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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

#191

Post by cflewis »

zie wrote: post #185
cnj wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Being in Silicon Valley has warped my sense of money so much.

When I read $300m, what I read is "when you factor in office costs & health care as well as salary/stock grants, an average FAANG software engineer must be ~$1m. That's only 300 employees!"

It's a crazy way to think. Suddenly all prices that end with `m` and not `b` seem pointless.

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

#192

Post by nibab »

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.

If you were to place all “available money” on a continuum, at one end of the spectrum you’d have the “dumb opportunistic money” and at the other end you have “strategic/partnership capital”. The money is very cheap if it comes from people that want to jump on the bandwagon of fomo. It’s more expensive when it comes from strategic partners that know they have something to offer (and when I say cheaper I mean literally how much $ you pay per preferred share).

I would consider most professional investors in AI somewhere in the middle of this continuum. The big clouds have the rare and coveted GPUs which are the lifeline to AI companies. That gives them way better terms than what a VC firm would get.

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

#193

Post by VirusNewbie »

divo6 wrote: post #37

So does anyone know how this works out with Googles investment a few months back?: Announcement "Anthropic Partners with Google Cloud" Feb 3, 2023 - https://www.anthropic.com/index/anthropic-partners-with-goog... "...Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, has selected Google Cloud as its cloud provider. The partnership is designed so that the companies can co-develop AI computing systems; Anthropic will levera…

Likely they’ll do training on GCP and serving on AWS.

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

#194

Post by srveale »

londons_explore wrote: post #150
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.

What do the betting markets think about the continued existence of Google Cloud? https://manifold.markets/OliverMattos/will-google-announce-t...

> the betting markets

For context, there are 5 people and 1 bot betting, and it's not real cash or even something with a cash equivalent, and the bet amounts are less than what you get for free on sign up -- not exactly what I'd call a "market". And the bet is that they'll close Google Cloud in 2 years, not 5-10 years as is being discussed.

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

#195

Post by fragmede »

divo6 wrote: post #37

So does anyone know how this works out with Googles investment a few months back?: Announcement "Anthropic Partners with Google Cloud" Feb 3, 2023 - https://www.anthropic.com/index/anthropic-partners-with-goog... "...Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, has selected Google Cloud as its cloud provider. The partnership is designed so that the companies can co-develop AI computing systems; Anthropic will levera…

How it works, is Amazon just paid a bunch of money just to be able to say that. This press release was written into the contract they signed, so us hearing about it isn't just happenstance. What happens under the hood is secondary, really.

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

#196

Post by digging »

kaibee wrote: post #147
brooksbp wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?" ...

What was the point of feeding Google all my location history data if it can't even figure out which Wegmans I go to?

This is how I feel about pretty much all the most data-hungry services. It's never been about an improved use experience, because the quality is not there.

I can't count how many times I yelled/cried about Spotify trying to learn every mood I've ever felt (and what song would have been perfect for the moment!) only to play the same 4 songs over and over because I listened to one of them on purpose a week ago. (I no longer use Spotify. We'll see if Tidal falls into the same trap.)

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

#198

Post by badrequest »

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…

You can enter a DPA (data processing agreement) with OpenAI that forbids subsequent training on submitted content.

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

#199

Post by nibab »

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.

There really isn’t a product in text or other modalities that shows me this is a $1T dollar market in 10 yrs (as the valuations would imply).

To play devils advocate, even if there were some killer products, value capture seems particularly tricky. There just aren’t any business models that could sustain a market mass of this size.

Lots of cool demos and productivity software (mind you with a very narrow definition of what productivity is).

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

#200

Post by skybrian »

l33tman wrote: post #188
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…

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...

Regardless of what's legally possible, it doesn't seem like an option that new FTX management would want to exercise, since they're trying to maximize the value of remaining assets for creditors.

Clawbacks would make sense for a charitable donation or shares that have gone down in value. For an investment that's increasing in value, it makes more sense to sell it at market.

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