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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

#181

Post by throw03172019 »

ac29 wrote: post #148
crazygringo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> Why would an investment ever be "returned"? Because the money used for the investment was stolen.

They attempt to sell the shares of the company it invested in.

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

#182

Post by jedberg »

cnj wrote: post #163
logicchains wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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!

Google includes the income from paid Gmail accounts in their cloud revenue. From all accounts, that is all of the profit and in fact it generates more profit that offsets the cloud losses.

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

#183

Post by iandanforth »

FWIW I can't build OpenAI into our product without huge headaches around privacy policies and getting additional customer consent. I can build Amazon services into our products because Amazon is a trusted vendor and we use an AWS stack already.

Because Anthropic / Claude is available via Amazon Bedrock, they have a significant advantage in any company that's already using AWS. If you're on Azure, OpenAI has that advantage.

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

#184

Post by nickelbob »

swamp40 wrote: post #180
nibab wrote: post #168

Several 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 comp…

> aren’t that many killer products You've got to be kidding me. Maybe for text. But what about video training neural nets? I could list killer products for days.

Please do - not trying to be snarky, just legitimately interested.

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

#185

Post by zie »

cnj wrote: post #163
logicchains wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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!

To you and me, that's a lot of money, for Google's size that's really not a lot of money. The fact that it just became profitable certainly helps the beancounters decide to keep it around though.

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

#186

Post by jedberg »

A bunch of folks in the thread seem confused as to why they would do this after their Google investments. It's important to note that Amazon has been working closely with Anthropic for a long time, and already vends their models in AWS:

https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/

So if anything this is just a more public way of acknowledging the existing relationship.

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

#187

Post by troyvit »

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?

I would ask, what are they using instead and what would they get by switching to Google Cloud that they don't already have?

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

#188

Post by l33tman »

crazygringo wrote: post #128
mkl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Bankruptcy court can do clawbacks, I'm curious how that could apply for an investment scenario though.. it's not exactly paying a creditor or buying a Porsche just before a bankruptcy...

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

iandanforth wrote: post #183

FWIW I can't build OpenAI into our product without huge headaches around privacy policies and getting additional customer consent. I can build Amazon services into our products because Amazon is a trusted vendor and we use an AWS stack already. Because Anthropic / Claude is available via Amazon Bedrock, they have a significant advantage in any company that's already using AWS. If you're on Azure, OpenAI has that adva…

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by correlator »

kalkin wrote: post #179
nibab wrote: post #168

Several 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 comp…

"Money comes way cheaper outside of the big cloud providers" Say more about it this? It's not obvious to me why it should be true or what evidence there is for it.

I would think that AWS also offers a lot of distribution opportunities for Anthropic.
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