in space,” Carballo explains. “The stimulation causes the receptors to activate and send a patterned signal to peripheral nerves of the wrist, that then carry the signal to the peripheral nervous system and into the central nervous system, to the same regions of the brain targeted by surgery.”

    In 2024, Encora ran a randomized control trial with 47 patients living with essential tremor. Last year, the team ran a 59-person trial where patients used the devices at home. In both trials, more than 70 percent of patients experienced meaningful improvement.

    The results were promising enough to gain what’s known as 510(k) clearance from the FDA for use as a medical device, in February of this year.

    [...]

    Today, Encora is focused on building a national sales force and working to secure coverage from insurers. As the company ramps up production, the product will finally become available for patients who qualify.

    10 votes

  16. Comment on Ukraine accuses SpaceX of crippling drone missions as ties with US worsen in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Ukraine accused Elon Musk's SpaceX on Wednesday of limiting Starlink services, crippling its drones, as Russian missiles knocked out power stations in attacks President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called "ostentatious disrespect" to Donald Trump.

    [...]

    Ukrainian military officials said Musk's SpaceX had without warning interrupted functioning of military-grade Starlink terminals moving at high speed, effectively preventing Kyiv from using them as onboard guides for drones.

    "Our defence forces did not receive a warning about this limitation, and this led to the disruption of several missions," presidential adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov wrote on Telegram.

    [...]

    Sources have told Reuters and other news organisations that the US has threatened to cut off intelligence for early warning of missile strikes on Ukraine, to press Kyiv to suspend attacks on Russian oil refineries.

    [...]

    Ukrainian officials said late on Tuesday they had received no warnings from Western partners for a second day before the massive Russian attacks on the capital. Trump had insisted on Tuesday that Washington was still sharing intelligence.

    [...]

    Starlink does not work inside Russia, and ​Ukrainian drones hitting Russia's oil industry use other means of ​communication, but Ukraine uses Musk's system to guide drones over its own territory, including parts of Ukraine occupied by Russia.

    "According to our observations, during flights, the connection could drop for 10–20 seconds at speeds of just 110–120 km/h. The drones kept moving, but these interruptions made them harder to control," Ukraine's 7th Rapid Reaction Corps, deployed in the southeast, said ​in a statement to Reuters.

    A source in Ukraine's defence ministry said the ‌limitations significantly complicate logistics and some drone operations.

    7 votes

  18. Comment on Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    Obviously this is over my head, but there are some blunt claims in this Twitter thread by Elliot Glazer, a mathematician and expert at formalization, that this doesn't affect whether the proof is...

    Obviously this is over my head, but there are some blunt claims in this Twitter thread by Elliot Glazer, a mathematician and expert at formalization, that this doesn't affect whether the proof is right:

    This Navier-Stokes mistranslation thing is a nothingburger. Like 5 of you are making a nuanced (frankly pedantic) point about readability issues that are being phrased in a way that sounds to non-math ppl like there are serious doubts the proof is correct. There is no such doubt.

    ...

    They're the same proof. The disagreements between them are smaller than a typical pair of human presentations of the same proof.

    ...

    If OpenAI presented its autoformalizer a wrong proof of Navier-Stokes, it would not have successfully formalized it. The proof is right and nearly identical to the Lean conversion.

    7 votes

  19. Comment on Those viral claims about plummeting Russian ‘bot’ activity have no basis in fact in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don't think I'm immune, but I think I do better than people who are reposting memes without checking them at all. (At least, when I actually check!)

    I don't think I'm immune, but I think I do better than people who are reposting memes without checking them at all. (At least, when I actually check!)

    2 votes

  20. Comment on Those viral claims about plummeting Russian ‘bot’ activity have no basis in fact in ~society

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Your argument is like saying nobody should use a search engine because some people found qanon or Al-Qaeda that way. Yes, there are real stories where people got suckered in by feeding their own...

    Your argument is like saying nobody should use a search engine because some people found qanon or Al-Qaeda that way. Yes, there are real stories where people got suckered in by feeding their own delusions, but using an AI like a search engine to ask a factual question (like I did in my example) is not the same.

    5 votes