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Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

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Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#11
post #6

I' m not sure how they make it back. The guardrails in place are extremely strict. The only people who seem to use it are a subset of developers who are unhappy with OpenAI. With Bard popping up free everywhere taking away much of the general user crowd and OpenAI offering the mini model always free and limited image generation / expensive model. Then you have to do it yourself crowd with llama. What is their target…

Claude api use is already as high as openai. I believe that market will grow far more over time than chat as AI gets embedded in more of the applications we already use.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#12
post #9

Curious if anyone knows the logistics of these cloud provider/AI company deals. In this case, it seems like the terms of the deal mean that Anthropic ends up spending most of the investment on AWS to pay for training. Does anthropic basically get at cost pricing on AWS? If Amazon has any margin on their pricing, it seems like this $4B investment ends up costing them a lot less, and this is a nice way to turn a cap ex…

Yes exactly. This was the brilliance of the original MSFT investment into OpenAI. It was an investment in Azure scaling its AI training infra, but roundabout through a massive customer (exactly what you’d want as a design partner) and getting equity. I’m sure Anthropic negotiated a great deal on their largest cost center, while Amazon gets a huge customer to build out their system with.

This explanation makes no sense, I could be AWS' biggest customer if they wanted to pay me for it. Something a little closer could be that the big tech companies wanted to acquire outside LLMs, not quite realizing that spending $1B on training only puts you $1B ahead.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#14
post #6

I' m not sure how they make it back. The guardrails in place are extremely strict. The only people who seem to use it are a subset of developers who are unhappy with OpenAI. With Bard popping up free everywhere taking away much of the general user crowd and OpenAI offering the mini model always free and limited image generation / expensive model. Then you have to do it yourself crowd with llama. What is their target…

With Claude on Bedrock I can use LLMs in production without sending customer data to the US. And if you're already on AWS it's super easy to onboard wrt. auth and billing and compliance.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#16
post #6

I' m not sure how they make it back. The guardrails in place are extremely strict. The only people who seem to use it are a subset of developers who are unhappy with OpenAI. With Bard popping up free everywhere taking away much of the general user crowd and OpenAI offering the mini model always free and limited image generation / expensive model. Then you have to do it yourself crowd with llama. What is their target…

Claude is the best model for programming. New generation of code tools like Cursor all use Claude as the main model.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#17

Curious if anyone knows the logistics of these cloud provider/AI company deals. In this case, it seems like the terms of the deal mean that Anthropic ends up spending most of the investment on AWS to pay for training. Does anthropic basically get at cost pricing on AWS? If Amazon has any margin on their pricing, it seems like this $4B investment ends up costing them a lot less, and this is a nice way to turn a cap ex…

I am not privy to specific details, but in general there is a difference between investment and partnership. If it's literally an investment, it can either be in cash or in kind, where in kind can be like what MSFT did for OpenAI, essentially giving them unlimited-ish ($10b) Azure credits for training ... but there was quid pro quo where MSFT in turn agreed to embed/extend OpenAI in Azure services.

If it's a partnership investment, there may be both money & in-kind components, but the money won't be in the context of fractional ownership. Rather it would be partner development funds of various flavors, which are usually tied to consumption commits as well as GTM targets.

Sometimes in reading press releases or third party articles it's difficult to determine exactly what kind of relationship the ISV has with the CSP.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#18
post #8

related coverage - https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-amazon-trainium - https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-invests-addition... - https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/22/anthropic-raises-an-additi...

What's the difference between trainium and the AWS bedrock offering?

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#19
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes exactly. This was the brilliance of the original MSFT investment into OpenAI. It was an investment in Azure scaling its AI training infra, but roundabout through a massive customer (exactly what you’d want as a design partner) and getting equity. I’m sure Anthropic negotiated a great deal on their largest cost center, while Amazon gets a huge customer to build out their system with.

This explanation makes no sense, I could be AWS' biggest customer if they wanted to pay me for it. Something a little closer could be that the big tech companies wanted to acquire outside LLMs, not quite realizing that spending $1B on training only puts you $1B ahead.

Yes but Amazon is not making extra money with you being their biggest customer

With Anthropic yes

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#20
This makes sense in the grand scheme of things. Anthropic used to be in the Google camp, but DeepMind seems to have picked up speed lately, with new “Experimental” Gemini Models beating everyone, while AWS doesn't have anything on the cutting edge of AI.

Hopefully this helps Anthropic to fix their abysmal rate limits.

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