When you miss out on OpenAI you end up with poor man’s OpenAI
Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic
161–170 of 275 posts
Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic
#162Looking back we can see how savvy Microsoft was to invest in OpenAI so early
Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic
#163For 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?
>Question: why isn’t Anthropic using Google Cloud, given who their past investors include? They also have a fiduciary duty to their other investors, and going all-in on Google cloud would be a pretty big risk (relative to other cloud providers) given the uncertainty about whether it'll still exist in 5-10 years.
> Google Cloud boosted its operating profits to $395 million for the second quarter
From https://www.geekwire.com/2023/google-cloud-posts-second-stra...
Yes, Google has killed a lot of products... but none of those ever came anywhere close to turning such a profit!
Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic
#164If this means alexa isn't a pet rock that can only reliably set timers, good for them.
They announced Alexa powered by some new LLM last week. Apparently it will go into beta sometime later this year.
That's their in-house LLM though. Amazon prefers investing $4B into Anthropic rather than using their own stuff. If you ask me, long ago they should've taken the top ML and engineering talent from Alexa and let them focus on building an in-house Openai/Anthropic. Then the engineers who left in Alexa could just integrate that stuff, as of the rest of the company (AWS, retail, etc).
Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic
#165I've been using the claude model over the past months and I have to say I usually prefer it over ChatGPT. Some things that impressed me particular are: * It can often give you working urls of images related to your query. (e.g. give me some images to use with this blog paragraph). * It can list relevant publications corresponding to paragraphs, chatgpt often halucinates new papers but claude consistenly gives highly…
When using stuff like this you let the cream of top surface then use it. It will surface when enough people/publication give praise, otherwise you waste time evaluating too many models, it’s not a fun task as they can give you illusions of being great at some but end up with overall worse. Right now gpt4 is king and haven’t been any consistent chatter saying otherwise
Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic
#166When you miss out on OpenAI you end up with poor man’s OpenAI
Meh. From what I can tell this space is both way too infant and volatile for anyone to get either excited or upset about status.
The rolling ball seems way more interesting than where it's currently at.
Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a counter point, I've been actively assessing feasibility of migrating my experiments to Claude with not much success. Trying to migrate prompts from GPT 4 to Claude often yields half-baked results. Claude seems to require a lot more handholding to get the desired result.
In my information extraction prompts Claude is about as good as GPT-3.5 but slower. Its only advantage over OpenAI is context length. GPT-4 is better, 3.5 is faster. But I am using it often to chat with PDFs and it works great for that. I would not want to give this ability up.
> But I am using it often to chat with PDFs and it works great for that. I would not want to give this ability up.
Side note: this would get you a crackpot moniker a year ago. Chat with pdfs? Dude what are you smoking I need some too.
Perfectly normal today, in fact if you aren’t doing that you’re falling behind.
Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic
#168Several things to note here:
Amazon as a corporate investor - Of course a lot of this is a futures contract on cloud compute. This indicates how much the leadership here thinks the compute will be problem. Money comes way cheaper outside of the big cloud providers (they also know the importance of compute and pull their leverage). This is not a sure bet. While true AGI is probably sitting behind a huge amount of compute, the “products” that are catching on right now are very much on lower end of the spectrum for required model performance. Small models are cheaper and can run on commodity compute. It’s not entirely clear to me that this is a financially sound bet..
Timing - This is an interesting time to do so. That indicates that the company feels that it’s shown some of its best work and right now is the time to bank and on that (so as to make the leap to the next big breakthrough). Openai did so on the heels of ChatGPT. This is somewhat discouraging, because outside of the context length hackery, Anthropic doesn’t have much to show as a differentiator. At best they’re a me-too startup set on the path to be acqui-hired by Amazon when the VC money subsidizing the compute drains up.
Structure/Size - there was a lot of information about the structure of the openai deal. We’re not so clear on what’s happening here. One of the big questions is valuation. Making a similar promise to openai (ie 50% of profit until 100b) would put the valuation of the company in to 10s of billions. Note that this is a very different proposition than a year ago. In navigating the “product maze” we’ve realized that there aren’t that many killer products. Most enterprises are throwing spend in this direction because the board requires you to have an “ai strategy”. At best, we’re talking about capturing all the VC money that’s going into companies with a new angle on knowledge management/search. As I mentioned above, that’s something that’s getting severely commoditized at the bottom of the market. The prospects here are pretty grim .
Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic
#169So what will this mean in relation to their recent Alexa announcements? are they using Anthropic in this announcement? Is it so difficult for a big company to build their own?
Alexa has been building their own LLM stuff for years now. Their models are also available on AWS. This Anthropic investment sounds much more of an AWS investment. If the Alexa LLMs were popular and capable like the best models, Amazon wouldn't invest in Anthropic. Currently if you want to use OpenAI models with better rate limits, you go to Azure. Since openai models are the most popular rn, that creates a problem for AWS. So they invested in the second most popular, which is still significantly more popular and capable than the Alexa models.
Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic
#170For 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?
>Question: why isn’t Anthropic using Google Cloud, given who their past investors include? They also have a fiduciary duty to their other investors, and going all-in on Google cloud would be a pretty big risk (relative to other cloud providers) given the uncertainty about whether it'll still exist in 5-10 years.
I would say it's less wether or not Google Cloud will exist in 5-10 years (which is still a valid concern).
But will specific parts of Google Cloud continue to exist or increase in cost. Things that have happened to GCloud very recently.
It just isn't worth the risk to invest in google cloud.