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Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

anthropic.com

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Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#121

Post by mynegation »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #119

If Amazon has $4B to invest into what may end up being the Theranos of AI research, why don't they have $4B to invest into their workforce and, you know, actually pay people instead of all the extra-legal shenanigans they're pulling to avoid cutting paychecks? Edit: For those not understand what I'm referencing, Amazon is currently trying to get out of owning their Seattle offices, and are using "get back to the offi…

Do you mean investing 4B internally instead? That would not be an investment into AI or LLM that Amazon considers strategic? Would they be able to invest 4B internally specifically for this? Maybe yes, but I’d argue they already probably tried it and it did not work as well as they hoped. Or they do know it may not be as effective.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#122

Post by benreesman »

jychang wrote: post #117
benreesman wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m no fan of the people you’re talking about myself. But once we start going down that road we run smack on into companies with like the sovereign wealth fund in Riyadh or (to my embarrassment) Thiel or any number of people who make SBF look like the clueless, entitled, amoral but ultimately strictly small-change knucklehead he is. There are some truly scary people invested in important companies. Do we hold all the…

Yeah, we should totally put our trust in founders who would gladly accept money from immoral sources. We need to understand that society only values who moves first. The early bird gets the worm. If they want to play the game, they need to raise funds from people who truly understand power and money, regardless of the human cost. /s

Altman scared the fuck out of me a decade ago.

And if I had told anyone five years ago that there would be eyeball scanners building a privately-held biometrics database at a level recently considered extreme for violent criminals? What letter anon would that have sounded like? I would have been like easy there mom, no one is doing that.

Are we allowed to talk about Loopt and Greenpoint and OpenAI and Autodesk and Siebel taking a year in Thailand while Socialcam flew into the side of a mountain on HN?

Or do they get a pass?

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#123

Post by aeyes »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #119

If Amazon has $4B to invest into what may end up being the Theranos of AI research, why don't they have $4B to invest into their workforce and, you know, actually pay people instead of all the extra-legal shenanigans they're pulling to avoid cutting paychecks? Edit: For those not understand what I'm referencing, Amazon is currently trying to get out of owning their Seattle offices, and are using "get back to the offi…

Whenever I see such comments I ask myself if you have no imagination what Amazons payroll looks like? They have 1.5M employees, total payroll is well beyond $100B per year.

Now over what timespan do they invest this money? 5 years? 10 years?

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#124

Post by loudmax »

benreesman wrote: post #116
anonylizard wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Deepmind exists. All 3 are trying to build a generalist AI agent, as opposed to the more specialised models of say CharacterAI or inflection.

I’m still trying to get my mind around a world where Brain/DeepMind aren’t way ahead on all this. They were so far ahead so recently. Is there a comeback story here? IIRC they’ve still got Dean and Hassabis and a bunch of other bruisers, along with arbitrary financing, the best training sets, and novel compute. Is it time to put Hassabis in charge and start making Ilya and Karpathy offers they can’t refuse?

The world's greatest engineering talent won't save you if the management is incompetent.

Google may yet experience a comeback, but it will start with throwing out the current C-suite.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#125

Post by benreesman »

loudmax wrote: post #124
benreesman wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m still trying to get my mind around a world where Brain/DeepMind aren’t way ahead on all this. They were so far ahead so recently. Is there a comeback story here? IIRC they’ve still got Dean and Hassabis and a bunch of other bruisers, along with arbitrary financing, the best training sets, and novel compute. Is it time to put Hassabis in charge and start making Ilya and Karpathy offers they can’t refuse?

The world's greatest engineering talent won't save you if the management is incompetent. Google may yet experience a comeback, but it will start with throwing out the current C-suite.

Hassabis has some pretty serious chops on the leadership side as well as a firm grip on the technology.

Him as CEO?

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#126

Post by kevinmchugh »

brooksbp wrote: post #111
baq wrote: post #3

If this means alexa isn't a pet rock that can only reliably set timers, good for them.

I'm still waiting for the day Google Assistant can answer "what time does Home Depot open in the morning?" GA: "I found 3 locations, which one?" Me: "The closest one" GA: "I found 3 locations, which one?" ...

Even better if they all open at the same time, which is the case near me

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#127

Post by martinald »

alberth wrote: post #43

> ” AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider” How much of this becomes creative accounting? AWS gets to reduce its profits by making this investment, which means they pay less taxes. Then with AWS’ own money, they will get to recognize this as new AWS cloud revenue continuing their sales growth. While all during which they also get an equate stake. This seems like a creative way for AWS (and Microsoft with…

That's not how it works. The investment is an asset on the balance sheet, it is very unlikely to reduce taxable profits. I don't know the US corporation tax situation much, but if it's anything like the UK then you couldn't use that to offset profits for the year. You could if the investment failed, but then you've lost a lot more money than the tax saving (as you've lost the entire $4bn investment).

You might be right that Anthropic could then spend that money back with AWS, but that would again be subject to tax on any profits it generates for AWS. Also, if they spent (say) $2bn of the money with AWS but had nothing to show for it, when Anthropic raises again you'd expect the valuation to decrease substantially.

I very much doubt it is a tax saving mechanism, nor do I think it is a particularly good way to juice sales (compared to spending say $4bn on marketing, or discounts, or whatever).

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#128

Post by crazygringo »

mkl wrote: post #57
alberth wrote: post #31

For those who don’t know, Anthropic has an interesting list of investors: - Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO/Chairman), Series A - Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX), lead investor in Series B - Caroline Ellison (FTX), Series B - Google, Series C https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/anthropic/company_fi... ——— Question: why isn’t Anthropic using Google Cloud, given who their past investors include?

Related from December (but unresolved there): Will Anthropic return the $580M in Series B funding led by SBF? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111082 Related from June: FTX Halts Sale of Its $500 Million Stake in AI Startup Anthropic https://archive.ph/WR94S Seems like FTX owns that stake, not Bankman-Fried and Ellison? Nishad Singh was apparently involved too: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/y…

Why would an investment ever be "returned"?

Because of its investment, FTX owns shares in Anthropic. In bankruptcy, those shares will be sold in some form to new investors in exchange for cash, at whatever the current value is. Just like any other asset.

In theory, I suppose that new investor could be Anthropic itself doing a stock buyback, but that would be extremely unusual. Buybacks are for mature companies with excess cash, not growing startups.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#129

Post by qeternity »

dharma1 wrote: post #92
cmcaleer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that FTX customers might end up having a non-trivial amount of cents on the dollar added to their claims by a lucky investment out of the many shotgunned by SBF and crew.

Could be made whole even? Hasn’t majority of the 8b lost by FTX been recovered by now - maybe this is enough to fill the remaining gap (on some timeframe)

Most of the FTX assets are worthless altcoins that are being marked to market at ridiculous prices that you could never liquidate at.

Anthropic is definitely claimants best hope at a reasonable recovery.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#130

Post by j0hnyl »

ianhawes wrote: post #108
xyst wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not good for a company to receive funds from investors that we now know stole and grifted from their customers. Wonder if this company is all just smoke and mirrors at this point. Never heard of this company prior to the Amazon investment. Kind of reminds me of the Amazon and Rivian partnership. This nobody EV company gets an investment from Amazon, interest/hype boosts potential revenue/preorders. Valuations spike t…

Claude 2 is probably the closest competitor to GPT-4 at this point. If you haven’t heard of them before it’s because you weren’t paying attention.

+1 - Anthropic is doing cool stuff. I recommend playing with it. You can upload files directly and it has token limit of 100k.
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